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SEO software pricing: an SEO tools price comparison of what Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz and Surfer really cost
Every list price below was read off the vendor's own pricing page in July 2026, not copied from a roundup. Before you commit to any of them, run one page through the thing you are actually buying an SEO tool to get: the fix.
What SEO software actually costs in 2026
A full SEO suite costs $99 to $149 a month at the entry tier, $179 to $299 in the middle, and $449 to $999 at the top. Moz Pro Standard is the cheapest complete suite at $99. Ahrefs Lite is $129 and Semrush SEO is $139. Single-purpose tools that do one job, including audits, rewrites or AI visibility tracking, run $29 to $99. Seats are extra almost everywhere and typically add $40 to $60 a month per person.
Those are list prices, and list prices are the least interesting part of this decision. What separates a good purchase from a bad one is the ratio: how much you pay per tracked keyword, per tracked AI prompt, per seat. Priced that way the field spreads out enormously. Ahrefs Lite gives you a tracked keyword for 17 cents and a tracked AI prompt for $25.80. Moz gives you the keyword for 33 cents and the prompt for $1.98. They are not competing on the same axis at all, and no vendor puts it in those terms because the comparison is unflattering somewhere for everyone.
The other thing worth saying plainly: most roundups you will find on this query are quoting plan names that no longer exist. Semrush retired Pro, Guru and Business. If a page still says Semrush Pro at $139.95, it was written before the change and nobody went back. Every figure here carries the date it was read.
Last updated July 2026. Semrush, Moz, Otterly.AI, Search Atlas and Surfer prices read off each vendor's pricing page on 31 July 2026. Ahrefs USD list re-checked the same day.
Every plan, every price, in one table
Monthly list prices. Annual billing takes 17 to 20 percent off almost everywhere. Plans are lined up by rough position in each vendor's range rather than by name, because the names do not correspond across vendors and never have.
| Tool | Cheapest paid | Entry | Middle | Upper | Top |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ahrefs | $29 Starter | $129 Lite | $249 Standard | $449 Advanced | from $1,499 |
| Semrush | none | $139 SEO | $199 Starter | $299 Pro+ | $549 Advanced |
| Moz Pro | $49 entry | $99 Standard | $179 Medium | $299 Large | custom |
| Search Atlas / OTTO | none | $99 Starter | $199 Growth | $399 Pro | $999 Agency |
| Surfer | none | EUR 49 Discovery | EUR 99 Standard | EUR 182 Pro | EUR 299 and up |
| Otterly.AI | none | $29 Lite | $189 Standard | $489 Premium | custom |
| Seomake | none | $49 Starter | $149 Growth | $499 Agency | custom |
Surfer is quoted in euros because surferseo.com geolocates its pricing page and displayed euros to our request, exactly as ahrefs.com does. Rather than convert at a rate that will be wrong by the time you read this, we report the currency the vendor showed. Check your own checkout total. Ahrefs USD figures come from the vendor's US-facing list and were corroborated against independent 2026 breakdowns.
The plan names changed and most guides did not notice
Semrush's lineup is now SEO, Starter, Pro+ and Advanced. The old Pro, Guru and Business tiers are gone, along with the $139.95 figure that half the internet still quotes. Ahrefs added a $29 Starter plan that is not a trial and not a suite, it is a metered lookup tool for people who need a difficulty score twice a week. Moz kept Standard, Medium and Large and added tracked AI prompts to all three. If a comparison page you are reading uses any of the retired names, treat every number on it as unverified.
Divide the price by what you get and the ranking changes
Rank tracking is the one feature every SEO tool sells and the one where allowances differ by a factor of seven at similar prices. Here is each tool's cheapest plan that includes tracking at all, with the monthly cost of one tracked keyword.
| Plan | Per month | Keywords | Cost each | What else the plan holds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ahrefs Lite | $129 | 750 | $0.17 | 1 seat, extras about $40 each |
| Semrush SEO | $139 | 500 daily | $0.28 | Extra users from $45 |
| Moz Standard | $99 | 300 | $0.33 | 1 user, 3 sites |
| Seomake Starter | $49 | 100 | $0.49 | 1 site, 1 seat, unlimited audits |
| Search Atlas Starter | $99 | 120 | $0.83 | 1 project, 1 seat |
Ahrefs wins this table outright, and it is worth understanding why rather than just acting on it. Ahrefs is priced as a data product. The index is the asset, the interface is a way to query it, and volume is cheap to serve once the crawl exists. Search Atlas sits at the other end because it is not selling data volume, it is selling an agent that goes and changes your pages, which costs money per action.
The trap in this table is buying an allowance you will never fill. A single site with 40 commercial pages has perhaps 120 keywords worth watching weekly. Paying $129 for 750 slots to use 120 of them means your real cost per tracked keyword is $1.08, not 17 cents. Run that division on the keywords you will actually load, not the ones the plan permits.
AI visibility tracking has a fourteenfold price spread
Every major vendor added AI visibility tracking during 2025 and 2026, and none of them has decided what it is worth. A tracked prompt means the tool asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or AI Overviews a question on a schedule and records whether you were named. Same feature, wildly different price.
| Plan | Per month | Prompts | Cost each | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Otterly.AI Standard | $189 | 100 | $1.89 | Standalone tracker, no SEO suite attached |
| Otterly.AI Lite | $29 | 15 | $1.93 | Standalone, cheapest way in at any allowance |
| Moz Standard | $99 | 50 | $1.98 | Bundled inside a full SEO suite |
| Surfer Standard | EUR 99 | 25 weekly | EUR 3.96 | Weekly refresh, not daily |
| Semrush Starter | $199 | 50 | $3.98 | Plus 300 daily AI visibility reports |
| Ahrefs Lite | $129 | 5 | $25.80 | Brand Radar sold separately from EUR 179 |
Two conclusions come out of this cleanly. If you want AI visibility tracking bundled into a suite you already need, Moz Standard at $99 for 50 prompts is the cheapest route to it, at $1.98 per prompt, and no roundup we found states that. If you want tracking on its own and do not need a suite, a dedicated tool is cheaper still. Buying it as an Ahrefs add-on is the expensive path by a wide margin, because Ahrefs sells the serious version separately as Brand Radar, listed from EUR 179 a month.
Worth knowing before you buy any of them: a tracked prompt tells you whether you were mentioned, and nothing about why. The work that changes the answer is the same work that has always changed organic rankings, which we cover on answer engine optimization, and the measurement side is compared properly on our AI visibility tracker page.
Four costs that are not on the pricing page
Seats, which are almost never included
Every Ahrefs plan below Enterprise ships with exactly one seat. Adding people costs roughly $40 a month on Lite, $60 on Standard and $80 on Advanced. Semrush extra users start at $45. A four-person team on Ahrefs Standard is not paying $249, it is paying about $429. Count the humans before you compare the plans.
Credits and quotas that meter your curiosity
Ahrefs runs on credits, 1,000 per user on Lite and unlimited above it. Search Atlas meters AI quota, content pages, articles and audits separately, so four different counters can each end your month early. Metering is not dishonest, but it means the plan you can afford and the plan you can work in may not be the same one.
The annual commitment you take too early
The discounts are genuine, roughly 17 percent at Semrush and Ahrefs and about 20 at Moz. They are also the mechanism by which most SEO budget gets wasted, because the commitment is signed in month one, enthusiasm peaks in month two, and nobody opens the tool in month seven. Run monthly for a quarter, then convert.
The hours the tool does not save
Every suite here produces a list of problems. None of the research-first ones writes the replacement title, the meta description or the paragraph. If a $139 subscription generates 300 issues that someone bills three hours a week to resolve, the subscription is the small number in that sentence. Price the work, not just the license.
Why SEO tools cost what they do
It helps to know what you are renting. Ahrefs, Semrush and Moz each operate a continuous crawl of the web, store the results, and keep years of history so a difficulty score returns in two seconds. That is a data infrastructure business wearing a SaaS interface, and the price reflects a crawl running whether you log in or not. It is the honest reason those three cluster around the same numbers despite competing hard.
It is also why the cheaper tools are cheaper, and the distinction matters when you are comparing a $49 product against a $139 one. Tools without an index cost less because they do not carry one. They cannot tell you a keyword's global search volume or who links to your competitor. What they can do is read a specific page and act on it. Those are different products at different prices, and a large share of buyer regret comes from expecting one to be a cheap version of the other.
What to buy at $50, $150, $300 and $500 a month
Budget bands are more useful than feature grids, because the real question is never which tool is best, it is which combination fits the money you have and the work you actually do each week.
Under $50 a month, one site
You cannot buy an index at this level, so do not try. Verify your domain in Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools for query data no paid tool can match, use Ahrefs Webmaster Tools free on your own site, and spend the budget on something that produces output rather than reports. Seomake Starter is $49 for unlimited audits, rewrites and 100 tracked keywords on one site.
Around $150 a month, one operator
This is where a suite becomes possible and where most people overbuy. Moz Standard at $99 gets you crawling, 300 keywords and 50 AI prompts. Ahrefs Lite at $129 gets a far better index and 750 keywords. Pick based on whether your bottleneck is knowing what to target or knowing what is broken. Buying both at this budget leaves nothing for execution.
Around $300 a month, a small team
Two tools beat one big one here. A research suite at the entry tier, Ahrefs Lite or Semrush SEO, plus a dedicated execution or content tool, covers more ground than a single mid plan and fails more gracefully when you cancel one. Remember the seat math: a second person on Ahrefs Standard adds $60 before anyone has done any work.
$500 and up, multi-site or agency
Site counts and seats drive this band, not features. Semrush Advanced at $549 covers 40 sites, Ahrefs Advanced at $449 covers 50, Search Atlas Agency at $999 covers 10 projects with white-label reporting. Work out cost per client site per month and the ranking usually inverts what the feature comparison told you. Our Agency plan is $499 for the execution side.
If you are still choosing the research suite itself rather than budgeting for it, the two candidates are settled properly on Semrush vs Ahrefs, and the wider field is covered in our best SEO tools comparison.
What we charge, and what we deliberately do not sell
Seomake is $49 a month for Starter, $149 for Growth and $499 for Agency, or $288, $888 and $2,988 a year. Starter covers one site with one seat, unlimited page audits with no credits, AI rewrites of titles, metas and headings, 20 content drafts and 100 tracked keywords. Growth adds five sites, three seats, 1,000 tracked keywords, whole-site crawling and weekly scheduled re-audits.
We do not run a web index, and pricing this page honestly means saying so on it. There is no backlink database here, no global keyword volume corpus, no competitor traffic estimates. If those are what you need, buy Ahrefs or Semrush, and this page exists partly to help you buy the right one. We also do not track prompts across ChatGPT or Gemini, so if AI visibility monitoring is the requirement, the table in section 05 is where to shop.
What $49 buys is the half the suites price as an afterthought. You point us at a URL and the query it should rank for, and you get the score, the specific reasons, and the corrected title, meta description, headings and body copy written and ready to paste. Audits are unlimited rather than credited, because metering how often someone checks their own work is a strange thing to charge for. Most of our customers run a research suite alongside us, and that is the pairing we would recommend to ourselves.
SEO software pricing, question by question
How much does SEO software cost?
A real SEO suite costs $99 to $149 a month at the entry tier and $250 to $550 in the middle. Ahrefs starts at $129, Semrush at $139, Moz at $99. Single-purpose tools that do one job well run $29 to $99. Agency and enterprise tiers reach $999 to $1,499.
What is the cheapest SEO tool that is actually worth paying for?
Moz Standard at $99 a month is the cheapest full suite with rank tracking, crawling and AI visibility bundled together. Below that you are buying single-purpose tools: Ahrefs Starter at $29 for keyword lookups, Otterly Lite at $29 for AI prompt tracking, Seomake Starter at $49 for audits and rewrites.
Is Semrush or Ahrefs cheaper?
Ahrefs is cheaper at every comparable tier. Lite is $129 against Semrush SEO at $139, Standard is $249 against Pro+ at $299, Advanced is $449 against Semrush Advanced at $549. Ahrefs also includes more tracked keywords per dollar. Semrush includes more tools per plan, which is the trade.
How much does Semrush cost per month?
Semrush lists four plans as of July 2026: SEO at $139, Starter at $199, Pro+ at $299 and Advanced at $549 a month. Annual billing drops those to $117.33, $165.17, $248.17 and $455.67. Extra users start at $45 a month each and are not included in any tier.
How much does Ahrefs cost per month?
Ahrefs lists Starter at $29, Lite at $129, Standard at $249, Advanced at $449 and Enterprise from $1,499 with an annual commitment. Every plan includes one seat. Additional seats cost roughly $40, $60 and $80 a month depending on the tier, which is the line most budgets miss.
Why are SEO tools so expensive?
You are renting a web crawl, not software. Ahrefs, Semrush and Moz each run continuous crawls of billions of pages and store years of history to answer a question in two seconds. That infrastructure is the cost. Tools that skip the index, including ours, cost far less because they do not carry it.
Do SEO tools charge per user?
Most do, and it is the single most underestimated line. Every Ahrefs plan includes one seat, with extras from about $40 a month. Semrush extra users start at $45. Moz includes one to three depending on tier. A four-person team on Ahrefs Standard pays $249 plus roughly $180 in seats.
How much does AI visibility tracking cost?
It depends entirely on where you buy it. Per tracked prompt, Otterly Standard works out at about $1.89 a month, Moz Standard at $1.98, Semrush Starter at $3.98 and Ahrefs Lite at $25.80. That is a fourteenfold spread for a feature nobody has settled the price of yet.
Is annual billing worth it for SEO software?
The discounts are real, generally 17 to 20 percent, which is one to two free months. Semrush advertises up to 17 percent, Moz about 20. Take it only after you have run a monthly plan for a full quarter, because the most common SEO tool expense is a yearly contract on a tool nobody logs into.
Do I need more than one SEO tool?
Most teams end up with two, and it is usually a research suite plus something that does the writing. The suites are priced as research products, so their content output is a secondary feature. Buy one index, then buy execution separately rather than paying twice for two overlapping keyword databases.
The question underneath all of these is whether any of it earns the money back, which deserves more than 50 words, so we worked through the arithmetic in are SEO tools worth it.
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