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01 / HEAD TO HEAD

Majestic SEO vs Semrush: backlink index, Trust Flow vs Authority Score, and what each one really costs

We sell neither of these and we carry no backlink index of our own, so on this particular comparison we have nothing to defend. Every price and quota below was read off majestic.com and semrush.com on 14 August 2026, not copied from an affiliate roundup.

02 / The short answer

Majestic is a backlink instrument. Semrush is a suite that contains one.

Majestic SEO does one thing: it has crawled the web for link data since 2006 and reports it through Trust Flow and Citation Flow. Semrush is a full marketing suite where backlinks are one module beside keyword research, rank tracking, site audits and paid search. Comparing them on price is misleading, because Majestic Pro at 94.99 euros buys deep link data and nothing else, while Semrush SEO at $139 buys shallower link data and eight other tools.

The decision is therefore not which is better. It is whether backlinks are your job or one of your jobs. Link builders, expired-domain buyers and anyone auditing a link profile they inherited will get more from Majestic. Everyone else is better served by the module they already pay for.

Last updated August 2026. Majestic pricing read off majestic.com/plans-pricing on 14 August 2026, Semrush pricing off semrush.com/pricing on 9 August 2026 and re-checked 14 August.

03 / What each one costs

Majestic vs Semrush pricing, plan by plan

One warning before the numbers, because it trips up every comparison of these two. Majestic geolocates its pricing page. It served us euros, so the Majestic table stays in euros. Converting them into dollars would produce a figure the vendor never quoted and an American buyer may never see. Semrush quotes dollars, and its page carries an active pricing test flag, so your figures can differ by login state and region.

Majestic plan	Monthly	Yearly, per month	Users	Analysis units	Rows per report	Reports	API
Lite	EUR 46.99	EUR 39.16	1	1 million	5,000	60	No
Pro	EUR 94.99	EUR 79.16	1	20 million	30,000	300	No
API	EUR 379.99	EUR 316.66	5	100 million	50,000	950	Yes

Semrush plan	Monthly	Yearly, per month	Seats	Link tooling	API
SEO	$139	$117.33	1	Backlink Analytics, Audit, Gap	No
Starter	$199	$165.17	1	Adds AI prompt tracking	No
Pro+	$299	$248.17	1	Adds share of voice and more projects	No
Advanced	$549	$455.67	1	The only tier whose copy mentions API access	Units bought separately

Two details in those tables do more work than the headline prices. Majestic Lite and Pro carry no API access at all, so anyone planning to pull link data programmatically is looking at the 379.99 euro plan from the start rather than growing into it. And Semrush counts one seat per plan at every tier, with extra users from $45 a month, so a three person link team pays roughly $90 a month more than the sticker on any plan you pick.

04 / Trust Flow vs Authority Score

Trust Flow vs Citation Flow vs Authority Score, and why the split matters

The philosophical difference between these two products shows up in one design decision. Semrush blends everything it knows about a domain into a single Authority Score. Majestic refuses to blend, and publishes two numbers side by side. That sounds like a detail and it changes how you read a link profile.

What you want to know	Majestic	Semrush
Link quality	Trust Flow, 0 to 100, distance from reviewed seed sites	Authority Score, 0 to 100, blended
Link volume	Citation Flow, 0 to 100, reported separately	Folded into Authority Score
Topic relevance	Topical Trust Flow, by category, logarithmic	Category data inside Backlink Analytics
Freshness model	Fresh Index, last 120 days, refreshed through the day	Continuous, updated daily
Historic depth	Historic Index, continuous back to 2006	No separately published historic index
Spam signal	Read from the Trust to Citation gap yourself	Toxicity score, calculated for you

How to actually read Trust Flow and Citation Flow

Read the gap, not the values. A domain with Citation Flow 45 and Trust Flow 40 has links that are broadly as trustworthy as they are numerous. A domain with Citation Flow 45 and Trust Flow 6 has been pointed at by a great many pages that no reviewed seed site vouches for, which is what a purchased link network looks like from the outside. Semrush reaches the same conclusion through its toxicity score, it just does the reading for you.

The evidence on authority metrics, and its limit

A 2023 peer-reviewed study in Profesional de la informacion tested 3,151 domains across 61 neutral queries and found every pairwise Spearman correlation above 0.9 between Moz Domain Authority, Semrush Authority Score and Ahrefs Domain Rating. They order domains almost identically. The honest caveat is that Majestic was not one of the three tested, so nobody should claim that result covers Trust Flow. It does suggest the general anxiety about which authority metric is right is misplaced.

05 / The index

Fresh Index, Historic Index, and 43 trillion links

Majestic splits its crawl into two indexes and that split is the most useful thing it sells. The Fresh Index holds backlinks discovered in the last 120 days and refreshes repeatedly through the day, so it answers "what links exist right now". The Historic Index runs continuously back to 2006 and answers a question no other mainstream tool answers cleanly: what did this domain's link profile look like before someone bought it.

Semrush publishes the bigger headline. Its own backlink page states 43 trillion backlinks across 808 million domain profiles with roughly 10 billion pages crawled daily, updated continuously. Third-party articles quote daily crawl figures ranging from 10 to 17 billion, which contradict each other, so we are quoting only the number Semrush states itself.

Where index size actually matters

Rarely, and never as a headline. What decides whether a link tool is useful is coverage of the specific domains you research, and no vendor publishes that. A tool with a smaller total index but better coverage of your niche will beat a bigger one every time.

Where the historic index earns its money

Buying an expired domain, inheriting a site with a suspicious profile, or reconstructing what happened before a traffic collapse. In all three the question is about the past, and a continuously maintained index back to 2006 is a genuinely rare asset.

What neither index tells you

Whether Google counts the link. Every third-party index is an approximation of a graph Google keeps private, which is why two tools disagree about the same domain and both are defensible. Treat the counts as directional.

06 / Programmatic access

If you want backlink data by API, the answer flips

Most comparisons of these two stop at the dashboard. That is a mistake if you plan to pull link data into your own systems, because the API story reverses the usual conclusion about which vendor is easier to buy from.

Majestic: one plan, published allowances

API access is the 379.99 euro a month plan and nothing below it. In exchange, the allowances are printed on the pricing page: 100 million analysis units, 20 million retrieval units, 500,000 index item units, five users, and the option to scale analysis units up to a billion. You can work out your bill before you sign up, which is a lower bar than it should be and one most vendors fail.

Semrush: a subscription, then units, price unpublished

Semrush requires a Business-tier subscription and then API units bought separately, and after upgrading the unit balance is still zero. The purchase screen returns HTTP 401 to anyone not logged in, so the package price is not public. Backlinks v3 costs 40 units per line, Backlinks Overview 40 per request and Authority Score Profile 100 per request. Units expire at renewal, and the terms forbid caching results beyond a month.

The practical upshot: for a predictable programmatic link-data bill, Majestic is the one you can actually price. We break the Semrush side down endpoint by endpoint in Semrush API pricing, including the error you get when the balance runs out mid-job.

07 / Which one fits

Majestic or Semrush: pick by what your week looks like

Buy Majestic if

Link acquisition or link auditing is most of your week. You vet placements before paying for them, buy expired domains, or clean up profiles you inherited. You want quality and quantity reported as two numbers rather than one, and you need history that predates whatever happened to the site last year.

Buy Semrush if

Backlinks are one of several things you do. You also need keyword research, rank tracking, technical audits and competitor visibility, and you would rather have one subscription and one login than assemble a stack. The link data is shallower than Majestic's and adequate for most of what people actually do with it.

Buy neither if

Your pages are not ranking for reasons that have nothing to do with links. Thin content, a title that never contained the keyword, no direct answer for an AI engine to lift. No amount of link data fixes an on-page problem, and this is the most common reason a subscription gets cancelled after three months.

That third box is where we come in, and it is worth being blunt about the scope: Seomake carries no link index, no keyword database and no rank tracker, so it replaces neither tool on this page. It audits a live page against the keyword it should rank for and writes the corrected title, meta and headings. If you are still narrowing the field, Ahrefs vs Semrush covers the two biggest suites, Moz Pro vs Semrush covers the cheaper suite, and the Moz competitors table prices the whole group in one place.

08 / Asked and answered

Majestic SEO vs Semrush, question by question

Majestic SEO vs Semrush: which is better?

Semrush is better if you need one tool for the whole job, because backlinks are one module beside keyword research, rank tracking, audits and paid search. Majestic is better if backlinks are the job. It has crawled the web for link data since 2006 and does nothing else, which is both the strength and the limit.

Is Majestic better than Semrush for backlinks?

For link forensics, yes, in the sense that its whole product is pointed at that one question. Majestic separates a Fresh Index of the last 120 days from a Historic Index reaching back to 2006, which is the cleanest way to answer "was this link ever there". Semrush counts more links overall, at 43 trillion by its own published figure.

How much does Majestic cost?

Majestic geolocates its pricing and served euros when we checked on 14 August 2026: Lite at 46.99 euros a month, Pro at 94.99, and the API plan at 379.99. Paid yearly those work out to 39.16, 79.16 and 316.66 a month. Only the top plan includes API access at all.

What is the difference between Trust Flow and Citation Flow?

Citation Flow scores how much link volume points at a page, on a 0 to 100 scale. Trust Flow scores how close those links sit to manually reviewed trusted seed sites, on the same scale. Volume without trust is the classic spam signature, so the gap between the two numbers matters more than either alone.

Is Trust Flow the same as Semrush Authority Score?

No. Authority Score is a single blended number combining link power, organic traffic estimates and spam signals. Majestic deliberately refuses to blend, publishing Trust Flow and Citation Flow separately so you can see quality and quantity apart. One number is easier to report, two are harder to game.

Does Majestic have keyword research and rank tracking?

Barely, and not as a replacement. Majestic added Search Explorer and a keyword generator that report search volume and topical URLs, but there is no rank tracker, no site crawler and no technical audit. If you drop Semrush for Majestic you lose those entirely and will need something else for them.

Which is cheaper for backlink API access, Majestic or Semrush?

Majestic, and it is not close on predictability. Majestic sells API access as a flat 379.99 euro a month plan with published unit allowances. Semrush requires a Business-tier subscription and then API units bought separately, and it does not publish the unit price at all, so you cannot calculate the bill before you commit.

Can I use Majestic and Semrush together?

Plenty of link-building teams do, and it is the setup that makes the most sense of the two. Semrush runs the day to day SEO work and Majestic gets opened when a link decision needs real scrutiny: vetting a placement, auditing a toxic profile, or checking what a domain looked like before someone bought it.

Is Majestic SEO still worth it in 2026?

For link specialists, expired-domain buyers and anyone auditing a historic link profile, yes, because nothing else keeps a continuous index back to 2006. For a general marketer who wants one subscription, no. The honest test is whether you would open it weekly. If not, the backlink module you already pay for is enough.

Does Majestic or Semrush have the bigger backlink index?

Semrush publishes the larger number, stating 43 trillion backlinks across 808 million domain profiles with roughly 10 billion pages crawled daily. Majestic does not publish a comparable headline count in a form we could verify. Index size is a weak buying signal anyway: coverage of the domains you actually research matters far more than the total.

09 / Run it

Check the page before you blame the links

Paste a URL and the keyword it should rank for. Seomake reads the live page, scores what is costing you the ranking, and writes the corrected title, meta and headings. No account, no card, no credits.

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