Benthic macroalgae are highly productive and increase biodiversity through the provision of a habitat for marine organisms and act as spawning, nursery, and feeding grounds for an extensive range of marine fauna. As a dominant habitat-former on temperate rocky coastlines, benthic macroalgae are important fundamental species in the temperate marine climate owing to their high productivity and extensive distribution. However, the loss of benthic macroalgal habitats has been widespread along the rocky coastlines owing to various perturbations, including climate change, species invasion, sedimentation increase, and anthropogenic stress. The establishment of artificial reefs have been proven an efficient approach for the recovery of the benthic macroalgae ecosystem. For the past three decades, the habitats of benthic macroalgae in Laoshan Bay of Qingdao have been destroyed by anthropogenic activities such as mariculture and fisheries. To mitigate the habitat losses of benthic macroalgae and restore the spawning grounds, artificial rocky reefs were deployed in two coastal areas, Huangshankou, which has high levels of wave motion and Sanmuqian, which has low levels of wave motion, between 2009 and 2010. After the deployment of artificial reefs, the marine habitats underwent a long-term and dynamic process prior to the formation of stable ecosystems. The inter-month variation and distributional pattern of benthic macroalgal communities were a reflection of the self-adaption of the ecosystem to the changing conditions. To study the community characteristics, inter-monthly variation, and response to the environmental factors of benthic macroalgae in the artificial reef zones, the horizontal and vertical distribution of the benthic macroalgae in two artificial reef zones were investigated between May and September 2015. Wave motion indexes between the two artificial reef zones showed extremely significant differences, whereas similar conditions were found among different wave depths in the same artificial reef zones. The temperature range between May and November showed significant variation, whereas no significant difference was found between artificial reef zones at same the time. A total of 26 species of 21 genera, belonging to three phyla were found; among these, 15 species belonged to Rhodophyta, 7 species belonged to Phaeophyta, and 4 species belonged to Chlorophyta, which accounted for 57.69%, 26.92%, and 15.38% of the total, respectively. The replacement of benthic macroalgal species in different months displayed significant differences: were the predominant species during spring, summer, and autumn, respectively. The species diversity indices of benthic macroalgae increased at first and decreased subsequently, whereas the indices in Sanmuqian reef zone were generally higher than those in Huangshankou Reef zone. Differences in the species diversity indices and the dominant species in different months were mainly caused by temperature variations and different temperature adaptability of macroalgal species. Redundancy analysis further proved that temperature was the key influential factor in the monthly replacement of benthic macroalgae and contributed to 37.64% of the variation, whereas wave motion and depth were the key influencing factors in the horizontal and vertical distribution of benthic macroalgae and accounted for 26.54% and 19.13% of the variation, respectively. The results indicated that the artificial reefs provided efficient substrates for benthic macroalgae in Laoshan Bay. The benthic macroalgal communities showed relative stable seasonal perturbation in the artificial reefs, which reach maturity and have the ability to withstand the external disturbances 5 years after deployment of the artificial reefs.