Semrush Pricing in 2026: Plans Explained

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. If you buy through them, Affitrove may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. I only recommend tools I’ve actually researched — and I’ll tell you plainly when a tool isn’t worth your money. Prices checked November 11, 2026.

Semrush pricing in 2026 has a trap in it, and most of the guides ranking on Google right now fall straight into it. If you’ve read a pricing page quoting Pro at $139.95 or Guru at $249.95, stop — those plans don’t exist anymore. Semrush retired Pro, Guru and Business from its pricing page around August 2026 and replaced them with four new tiers: SEO, Starter, Pro+ and Advanced. The names changed, the limits changed, and one of the prices you’ll see quoted everywhere — $549 a month for Advanced — went stale in late October. I read Semrush’s live pricing page today, November 11, 2026, and cross-checked the numbers against independent reads from October and November. Everything below comes from those reads. Where sources disagree — and a few do — I’ll say so instead of picking the number that makes the cleanest table.

Here’s the other thing you should know before you start comparing: Semrush is now owned by Adobe. The acquisition closed on April 28, 2026, Semrush was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange, and it now sits inside Adobe’s Experience Cloud business. Nothing about the pricing changed at the close — Semrush’s own customer FAQ said there would be no immediate changes to contracts, pricing, support or billing — and I couldn’t find any price change tied to Adobe as of today. But the rename, the new Semrush One bundle and the AI Visibility push all happened in the same twelve months, so the pricing page you remember from last year is gone. This is the replacement.

The short version

• SEO costs $139.95/mo monthly or $117.33/mo annual ($1,407.96/yr). It covers 5 projects and 500 keywords tracked a day. This is the plain SEO toolkit, no AI bundle — and for a lot of bloggers it’s the right buy.
• Starter costs $199/mo monthly or $165.17/mo annual ($1,982.04/yr). Same 500 keywords as SEO, but it adds the AI Visibility Toolkit: 50 AI prompts a day, 300 AI visibility reports a day, and one AI brand-performance domain. The $60 premium buys AI visibility, not more keywords.
• Pro+ costs $299/mo monthly or $248.17/mo annual ($2,978.04/yr). It covers 15 projects, 1,500 keywords a day and 100 AI prompts a day. On a per-keyword basis it’s the cheapest priced plan Semrush sells.
• Advanced is custom-priced now — you request a demo. Don’t trust any guide still quoting $549 a month; that price disappeared from the pricing page in late October. Advanced covers 40+ projects, 5,000+ keywords and unlimited AI prompts a day.
• There’s a free plan ($0 forever) and a 7-day trial on paid plans — but the trial needs a card, puts a $1 authorization hold on it, and auto-converts unless you cancel. Monthly plans are not refundable. Only a first annual purchase gets a one-time 7-day money-back window.
• The add-ons are where the bill grows. Content Toolkit is $60 a month on top, the standalone AI Visibility Toolkit is $99 a month per domain, and Traffic & Market is $289 a month. None of that is in the plan prices above.
• No Black Friday 2026 deal has been announced as of November 11. Semrush has run Black Friday offers before, so “never” would be wrong — but right now there’s nothing to wait for, and past offers always launched in mid-November and were new-customers-only.
• Per tracked keyword per year, Semrush SEO is $2.82 against $0.62 for SE Ranking Core and $1.72 for Ahrefs Lite. Semrush is the expensive one. You’re paying for the breadth of the toolkit, not the cheapest rank tracking.

The 2026 trap: the plans you’re reading about don’t exist

Search “Semrush pricing” today and you’ll still find pages quoting Pro, Guru and Business as if they were the current lineup. They were, until around August 2026. Then Semrush quietly replaced them with SEO, Starter, Pro+ and Advanced, and folded the AI Visibility Toolkit into a bundle called Semrush One. The old prices are still floating around in Semrush’s own help centre and in older reviews, which is why so many guides look current and aren’t.

Here’s the mapping, so you can translate any old guide you’re reading:

• Pro ($139.95/$117.33) is now SEO — same price, new name, similar limits, plus the new AI visibility reports.
• Guru ($249.95/$208.33) has no direct replacement. Starter ($199/$165.17) and Pro+ ($299/$248.17) bracket it from either side.
• Business ($499.95/$416.66) is now Advanced — except Advanced no longer shows a price at all. It’s custom, request-a-demo.

And then there’s the $549 trap. Through early October, Advanced was listed at $549 a month ($455.67 on annual billing). Around October 22 the price card flipped to “Custom / Request demo,” and the live page I read today confirms it: no price shown. Every guide still quoting $549 for Advanced is working from a screenshot that’s at least three weeks old. I’m not quoting it as current anywhere in this article, and you shouldn’t trust a guide that does.

One more thing the rename hides: the SEO plan is the only one that isn’t part of Semrush One. Starter, Pro+ and Advanced are Semrush One plans — SEO Toolkit plus AI Visibility Toolkit bundled together. SEO is the plain toolkit on its own. That distinction matters, because it’s the whole reason Starter costs $60 a month more than SEO for the same 500 keywords.

Semrush pricing at a glance

Plan	Monthly	Annual (per month)	Annual total	Projects	Keywords / day	AI prompts / day
Free	$0	$0	$0	1 demo project	10	—
SEO	$139.95	$117.33	$1,407.96	5	500	Reports only
Starter (Semrush One)	$199	$165.17	$1,982.04	5	500	50
Pro+ (Semrush One)	$299	$248.17	$2,978.04	15	1,500	100
Advanced (Semrush One)	Custom	Custom	—	40+	5,000+	Unlimited
Enterprise	Custom	Custom	—	Unlimited	Custom	Custom

Annual billing saves 16.2% on SEO ($271.44 a year) and 17% on Starter ($405.96) and Pro+ ($609.96). The catch is the obvious one: annual means the full year prepaid upfront — $1,407.96 for SEO, $1,982.04 for Starter, $2,978.04 for Pro+. If you’re not sure you’ll still be using Semrush in six months, that’s a lot of money to hand over on day one, and the refund rules (below) are not generous.

A note on how I verified these numbers, because it matters: Semrush’s pricing page renders its price cards with JavaScript, so the dollar amounts didn’t appear in a straight text fetch of the page. I read the live page directly today for every feature, limit and add-on price, and corroborated the dollar figures against multiple independent reads dated October 22 to November 10, 2026 — all of which agree on $139.95 / $199 / $299 monthly and $117.33 / $165.17 / $248.17 annual, and all of which agree Advanced is now custom. Where a figure comes from third-party reads rather than the live page, I’ve said so in the References.

Free: $0 — what you actually get

Semrush still has a genuinely free plan, and it’s separate from the 7-day trial — no card, no expiry, $0 forever. What you get is a demo, not a working toolkit: 1 demo project, 10 keywords tracked, 10 reports a day, a 100-page Site Audit a month and 50 Map Rank Tracker credits a month. That’s enough to click around, see what the interface looks like, and check how your own site scores on a handful of keywords. It is not enough to run a blog’s SEO on.

Use the free plan for what it is: a way to confirm Semrush covers your niche and your competitors before you pay anything. If you need daily tracking, a real audit or more than a glance at keyword data, you’ll hit the ceiling within an afternoon. That’s by design.

SEO: $139.95/mo monthly, $117.33/mo annual

SEO is the new name for what Pro used to be, and it’s the plan I’d point most solo bloggers and small-site owners toward. You get 5 projects, 500 keywords tracked a day, 3,000 Keyword Magic Tool reports a day, a 100,000-page monthly Site Audit budget, and 500 SEO Idea Units a month from the On-Page SEO Checker. The keyword research, competitor analysis, Position Tracking and Site Audit tools are all here, and so are the new AI visibility reports for any domain — you can see how a site shows up in AI answers — plus AI sentiment monitoring and custom prompt monitoring.

What you don’t get is the AI Visibility Toolkit itself. On SEO, AI features are reports-only: you can look at AI visibility data, but you can’t run the full toolkit — no AI prompt tracking of your own, no AI brand-performance domain, no AI-ready Site Audit. If AI search visibility is the reason you’re shopping for Semrush, SEO will frustrate you. If it isn’t, SEO is the cheapest way into the full classic toolkit, and nothing in it is cut down to push you upward.

The math: $139.95 a month on monthly billing, $117.33 a month on annual billing, $1,407.96 for the year. Per project that’s $27.99 a month on monthly billing — and since most bloggers run one or two projects, think of it as $140 a month for one site’s SEO, not $28. The annual saving is $271.44, which is real money, but only if you’re sure you’ll use it for twelve months.

Starter (Semrush One): $199/mo monthly, $165.17/mo annual

Starter is where Semrush One begins — and where the pricing gets interesting, because Starter costs $60 a month more than SEO and gives you exactly the same 500 keywords a day and the same 5 projects. So what does the $60 buy? The AI Visibility Toolkit, bundled in.

Here’s what Starter adds on top of everything in SEO: 50 AI prompts a day, 300 AI visibility reports a day, 1 AI brand-performance domain, the AI-ready Site Audit, and MCP access (50,000 units a month, so you can query Semrush from Claude, ChatGPT or Perplexity). The keyword and competitor tools are fuller than SEO’s, too, though Semrush doesn’t publish a clean list of which extra reports unlock — the headline difference is the AI bundle.

Now the bundle math, because this is the part Semrush wants you to notice. Bought separately, the SEO Toolkit ($139.95) plus the standalone AI Visibility Toolkit ($99 a month per domain) comes to $238.95 a month. Starter is $199. So you’re saving about $40 a month against the separate prices — and getting 50 AI prompts a day instead of the standalone toolkit’s 25. If you were going to buy both anyway, Starter is the better deal by a clear margin.

But flip it around: if you weren’t going to buy the AI Visibility Toolkit at all, Starter is $60 a month — $720 a year — for a feature set you didn’t ask for. And on a per-keyword basis, Starter is the worst value in the lineup: $0.40 per tracked keyword a month on monthly billing ($0.33 annual), against $0.28 ($0.23 annual) for SEO. That 42% premium is the price of the AI bundle. My honest read: buy Starter if AI search visibility is a real part of your strategy this year — if you’re tracking how your brand shows up in ChatGPT and Perplexity answers, or your clients are asking about it. If you’re a blogger who just needs keyword research, rank tracking and audits, SEO does the same job for $60 less.

Pro+: $299/mo monthly, $248.17/mo annual

Pro+ is the plan where the limits finally open up. You get 15 projects instead of 5, 1,500 keywords a day instead of 500, 5,000 Keyword Magic Tool reports a day, a 300,000-page monthly Site Audit budget, 800 SEO Idea Units a month, and 100 AI prompts a day. It also adds historical SEO data, content optimization tools, keyword cannibalization analysis, and multi-location and multi-device tracking — the things that matter once you’re managing several sites or tracking keywords across countries and devices.

Here’s the number that surprised me when I ran the math: Pro+ is the cheapest Semrush plan per tracked keyword. $299 divided by 1,500 keywords is $0.20 a month per keyword on monthly billing ($0.17 annual), against $0.28 ($0.23) for SEO and $0.40 ($0.33) for Starter. If you actually use the keyword allowance — and that’s the key condition — Pro+ gives you three times the tracking of Starter for 50% more money. Per project it’s $19.93 a month, the lowest in the lineup.

Who is Pro+ for? Small agencies, affiliate site operators running several properties, and bloggers with a portfolio of sites. If you’re tracking 500 keywords on one site, Pro+ is wasted money — you’re paying for headroom you’ll never touch. If you’re tracking 1,200 keywords across six sites, Pro+ is cheaper per keyword than anything else Semrush sells, and the multi-location tracking alone can justify it. The honest test is simple: count the keywords you actually track today. If it’s under 500, you don’t need Pro+ yet.

Advanced: custom pricing — request a demo

Advanced is the plan that used to be Business, and the one change that matters most is that it no longer has a published price. Through early October it was listed at $549 a month ($455.67 annual). Around October 22 the price card flipped to “Custom / Request demo,” and the live page today still shows no price. I’m not quoting $549 as current anywhere in this article because it isn’t current — it’s a screenshot from three weeks ago, and any guide still printing it is out of date.

What Advanced does publish is the scale: 40+ projects, 5,000+ keywords tracked a day, 10,000 Keyword Magic Tool reports a day, a 1,000,000-page monthly Site Audit budget, 2,000 SEO Idea Units a month, SEO Share of Voice, advanced API data integration, team users and reporting. The AI prompts allowance also changed recently — October reads said 200 prompts a day; the live page today says unlimited prompts to track daily. I’m quoting unlimited, with today’s date, because that’s what the page says now.

Advanced is a sales conversation, not a checkout. If you need 5,000 keywords a day and a million audit pages a month, you already know who you are — an agency, an in-house team at a large site, or an enterprise SEO operation. For everyone else, the relevant question is whether Pro+ covers you, and for most bloggers and small agencies it does.

Enterprise sits above Advanced and is also custom-priced, with unlimited projects and custom keyword and AI allowances. Same story: if you need it, you’ll be talking to sales anyway.

What the add-ons really cost

This is the section that decides what Semrush actually costs you, because the plan price is only the entry fee. Semrush sells a long list of toolkits as separate subscriptions, and none of them get the 17% annual discount — toolkit prices are the same monthly or annual.

Toolkit / add-on	Price	What it is
Content Toolkit	$60/mo	AI article generation, SEO briefs, topic research. 5 SEO-boosted articles a month; +10 articles for $30/mo. Not inside Semrush One.
AI Visibility Toolkit (standalone)	$99/mo per domain	25 prompts tracked; +$60/mo per extra 50 prompts; +$99/mo per extra seat.
Traffic & Market (.Trends)	$289/mo	Traffic and market data on up to 100 competitors; includes .Trends data and API (10,000 requests a month default).
Local Base / Pro	$30 / $60 per location	Listings, reviews, Map Rank Tracker credits (375 / 1,225).
Social Base / Pro / Business	$20 / $40 / $250	5 / 10 profiles; scheduling.
Advertising Base / Pro	$99 / $220	PPC and PLA research; Pro adds AdClarity.
AI PR Base / Pro / Business	$149 / $279 / $499	Media contacts 250 / 500 / 1,000; emails 500 / 1,250 / 3,500.
Additional users	From $45/mo	Official page only says “starting at $45.” Third-party guides map $45 to SEO/Starter, $80 to Pro+, $100 to Advanced — reported, not on the live page.
My Reports Base / Pro	$10 / $20 per report per month	PDF export and scheduling; Pro adds white-label, branding and link sharing.
Lead Generation (Agency Partners listing)	$90/mo	Branded profile and verified badge on the Agency Partners platform.

Two things to watch here. First, the Content Toolkit is the one most bloggers will be tempted by — $60 a month for AI-written, SEO-boosted articles — and it is deliberately not part of Semrush One. Starter at $199 plus Content Toolkit at $60 is $259 a month, and at that point you’re $40 away from Pro+ with no extra keywords to show for it. Run the numbers before you stack toolkits.

Second, the Agency Growth Kit is dead. It used to bundle the Client Portal, CRM and Lead Finder; those are closed, reporting moved to My Reports, and the replacement is the $90-a-month Agency Partners listing. If a guide tells you to buy the Agency Growth Kit, it’s quoting a product that no longer exists.

Standard API access is Advanced-only, sold in packages of 2, 5, 10 or 20 million units, with no public per-unit price — you get that number from sales or at checkout. MCP access comes with 50,000 units a month on Starter and Pro+, refreshing at renewal; Advanced needs a separately bought MCP package.

The cost-per-keyword math (and why it’s not the whole story)

Rank trackers all sell the same thing in different packaging, so the honest way to compare them is cost per tracked keyword. Here’s Semrush on that basis, using annual prices:

Plan	Annual price / month	Keywords / day	Cost per keyword / month	Cost per keyword / year
SEO	$117.33	500	$0.23	$2.82
Starter	$165.17	500	$0.33	$3.96
Pro+	$248.17	1,500	$0.17	$1.99

And against the competitors I’ve priced in this series: SE Ranking Core tracks 2,000 keywords a day for $103.20 a month on annual billing — about $0.62 per keyword per year. Ahrefs Lite tracks 750 keywords for $107.50 a month annual equivalent — about $1.72 per keyword per year. Semrush SEO, the cheapest Semrush plan, is $2.82 per keyword per year. Starter is $3.96.

So Semrush is the expensive one, and not by a little — roughly four and a half times SE Ranking Core per keyword. But that’s not a like-for-like comparison, and I don’t want to pretend it is. SE Ranking gives you rank tracking and a solid toolkit at that price; Semrush gives you the deepest keyword database in the business, the competitor analysis, the audit depth, the content tools and now the AI visibility layer. You’re paying for breadth, not for the cheapest possible keyword count. If all you need is “track 2,000 keywords and tell me where I rank,” SE Ranking Core at $103.20 is the better buy and I’ve said so in that article. If you need the full research workflow — keyword discovery, gap analysis, content briefs, audits, AI visibility — Semrush earns its premium. The mistake is buying Semrush and then only using it as a rank tracker. That’s like renting a workshop to store a bicycle.

One more comparison that puts the pricing in perspective: the per-project math. SEO is $27.99 a month per project, Starter $39.80, Pro+ $19.93. Pro+ looks cheap per project only because it ships 15 of them. If you run one site, ignore the per-project figure entirely — you’re paying the full plan price for one project, and Pro+ is $299 a month, not $19.93.

Trial and refund: the honest version

The 7-day free trial is real, but read the fine print before you start it. You need a card to start it. Semrush puts a $1 authorization charge on the card, which reverses — though it can take weeks to show up as reversed, so don’t panic if it lingers. The trial auto-converts to the paid plan unless you cancel, and exports are disabled during the trial, so you can’t just sign up, export a year’s worth of keyword data and leave. You get one trial per toolkit, and — this one catches people — the trial is not offered for the SEO plan or for Traffic & Market to anyone who has ever had any Semrush trial or paid plan. If you trialled Semrush two years ago, you can’t trial SEO now. The Agency Partners add-on trial is 14 days instead of 7, and affiliate links from Silver-tier affiliates and above give a 14-day trial instead of 7.

The refund policy is where I need to be blunt, because it’s narrower than most people assume. Semrush’s official refund policy, last updated August 20, 2025, offers a one-time 7-day money-back guarantee — but only for your first annual purchase (a 12-month term or longer) or your first add-on purchase, only on a written request within 7 calendar days, and only for direct semrush.com credit-card purchases. Monthly subscriptions are not refundable. Renewals are not refundable. Trial conversions are not refundable — one third-party guide’s table claims otherwise, but the official policy text says no, and I’m trusting the policy. Approved refunds are processed within 30 calendar days.

What that means in practice: if you buy monthly and change your mind on day three, you don’t get the month back. If you buy annual and change your mind on day eight, you don’t get the year back. The 7-day trial is your real safety net, not the refund policy — use it properly, on the plan you’d actually buy, and set a calendar reminder for day six. Cancelling itself goes through a cancellation form plus an email confirmation link that’s valid for 24 hours — if you don’t click it, billing continues. And if you do cancel, your monitoring data is deleted 30 days later (except your oldest project), so export anything you want to keep before you go. If you’re cancelling and claiming a refund at the same time, say so explicitly in the form’s comments.

Black Friday 2026: don’t wait on a rumour

I need to correct something I’ve written in this series before. In earlier articles I described Semrush as having a “no Black Friday by policy” stance. That’s not what the sources say, and I don’t want to keep repeating it. Semrush has run Black Friday offers — irregularly, and never as a standing annual sale, but they’ve happened. There is no published policy saying they never will.

Here’s the actual record. In 2023, Semrush offered 30% off 12-month Pro and Guru plans for new users, November 15 to December 1. In 2024, there was no discount at all — instead, a free 1-hour SEO consultation (valued at $300) with one month of Pro, for the first 200 applicants, November 11 to December 3. For 2025 the sources conflict: one affiliate-email-based source says there was a 14-day trial offer, while an archived copy of the site found no 2025 offer at all. I’m presenting both because I can’t verify either as fact.

For 2026: nothing has been announced as of November 11. The old Black Friday landing page redirects to the homepage, and the pricing page shows no seasonal offer. Black Friday is November 27 this year, Cyber Monday November 30, and past Semrush offers launched between November 11 and 15 — so a late-November announcement is still possible. But every past offer was new-customers-only, and none of them was a straightforward price cut on the current plans. The standing best deal all year is the one already on the table: up to 17% off with annual billing, plus the 7-day trial. No coupon code exists for Semrush — anyone advertising one is selling you a fiction. My advice: don’t delay a purchase you need now on the hope of a Black Friday deal that may not come, and if one does appear in the last two weeks of November, check it’s for new customers and read the terms before you switch.

The affiliate program (and my honest position on it)

Semrush runs its affiliate program through Impact (it used to be called BeRush; berush.com now redirects to Semrush’s affiliate page). The terms are genuinely strong for a one-time commission program — and that “one-time” is the important word, because Semrush does not pay recurring commissions. You get a flat fee per sale, once, and that’s it.

Here are the Basic-tier rates (0–4 sales a quarter), verified from two independent reads of Semrush’s official Affiliate Program page dated October 24–25, 2026: Semrush One $300 per sale, SEO Toolkit $200, Traffic & Market $200, Content $100, Advertising $100, AI Visibility $100, Social $50, Local $50 — plus $10 for every trial, except there’s no trial commission for the AI Visibility Toolkit. The rates rise with volume: Silver (5–19 sales a quarter) pays $350 for Semrush One, Gold (20–49) pays $400, Platinum (50+) pays $450, with matching steps for the other products. There’s also a quarterly content bonus of $200 to $1,500 depending on tier. The cookie is 120 days with last-click attribution, and credit is on the referral’s first purchase — existing Semrush users don’t count, and attribution happens at account registration, not at payment.

Payouts come through Impact by bank transfer or PayPal. Transactions lock 27 days after month-end and are paid about 21 days after the end of the lock month, so roughly two months pass between a sale and the cash landing. I’m not quoting a minimum payout figure because the official page doesn’t confirm one and third-party directories disagree.

Getting in requires a website with at least 1,000 unique visitors a month or a social page or channel with a significant organic following (typically 1,000+), a manual review that takes about 2–4 working days, and signing up with your own-domain email. The rules that matter for this blog: no coupon, cashback or deal sites — Semrush affiliate links must not sit on a Discounts or promo page framed as a deal, which is why you won’t find a Semrush link on Affitrove’s Discounts page. There are no exclusive discounts for affiliates and no coupon codes exist, so never advertise a Semrush discount code. Don’t present the free trial as a coupon or discount, don’t refer yourself, don’t bid on Semrush brand terms in PPC without pre-approval, and don’t use Semrush trademarks in domain or social names. FTC disclosure is required, which is why it’s at the top of this article.

My honest position: I’m not enrolled in the Semrush affiliate program. The link in this article goes to Semrush’s plain pricing page — semrush.com/pricing — and if I enroll later, I’ll say so. The $300-per-sale Semrush One commission is one of the better one-time payouts in SEO tools, and the 120-day cookie is generous, but one-time is one-time: a $200 SEO Toolkit sale pays $200 once, while a recurring program would keep paying. That’s the trade-off, and it’s why Semrush belongs in a comparison article like this one rather than as the backbone of a recurring-revenue strategy.

Adobe owns Semrush now — does it change the price?

Short answer: not yet. Adobe announced the acquisition on November 19, 2025 — all cash, $12 a share, about $1.9 billion in total equity value. It closed on April 28, 2026, Semrush was delisted from the NYSE, and it’s now a wholly owned Adobe subsidiary inside Adobe’s Customer Experience Orchestration and Experience Cloud business. Bill Wagner remains CEO.

Semrush’s customer FAQ at the close said there would be no immediate changes to existing contracts, pricing, support or billing, and I couldn’t find any price change attributable to Adobe as of November 2026. What has changed in the same window is the product: Semrush One launched on October 29, 2025, the legacy plans were retired in August 2026, MCP connectors now let you query Semrush from Claude, ChatGPT and Perplexity, and the AI Visibility Index 2026 analysed 126 million prompts. The Adobe connection also shows up in enterprise tooling — Semrush’s AI optimization features are cross-listed on Adobe’s business site, and Adobe LLM Optimizer and Semrush’s AI tools are meant to be used together.

Should you worry about an Adobe-driven price rise? It’s a fair question and I don’t have a clean answer. Adobe has a history of premium pricing, and Semrush is now inside a much bigger company with its own pricing logic. But nothing in the pricing page today reflects that, and the 2026 changes so far have been renames and bundling, not increases — SEO costs exactly what Pro cost. My advice is the same as it would be for any tool: buy the plan you need at the price published today, on monthly billing if you’re unsure, and re-check at renewal. Don’t pay a year upfront because you’re afraid of a rise that hasn’t been announced.

Who should buy which plan?

• Just starting out, or checking whether Semrush fits your niche: the free plan. No card, no expiry. You’ll outgrow it fast, but it costs nothing to find out.
• A blogger or small-site owner who needs keyword research, rank tracking and audits: SEO at $117.33 a month on annual billing ($139.95 monthly). It’s the full classic toolkit at the lowest price, and the AI reports are included for a look — just not the full AI toolkit.
• Anyone tracking how their brand shows up in AI answers, or whose clients ask about it: Starter at $165.17 a month annual ($199 monthly). The $60 premium over SEO buys the AI Visibility Toolkit, and the bundle is about $40 a month cheaper than buying the two toolkits separately.
• A small agency, or a blogger running several sites: Pro+ at $248.17 a month annual ($299 monthly). Three times the keywords of Starter for 50% more money, the cheapest per-keyword rate Semrush sells, and multi-location tracking included.
• An agency or in-house team tracking thousands of keywords: Advanced — but talk to sales first, because the price is custom now and the $549 figure floating around is stale.
• Someone whose only job is rank tracking: honestly, look at SE Ranking Core first. At $103.20 a month annual for 2,000 keywords a day, it’s a fraction of Semrush’s per-keyword cost. I priced it in detail in my SE Ranking pricing guide — Semrush wins on breadth, SE Ranking wins on tracking value.

And if you’re still choosing between the big two, my Semrush vs Ahrefs comparison puts the two side by side for bloggers specifically — Ahrefs Lite at $129 a month ($107.50 annual equivalent) against Semrush SEO, with the cost-per-keyword math done both ways. The short version of that verdict: Ahrefs is cheaper per keyword and has no free trial; Semrush has the deeper toolkit and the AI layer.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Semrush cost in 2026?

SEO is $139.95 a month or $117.33 a month on annual billing ($1,407.96 a year). Starter is $199 or $165.17 a month annual ($1,982.04 a year). Pro+ is $299 or $248.17 a month annual ($2,978.04 a year). Advanced and Enterprise are custom-priced — you request a demo. There’s also a free plan at $0. All prices are in US dollars, before tax, for one user.

What happened to Semrush Pro, Guru and Business?

They were retired from the pricing page around August 2026 and replaced by SEO, Starter, Pro+ and Advanced. Existing subscribers on the old plans can keep them for now, and the old names still appear in Semrush’s help centre — but you can’t buy them as a new customer, and any guide quoting them as current prices is out of date.

Is Advanced really $549 a month?

Not anymore. Advanced was $549 a month ($455.67 annual) through early October 2026, but the price card flipped to “Custom / Request demo” around October 22, and the live pricing page today shows no price. Don’t trust a guide that still quotes $549 as the current price.

Is there a free trial, and does it need a credit card?

Yes, 7 days on paid plans, and yes, a card is required — with a $1 authorization hold that reverses. The trial auto-converts to a paid plan unless you cancel, exports are disabled during the trial, and you only get one trial per toolkit. If you’ve ever had a Semrush trial or paid plan before, you can’t trial the SEO plan or Traffic & Market. Affiliate links from Silver-tier affiliates and above give a 14-day trial instead of 7.

Can I get a refund?

Only in a narrow window: a one-time 7-day money-back guarantee on your first annual purchase (12 months or longer) or your first add-on purchase, on a written request within 7 calendar days, for direct semrush.com credit-card purchases only. Monthly plans, renewals and trial conversions are not refundable.

Is there a Black Friday 2026 deal?

Nothing has been announced as of November 11, 2026. Semrush has run Black Friday offers before — 30% off in 2023, a free consultation bundle in 2024 — but irregularly, always for new customers only, and past offers launched in mid-November. A late-November announcement is still possible, but don’t plan a purchase around it.

SEO vs Starter — which Semrush plan should I buy?

Buy SEO if you need keyword research, rank tracking and audits and don’t care about AI search visibility yet — it’s $60 a month cheaper for the same 500 keywords. Buy Starter if you’re tracking how your brand appears in AI answers, because the $60 buys the AI Visibility Toolkit, 50 AI prompts a day and MCP access. Same keywords, different job.

Do unused limits roll over?

No. Unused Site Audit crawl budget resets on the 1st of each month, unused API units expire at renewal, and MCP units refresh at renewal with no carry-over. Monthly limits on annual plans refresh on the same day each month as your purchase date.

Is Semrush cheaper than Ahrefs or SE Ranking?

Per tracked keyword, no. Semrush SEO is about $2.82 per keyword per year on annual billing, against $1.72 for Ahrefs Lite and $0.62 for SE Ranking Core. Semrush costs more because the toolkit is broader — keyword database, competitor analysis, audits, content tools and AI visibility in one subscription. If rank tracking alone is the job, SE Ranking is the better value.

Does Semrush have an affiliate program?

Yes, through Impact. Basic tier pays $300 per Semrush One sale, $200 per SEO Toolkit sale and $10 per trial, with a 120-day cookie — but it’s a one-time flat fee, not recurring. Rates rise with quarterly volume up to $450 per Semrush One sale at Platinum. I’m not enrolled; the link in this article goes to Semrush’s plain pricing page.

Has Adobe changed Semrush pricing?

Not as of November 11, 2026. Adobe closed the acquisition on April 28, 2026, and Semrush’s customer FAQ said there would be no immediate changes to contracts, pricing, support or billing. SEO costs exactly what Pro cost before the rename. That could change — but nothing announced so far points that way.

What is Semrush One, and is it worth it?

Semrush One is the bundle name for Starter, Pro+ and Advanced — the SEO Toolkit plus the AI Visibility Toolkit together. It launched on October 29, 2025. Starter at $199 a month is about $40 cheaper than buying the two toolkits separately ($139.95 + $99), and gives 50 AI prompts a day instead of 25. It’s worth it if you want both; if you only want the SEO Toolkit, the plain SEO plan at $139.95 is the better buy.

References

1. Semrush official pricing page — semrush.com/pricing — read live November 11, 2026 (plan features, limits, add-on prices, Advanced custom pricing; price cards are JavaScript-rendered, dollar amounts corroborated by the sources below).
2. Tools8020 — Semrush pricing — fetched semrush.com/pricing November 10, 2026: SEO $139, Starter $199, Pro+ $299, Advanced Custom.
3. Professional Toolkit — Semrush pricing — prices, limits, toolkits, trial and refund terms read from Semrush pages October 12, 2026.
4. ContextBolt — Semrush pricing — read October 3, 2026, re-checked October 22: Advanced flipped from $549 to Custom.
5. DroidCrunch — Semrush pricing — read October 12, 2026: add-on prices and Adobe acquisition timeline.
6. JustPricing — Semrush pricing — updated October 23, 2026: Agency Growth Kit discontinued note.
7. Semrush official refund policy — semrush.com/company/legal/refund-policy — last updated August 20, 2025; policy text corroborated by three independent October–November 2026 reads (one-time 7-day money-back on first annual purchase only; monthly, renewals and trial conversions not refundable).
8. IndieStackLab — Semrush affiliate program — full commission tables from Semrush’s official Affiliate Program page, read October 24, 2026 (Basic $300 One / $200 SEO Toolkit, $10 trial, 120-day cookie, tier table).
9. Reverbico — Semrush affiliate program — read October 25, 2026: corroborates the Impact commission tables and tier structure.
10. JustWebWorld — Semrush Black Friday — November 4, 2026: no 2026 offer announced; 2023 30% off and 2024 consultation bundle history.
11. Elite Content Marketer — Semrush Black Friday deal — November 3, 2026: no 2026 offer announced.
12. GSC Wizard — SEO Black Friday deals — checked October 27, 2026: nothing announced for Semrush in 2026.
13. SE Ranking Pricing in 2026: Plans Explained — Affitrove — SE Ranking Core $129/$103.20, Growth $279/$223.20, read live November 11, 2026.
14. Semrush vs Ahrefs for Bloggers in 2026 — Affitrove — Ahrefs Lite $129/$107.50 annual equivalent, Standard $249/$207.50; Semrush SEO $139.95/$117.33.
15. Surfer Pricing in 2026: Plans Explained — Affitrove — Surfer Discovery $59/$49, Standard $119/$99.
16. Frase Pricing in 2026: Plans Explained — Affitrove — Frase Starter $49/$39.
17. Best AI SEO Tools for Bloggers in 2026 — Affitrove — 2026 SEO tool roundup and cost-per-article math.

Semrush is the most expensive way to track a keyword in 2026 — and still the toolkit I’d buy if the research workflow is the job. SEO at $117.33 a month on annual billing gets you the full classic toolkit for less than a Starter subscription you might not need; Pro+ is the value pick if you track more than 500 keywords; and Advanced’s missing price tag is a reminder to check the live page before you believe any guide, including this one. Prices checked November 11, 2026 — re-check at checkout before you pay.