Semrush pricing: what it really costs

Which Semrush plan matches your keyword-tracking workload?

Semrush sells its core product as one free account, four self-serve paid tiers and a custom Enterprise tier above them, and the number that decides which paid tier fits is how many keywords you track, not how big your team is. The free plan is not a real starting point: 10 reports a day across the main tools, one website and 10 keywords in Position Tracking, enough to try the interface, not to run anyone’s SEO. The first plan built for real work is SEO at $139.95 a month: 5 websites, 500 keywords tracked daily, one user included, which matches a solo consultant’s workload exactly, at $139.95 for the real bill above. Go past 500 tracked keywords and SEO stops being an option at any budget; Pro+ raises the cap to 1,500 keywords at $299 a month, where a two-person team lands at $379 once a second login is added. A four-person team tracking closer to 5,000 keywords, or one that specifically needs API access, has to move all the way to Advanced at $549 a month, the only tier Semrush sells with an API, running $849 once three extra logins are added.

Is Starter’s AI-search tracking worth paying more than the plain SEO plan?

Semrush brands Starter, Pro+ and Advanced as “SEO + AI Search” plans, and Starter’s SEO limits are identical to plain SEO: 5 websites, 500 keywords tracked daily, 100,000 pages crawled a month, one user. The only real difference is AI Visibility: up to 50 AI-search prompts tracked daily and brand-mention monitoring across ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini and Perplexity, for $199 a month against SEO’s $139.95. If nobody is paying you to report on AI-search visibility, buy plain SEO and skip the difference. If someone is, buy Starter directly rather than bolting Semrush’s $99 AI Visibility Toolkit onto SEO afterward: bought as a separate add-on, that toolkit costs more in total than simply upgrading to Starter, which already bundles the same tracking into its price. The same logic holds a tier up, too, since Pro+ and Advanced both already include AI Visibility.

What pushes a Semrush bill higher than the plan price alone?

Every plan includes exactly one login, and extra seats are the first thing that moves the number: $45 a month each on SEO or Starter, $80 on Pro+, $100 on Advanced, and that price buys SEO features only. Semrush’s own knowledge base spells out the real catch with a worked example: give one extra Starter user full AI Visibility access, and that person alone costs $144 a month, the $45 seat fee plus a separate $99 AI Visibility Toolkit licence, because AI Visibility, Traffic & Market and App Center access all have to be bought again per user. The same stacking happens on Pro+ and Advanced, where the $99 toolkit sits on top of an $80 or $100 seat instead of $45. Beyond seats, Semrush sells six more toolkits as their own subscriptions, none bundled into any SEO + AI Search plan: Local starts at $30 a location, Content at $60 a month, and Traffic & Market, Social, Advertising and AI PR each carry their own separate price. Want local SEO or AI content drafting alongside core SEO? Budget for those as extra line items, not features the plan already includes.

Does paying Semrush annually actually save money?

On the four paid plans themselves, yes: annual billing saves about 17% on Starter, Pro+ and Advanced and about 16% on SEO, dropping the effective monthly price to $117.33 on SEO, $165.17 on Starter, $248.17 on Pro+ and $455.67 on Advanced. The catch is how that gets charged: it is one lump payment for the full year upfront, not 12 smaller monthly charges at the lower rate, so the up-front cost is far bigger even though the monthly average is lower. It also does not touch anything else Semrush sells. AI Visibility, Local, Content, Traffic & Market, Social, Advertising and AI PR all show the identical price on either billing toggle, so a business paying for several toolkits sees the yearly saving apply only to its core plan, never to what is layered on top.

What does Semrush’s pricing page leave out about trials and refunds?

The pricing page shows a “Try for free” button on SEO, Starter and Pro+, and Semrush’s knowledge base says every SEO + AI Search plan gets a 7-day trial, but Advanced shows only a “Subscribe” button with no trial offer visible; whether Advanced actually gets the same 7 days at checkout is not something the published pages confirm either way. Where a trial does apply, it needs a credit card: Semrush’s billing FAQ says it places a $1 authorization that gets reversed, exports are switched off for the week, and the trial rolls into a paid subscription automatically unless you cancel first. Refunds carry the opposite asymmetry. The 7-day money-back guarantee covers only your first annual subscription and your first add-on purchase, bought online by card; a month-to-month subscription is not refundable at all, and canceling one only stops future billing, not the period you already paid for. The more flexible monthly plans, in other words, are the ones with no safety net if you change your mind.

How does Semrush’s price compare with Ahrefs and SE Ranking?

Ahrefs is the closest verified comparison. Its Lite plan runs $129 a month for 750 keywords, more keywords than Semrush’s SEO plan for less money, though Ahrefs updates rankings weekly rather than daily and meters research behind monthly credits that Semrush’s SEO plan does not use at all. A two-person team lands at $309 on Ahrefs’ Standard plan against $379 on Semrush’s Pro+, and a four-person team pays $689 against $849. See the Semrush vs. Ahrefs comparison for the feature differences behind those numbers.

SE Ranking is worth checking when team size, not SEO features, is driving the budget: its Growth plan, at $279 a month, already includes 3 seats, against one seat apiece on Semrush and Ahrefs below Enterprise. That is why a four-person team on SE Ranking runs $299, a fraction of the same team’s cost on Semrush or Ahrefs.

Pick Semrush for daily rank tracking and AI-search visibility built into the plan. Pick Ahrefs when weekly rank updates are fine and you would rather pay for research by user credits than by AI-prompt tracking. Pick SE Ranking when a multi-person team, not the SEO toolset, is the real budget constraint.