Semrush Pricing in 2026: What Each Plan Costs and Which One to Buy

Semrush pricing in 2026 runs from a free plan to $549 a month. The paid ladder is SEO at $139 a month, Starter at $199, Pro+ at $299, and Advanced at $549, with annual billing dropping those to $117.33, $165.17, $248.17, and $455.67 a month. Most teams who buy Semrush for SEO alone land on the $139 plan, and most who need AI search visibility tracking end up on Starter at $199.

One thing worth clearing up first, because a lot of articles still get it wrong: Semrush retired the old Pro, Guru, and Business tier names. If you are reading a comparison that quotes "Guru at $249.95" or "Business at $499.95", it is out of date and the plan it describes no longer exists. The tiers below are what the vendor's own pricing page served in August 2026.

Semrush pricing table for 2026

Annual billing saves up to 17 percent, which is about $260 a year on the SEO plan and roughly $1,120 a year on Advanced. Prices were read from semrush.com/prices in August 2026. Semrush changes its packaging fairly often, so confirm on the vendor page before you put a number in a budget.

How much does Semrush cost per month?

Semrush costs $139 per month for the entry SEO plan, billed monthly. That covers 5 websites and 500 keywords tracked daily, which is enough for one business or a handful of small client sites. Paying for a year up front brings it to $117.33 a month. There is also a free plan at $0 with one project and ten reports a day.

Why is Semrush so expensive?

Semrush is expensive because you are renting continuously refreshed data infrastructure, not software. It maintains a very large keyword index across dozens of markets, re-checks tracked rankings every day, runs a backlink crawler, and crawls your site for technical issues. That is genuine ongoing cost. Tools that analyze results on demand instead of maintaining an index, like Surfer, can charge far less.

Which Semrush plan should you buy?

The plan choice comes down to two questions: how many sites you work on, and whether you need AI search visibility tracking.

• Buy the free plan first if you are not sure you will use the data. One project and ten reports a day is enough to find out whether you log in weekly or twice a quarter. A lot of people discover they are the second kind before spending anything.
• Buy SEO at $139 if you run one business or a few sites and want keyword research, rank tracking, and site audits. This is the right plan for most in-house marketers and solo consultants.
• Buy Starter at $199 if you care about showing up in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's AI results. The $60 gap buys 50 tracked prompts a day and AI brand performance for one domain. The $139 SEO plan does not include daily prompt tracking.
• Buy Pro+ at $299 if you manage up to 15 sites and want content optimization and keyword cannibalization analysis on top.
• Buy Advanced at $549 if you are an agency running up to 40 client sites, need 5,000 tracked keywords, or need API access to pull data into your own reporting.

What is not included in Semrush pricing

Two costs surprise people after they sign up. First, additional users are not bundled the way they are at some competitors, so a team of four is not the same price as a team of one; check the seat cost on the pricing page before you compare it to a tool with unlimited users. Second, the entry SEO plan has no daily AI prompt tracking at all, so if AI visibility is the reason you are buying, the real entry price is $199 and not $139.

The larger omission is not a line item. Semrush shows you what to do; it does not do it. It will surface a keyword gap, and then somebody on your team still has to research the angle, write the article, optimize it, publish it, and link it internally. For teams whose bottleneck is producing content rather than knowing what to produce, that gap is where the budget actually goes, and no Semrush tier closes it.

Semrush pricing vs other SEO tools

Ahrefs prices in US dollars: Starter $29, Lite $129, Standard $249, Advanced $449, Enterprise $1,499. Surfer publishes in euros with no dollar ladder, so a US buyer's real cost moves with the exchange rate. If you are weighing the two content-side tools against each other, the Surfer SEO vs Semrush comparison breaks down where each one wins and what the combined stack costs.

Is Semrush worth it?

Semrush is worth $139 a month if you actively use the data: researching keywords, checking rankings, and fixing what the site audit finds. It stops being worth it when you log in occasionally to check a position, because then you are paying index prices for a lookup you could get elsewhere. The honest test is usage, not features, and the free plan is the cheapest way to run that test on yourself.

It is also worth separating the platform from the writing side. Semrush's SEO Writing Assistant grades drafts well, but grading is not writing, and buying the suite mainly for that feature is an expensive way to get a score. We went through that specific question in more detail in is Semrush worth it for content writing.

Does Semrush have a free plan?

Yes. Semrush offers a free plan at $0 with no credit card required, covering one demo project and ten reports a day across its tools, including some AI visibility features. It is genuinely useful for evaluating the platform or running occasional lookups, though the daily cap makes it impractical for real ongoing work.

Do you need Semrush and Ahrefs both?

Most teams do not. The overlap is large and the combined cost is over $250 a month at the entry tiers. Semrush is stronger on keyword data breadth and reporting; Ahrefs is stronger on backlinks. We compared them directly in do you need both Semrush and Ahrefs, and for most budgets the answer is to pick the one that matches your main job.

Getting more from a smaller budget

If the reason you are pricing Semrush is that content is not getting produced, the tool is not the constraint and a bigger plan will not fix it. Data tells you which keyword is worth targeting. It does not give you the campaign angle, the draft, or the published page. Some teams find the real gap is upstream of the keyword entirely, and a dedicated idea generation tool costs a fraction of a Semrush seat when the shortage is angles rather than data.

Downstream, the gap is production. That is the part AI SEO software is built for: research the commercial keywords, write the optimized article, link it internally, and publish it on a schedule, so the plan you paid for turns into pages that actually exist. If you want to see the whole SEO tooling market priced side by side, our SEO software pricing breakdown covers the category.

The short version

Semrush costs $139 a month for SEO, $199 for Starter with AI search tracking, $299 for Pro+, and $549 for Advanced, with roughly 17 percent off on annual billing and a free plan to test it. The old Pro, Guru, and Business tiers are gone. Buy SEO if you need the data, Starter if you need AI visibility, Advanced if you are an agency, and the free plan first if you are honestly not sure you will use it.