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01 / WHAT IT REALLY COSTS

Semrush API pricing: what the Semrush API costs, how units are metered, and the price Semrush will not publish

We do not sell an API and we are not competing for this purchase, so there is nothing here we need you to conclude. Every figure below was read off Semrush's own pricing page, knowledge base and developer documentation in August 2026, and where Semrush declines to publish a number we say so instead of guessing.

02 / The short answer

The Semrush API has a two-part price, and only one part is public

Semrush API access costs a Business-tier subscription plus API units purchased separately, and Semrush does not publish the unit package prices. The subscription is listed at $499.95 a month in Semrush's own knowledge base. The units are sold in packages of 2 million, 5 million, 10 million and 20 million, and the purchase screen that would show their prices returns an HTTP 401 to anyone without an active qualifying plan.

The consequence catches teams out constantly: after you upgrade to a qualifying plan, your unit balance is still zero. The subscription buys you the right to buy units. It does not include any. Budget for both lines or the integration you scoped will stop on its first production run.

You will find third-party articles quoting anywhere from roughly $20 to $250 per million units. They contradict each other and none of them cite a Semrush page, because no such page is reachable. We are not going to add a fourteenth invented figure to that pile.

Last updated August 2026. Plan prices read off semrush.com/pricing on 9 August 2026, the SEO Classic ladder off semrush.com/kb/1547 and the unit costs off developer.semrush.com on 12 August 2026.

03 / Which plan unlocks it

Semrush API price by plan, including the tier names Semrush stopped advertising

Semrush currently runs two plan namings side by side, which is the single biggest source of confusion when people compare the Semrush API cost. The public pricing page sells SEO, Starter, Pro+ and Advanced. The older Pro, Guru and Business tiers were not retired: they persist as SEO Classic, they are priced in the knowledge base, and the API documentation still names Business. They are not publicly self-serve purchasable, so reaching that tier usually means a sales conversation.

Plan	List price	REST API access	What that actually means
SEO	$139 a month	No	Entry tier, no API path
Starter	$199 a month	No	Adds AI prompt tracking, still no API
Pro+	$299 a month	No	Includes 50,000 units for MCP, not the REST API
Advanced	$549 a month	Mentioned in plan copy	The only current tier whose copy names API access
SEO Classic Pro	$139.95 a month	No	Includes 50,000 units for MCP
SEO Classic Guru	$249.95 a month	No	Includes 50,000 units for MCP
SEO Classic Business	$499.95 a month	Yes, this is the tier the API docs name	Units still bought separately

One caveat on every row: the Semrush pricing page carries an active pricing experiment flag, so the figure you see can differ by region, login state and which test bucket you land in. Semrush's own two pages already disagree on the entry tier, listing it at $139 and $139.95. Treat all of these as the shape of the ladder rather than a quote. The full plan comparison, including seat costs and report credits, sits on our SEO software pricing comparison.

04 / Units per call

What each Semrush API endpoint costs in units

This is the table that decides your bill, and it is the one most articles about Semrush API pricing skip entirely. Most endpoints charge per line returned, not per request, so asking for 100 rows costs roughly ten times what asking for 10 rows costs. A handful charge a flat rate per request regardless of size, and those are the ones worth batching into.

Endpoint	Standard cost	Note
Domain Overview	10 units per line	50 per line for historical
Domain Organic Keywords	10 units per line	50 per line for historical
Keyword Overview	10 units per line	50 per line for historical
Broad Match Keywords	20 units per line	No historical variant published
Related Keywords	40 units per line	No historical variant published
Keyword Difficulty	50 units per line	The most expensive keyword call
Competitors in Organic Search	40 units per line	200 per line for historical
Domain vs Domain	80 units per line	400 per line for historical
Domain Ad History	100 units per line	No historical variant published
Backlinks (v3)	40 units per line	Per line, not per request
Backlinks Overview (v3)	40 units per request	Flat, regardless of size
Backlinks Overview (v4)	45 units per request	Flat, regardless of size
Authority Score Profile	100 units per request	Flat, regardless of size
Get Keyword Metrics (v4)	20 units per request	Flat, regardless of size

Read off developer.semrush.com on 12 August 2026, documentation last updated 5 August 2026. Semrush revises these, so re-check before you size a package.

Two lines deserve attention before you design anything. Keyword Difficulty at 50 units per line is five times a Keyword Overview line, so a difficulty score on every keyword in a large set is the most common way a budget disappears without anyone noticing. And Domain vs Domain at 400 units per line for historical data means a competitive backfill across a few years can cost more than everything else combined.

05 / What a real job costs

Semrush's own worked example: 1.5 million units for one pull

Semrush publishes a sizing example in its documentation, and it is the most useful number on this page. Pulling 50 domains against 500 keywords each consumes roughly 1,500,000 units. That is one competitive analysis, run once.

The smallest package sold. Semrush's own 50-domain example would consume three quarters of it on a single run.

10 req/s

The rate limit, alongside a cap of 10 concurrent requests. A wide crawl is bounded by this as much as by your unit balance.

1 month

The longest the terms of service permit you to retain the data. Section 3.3 rules out building a permanent local copy.

Put those three together and the practical shape of the product appears. It is priced for recurring, machine-consumed pulls at moderate width, and it is deliberately not priced for anyone trying to warehouse the index. If your plan was to pull once, store forever and query locally, the contract closes that door before the price does.

Before you spend anything, wire up the balance endpoint. Semrush exposes the current unit count at countapiunits.html and checking it is free, so a job that logs its remaining balance on every run will tell you what your real burn rate is inside a week. When the balance hits zero you get ERROR 132 back from the SEO, Trends, Position Tracking and Site Audit endpoints, and an HTTP 403 from Projects and Local, so handle both.

06 / What changed in 2026

The cheapest Semrush API access in 2026 is not the API

The most useful thing to know about Semrush API pricing this year is that a second, much cheaper door opened. Semrush now ships an MCP server, and several mid-tier plans include a unit allowance for it: Semrush One Starter, Pro+, and SEO Classic Pro and Guru each carry 50,000 included units, reachable at mcp.semrush.com/v2/mcp.

What that gets you

50,000 units is not much against a 1.5 million unit competitive pull, but it is plenty for conversational work: checking a handful of domains, pulling keyword metrics for a page you are about to rewrite, or letting an AI assistant look something up mid-task. For that use, it removes the Business-tier requirement entirely.

What it does not get you

It is not a substitute for the REST API. There is no bulk export path, the allowance is fixed rather than toppable, and it is designed for an assistant asking a question rather than a pipeline running on a schedule. If you need a nightly job across thousands of rows, you are still buying Business plus units.

The Trends API is separate

Traffic Analytics and Trends data run on their own API, which does not consume standard units and defaults to 10,000 requests a month. Semrush does not publish its price either, so it is a third line item nobody discovers until they scope the project.

Why this matters for budgeting

The old advice, that any programmatic Semrush access starts near $500 a month, stopped being true in 2026. A team whose real need is occasional lookups inside an AI workflow can now get there on a plan a tenth of that price. Check which door your use case actually needs before you price the expensive one.

07 / If the price does not work

Semrush API alternatives, and where we are not one

Start with the disclosure that matters: Seomake ships no API. If a programmatic feed is what you need, we are not a candidate and this section would be dishonest if it pretended otherwise. What follows is what people actually move to.

Option	Published price	Covers	Honest verdict
Semrush API	Business tier plus unpriced unit packages	Domains, keywords, backlinks, ads, traffic	Widest data coverage, least predictable bill
Majestic API plan	EUR 379.99 a month, allowances published	Backlinks only, back to 2006	The predictable option, if links are the job
SE Ranking	From EUR 109 a month, 25,000 API credits included	Rankings, keywords, audits, plus an MCP server	Credits included in the base plan, not sold on top
Google Search Console API	Free	Your own queries, clicks and positions only	Free and authoritative for your sites, useless for competitors
Semrush MCP allowance	Included on several mid tiers, 50,000 units	Same data, conversational access	Enough for lookups, not for pipelines

Majestic geolocates its pricing page and served us euros, so that row stays in euros rather than a dollar figure the vendor never quoted. The same applies to SE Ranking. We compare Majestic and Semrush properly, including why flat API pricing changes the usual conclusion about which is expensive, on Majestic SEO vs Semrush. If your question is really about the two big suites rather than their APIs, Semrush vs Ahrefs compares them head to head.

One last piece of arithmetic worth doing before any of this. The most common reason a team reaches for the API is that they want an audit run across many pages on a schedule. That is a different job from buying a data feed, and it is usually cheaper to solve with a tool that already does it. Our SEO automation tools page splits the work into what a machine should own outright, what it should draft for a human, and what should stay manual.

08 / Asked and answered

The questions buyers actually ask about Semrush API pricing

How much does the Semrush API cost?

There is no single number, and that is the honest answer. The bill has two parts: a Business-tier subscription, listed at $499.95 a month in Semrush's own knowledge base, plus API units bought separately as a package. Semrush does not publish the unit package prices anywhere public, so you cannot total the cost before you talk to them.

Does Semrush have an API?

Yes. Semrush runs a documented REST API covering domain analytics, keyword data, backlinks and traffic analytics, plus a separate Trends API. Access is gated behind the Business tier rather than sold on its own, and the data is metered in units rather than in calls.

Is the Semrush API free?

No, and there is no free tier. Even the documentation is only useful once you hold a Business subscription. There is one free piece: the balance endpoint at countapiunits.html tells you how many units you have left without spending any, which is the first call most teams wire up.

What are Semrush API units?

Units are Semrush's metering currency. Every request spends units according to the endpoint and the number of result lines returned, so a query for 100 rows costs roughly ten times a query for 10 rows. A Domain Overview line costs 10 units, and the same line with historical data costs 50.

Do Semrush API units expire?

Yes, and this is the detail that catches finance teams out. Unused units expire at your renewal date rather than rolling over. Buying a large package to get a better effective rate only saves money if you actually consume it inside the billing period.

Which Semrush plan includes API access?

The Business tier, under the SEO Classic naming, is the one the API documentation names. In the current plan lineup, Advanced at $549 a month is the only tier whose public copy mentions API access at all. Neither includes units. After you upgrade, your unit balance is still zero.

How do I get a Semrush API key?

The key sits in your account subscription area once a qualifying plan is active. Getting the key is the easy half. The hard half is that a key with a zero unit balance returns nothing useful, so the key and the unit package are two separate purchases.

What is Semrush ERROR 132?

ERROR 132 means you have run out of API units. It is returned by the SEO, Trends, Position Tracking and Site Audit endpoints. The Projects and Local endpoints signal the same condition with an HTTP 403 instead, which is worth handling separately in your client code.

How many Semrush API units will I actually need?

Use Semrush's own worked example as your anchor: pulling 50 domains against 500 keywords each consumes about 1,500,000 units. That single job would exhaust most of a mid-sized package, which is why estimating before you buy matters more here than on any other SEO tool.

Is there a cheaper alternative to the Semrush API?

For backlink data specifically, Majestic sells API access as a flat plan at 379.99 euros a month with published unit allowances, so you can calculate the bill in advance. That predictability is the real difference. Semrush covers far more data types, but you cannot price it without a sales conversation.

Can I cache Semrush API data to save units?

Only briefly. Semrush's terms of service forbid storing the data beyond one month, so caching is a way to avoid repeat calls inside a billing cycle, not a way to build your own permanent database. Any architecture that assumes indefinite storage is a contract problem, not just a cost one.

Do I need the Semrush API at all?

Most teams do not. If you want data in a spreadsheet, the interface exports handle it at no extra cost. The API earns its price when the pull is recurring, wide and machine-consumed, such as scoring thousands of domains on a schedule or feeding an internal dashboard nobody wants to update by hand.

09 / Run it

No API needed to fix the page in front of you

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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