Semrush pricing, and what the invoice actually comes to

Semrush advertises $139 a month. The number’s real and almost nobody pays it, because it prices one person, without reporting, without the API, on the narrowest of the five tiers.

That gap isn’t a scandal. Every seat-priced SaaS product does this. It matters here because SEO buying decisions get made off a comparison table, and Semrush is the product where the table and the invoice diverge most. I’ve paid for Semrush with my own money since 2024, and I recorded six hours of it on the tier below the one I kept needing.

The published ladder

Every figure below was read off Semrush’s own pricing page on 18 August 2026. Monthly, one seat.

Three add-ons sit on top, and two of them are things a buyer assumes are included:

• Additional users, from $45 a month each. Seats are per person and cannot be shared.
• Base Report, $10 a month. Data from twenty-odd tools, with the Google Analytics and Search Console integrations and PDF export.
• Pro Report, $20 a month. Base plus external integrations and scheduled delivery.

What the invoice comes to

Take the case Semrush is actually sold into: a three-person team that sends a monthly report to clients, on the tier most agencies land on.

Pro+                      $299
Two additional seats      $ 90   (2 × $45)
Pro Report                $ 20
                          ----
                          $409 / month

That is 2.9 times the advertised entry price, and none of it is an upsell anyone talked them into. It is one tier up from the bottom with the two things the work requires.

The annual discount applies to the tier. Semrush publishes an annual equivalent for each plan but not for additional seats, so the honest version of the annual figure is $248.17 for Pro+ plus seats at a rate the pricing page does not state. Anyone quoting a precise annual total for a team is guessing at the part that is not published.

The boundary you hit is not the one on the table

A comparison table makes tiers look like volume: more sites, more keywords, more prompts. In use, the boundary is features, and it lands in the middle of workflows you are already running.

I recorded a six-hour walkthrough on the Pro tier in March 2024, and you can watch the same thing happen over and over. Position Tracking opens and share of voice is greyed out. Device and location breakdowns aren’t there. Keyword tagging isn’t there. Neither is the cannibalisation report, or the JavaScript impact report in Site Audit, or sending a keyword straight to the SEO Writing Assistant.

Six of the reports I’d have used that week were one tier above the one I was paying for. That is not a complaint about Semrush. It’s the answer to “which tier do I need”, and it is not on the pricing page.

The tier names from that recording no longer exist, so I’m not going to map a 2024 plan onto a 2026 one. What survives the rename is the shape of the thing: the mid tier is where the reports people cite as reasons to buy Semrush start, and the tier below it is the one most people buy. If share of voice or cannibalisation is why you’re buying, price the tier that has it, not the one that has the keyword volume you need. The full listing has the feature-by-feature version of that.

One more from the same recording: traffic analytics said plainly that its full dataset needs a separate subscription on top of the main one. Whether it’s still sold that way is worth checking on the pricing page before you budget for it.

What the AI tiers actually allow

Prompt monitoring is where the current lineup does its differentiating, and the allowances are small next to products built only for that job. Starter tracks 50 prompts a day against one domain, Pro+ 100, Advanced 200. The SEO tier advertises AI-search performance and custom prompt monitoring without publishing a prompt count at all, which is the one figure on the pricing page that cannot be checked.

If AI visibility is the reason for the purchase, that is an argument for a dedicated product alongside a cheaper Semrush tier, rather than for climbing the Semrush ladder to reach prompt allowances a specialist gives you at the entry price.

Which tier to actually buy

SEO, $139. One person, up to five sites, no client reporting, no API. Real answer for a solo consultant whose competitor research is occasional.

Pro+, $299. The default for anyone doing this as the job. Cannibalisation and the wider site and keyword limits are the reason, not the prompt count.

Advanced, $549. Buy it for the API or for share of voice. Those are the two things genuinely absent below it, and neither has a workaround.

Enterprise. Quote-only, so there is nothing to compare. Get the seat count and the API terms in writing before the conversation moves on to features.

Skip the ladder entirely if the reason you want Semrush is one module. A dedicated crawler costs a fraction of any of these tiers, and rank tracking alone is cheaper almost everywhere else. Which product actually replaces which part of it is the alternatives question, and the answer is rarely the one on the listicles.