Ahrefs MCP server is golden if you ask me, but the documentation only shows how to connect it to an AI web interface such as ChatGPT Plus/Pro or Claude, but that didn’t cut it for me.

I want to acces it in PHP so I can set up a cronjob and go through hundreds of sites instead of manually through a web interface.

Since there is no documentation available for that it took a few hours of playing around.

Eventually I did set up the web interface to test it and it worked and then I asked GPT-5 what it used to make the connection and the truth was revealed.

We need to use tools/call first as the method and then we can define the actual method such as site-explorer-organic-keywords.

Here is the full code (this will print the results on your screen):

<?php
/*
Template Name: Ahrefs MCP Server
*/

$mcpUrl = ‘https://api.ahrefs.com/mcp/mcp’;
$mcpHeaders = [
‘Authorization: Bearer YOUR_MCP_API_KEY’,
‘Content-Type: application/json’,
‘Accept: application/json’
];

$requestBody = json_encode([
‘jsonrpc’ => ‘2.0’,
‘method’ => ‘tools/call’,
‘id’ => ‘1’,
‘params’ => [
‘name’ => ‘site-explorer-organic-keywords’,
‘arguments’ => [
‘target’ => ‘https://www.serptrust.io’,
‘mode’ => ‘prefix’,
‘protocol’ => ‘https’,
‘date’ => ‘2025-10-30’,
‘limit’ => 100,
‘order_by’ => ‘volume:desc’,
‘select’ => ‘keyword,volume’
]
]
]);

$ch = curl_init($mcpUrl);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $mcpHeaders);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $requestBody);
// curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION, CURL_HTTP_VERSION_2_0);
$response = curl_exec($ch);

if ($response === false) {
echo “cURL Error: ” . curl_error($ch) . “\n”;
} else {
$httpCode = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
echo “HTTP Status: $httpCode\n”;
if ($httpCode === 200) {
$result = json_decode($response, true);
if (json_last_error() === JSON_ERROR_NONE) {
var_dump($result);
} else {
echo “JSON Decode Error: ” . json_last_error_msg() . “\n”;
}
} else {
echo “Raw Response: $response\n”;
}
}
curl_close($ch);

?>

The next thing you can do is use: if ($result) { }

You can put your OpenAI API call within the { } brackets and use $result in the instructions, for example:

Simply put the code in a text file, save it in PHP format, upload it in your theme folder and then load it as a custom page template (eg Add Page, select Template) and then all you got to do is load the page and it runs.

You can connect it to a database table with sites in MySQL to automate it and run it on a cron job.

As you can see in the featured image I build a site evaluation script that analysis the keywords a site ranks for and gives it a total score from 0-10 and shows the commercial value etc, well just check the screenshot.

I’ve been doing this work manually when updating our guest post database and must’ve done it for over a 100,000 sites.

This is why our database is only 500 sites and that truly means something.