What Semrush really costs in 2026 if all you do is track rankings

What Semrush costs in 2026: the four plans, monthly and annual

Semrush's pricing page (semrush.com/prices, checked September 10, 2026) no longer talks about Pro, Guru and Business. The current plans are SEO, Starter, Pro+ and Advanced, and the gap between them is not just keyword volume — it is also whether you can track more than one location or more than one device inside the same campaign.

Prices in USD, before tax. All four plans include AI visibility and a 7-day trial. Source: semrush.com/prices, checked September 10, 2026.

One detail the table does not spell out: the annual price looks better per month, but it is billed in a single charge. On SEO, that means $1,407.96 in one transaction, not twelve payments of $117.33. And if Position Tracking — watching where each keyword ranks — is genuinely all you need, you are also paying for keyword research, backlinks, technical audits and content tooling you may never open. We do that math per keyword further down. If what you actually want is the opposite — a tracker that only does rank tracking — that is Rankiamos' rank-tracking feature set.

Semrush Pro vs Guru: what happened to the names you still search for

Search "Semrush plans and pricing" or "Semrush Pro vs Guru" and you will still find comparisons anchored to three names that no longer appear on the official pricing page: Pro, Guru and Business. That is not an error on whichever page you are reading — it was written before the rename and nobody went back to update it. Some of those pages even surface Semrush's stock listing next to the price, which is a real fact about the company but has nothing to do with what you will actually pay.

Semrush's help center, though, still keeps the old names alive in another section, with these prices: Pro at $139.95 (500 keywords), Guru at $249.95 (1,500 keywords, with multi-target already included) and Business at $499.95 (5,000 keywords). By keyword ceiling, a rough mapping would be Pro≈SEO/Starter, Guru≈Pro+ and Business≈Advanced — but that is our own read of the numbers, not an official table Semrush publishes.

For the question this post is answering, the label matters less than one specific capability: multi-target tracking, which today lives on Pro+ (and its old equivalent, Guru). If your plan is to track one city on one device, SEO or Starter is enough. The moment you need a second city, or mobile and desktop together in the same campaign, there is no workaround — you move to Pro+.

What Semrush costs in pesos, reais or your local currency

Semrush bills in US dollars, always by card. What ends up on your local-currency statement depends on three variables the pricing page never shows: the exchange rate on the exact day the charge is processed, the foreign-transaction fee your card issuer applies, and digital-services VAT, if your bank charges it on that kind of purchase. The formula looks like this:

You will not find a fixed number here in pesos, reais or soles — any exchange rate we quoted today would already be stale by the time you read this. What you can do is check an official, dated source — your central bank's published rate — for the actual day the charge posts, not an average from weeks back. And if you choose the annual plan, remember that calculation runs once against the full yearly total, not against the monthly figure shown in the table above.

*General reference, not a verified figure on today's bill. Rates and how they apply to digital services change — confirm with your bank or accountant before budgeting.

A fair note on the other side of this: Rankiamos bills through Apple, on your App Store account. Currency is set by your country's storefront, and we do not issue our own invoice either — the charge shows up on your statement as an App Store purchase, just as exposed to exchange rates and card fees. No rank tracker billing with an international card escapes that variable.

Semrush Position Tracking: how it actually counts your keywords

Before doing any math, you need to understand the unit Semrush uses for its quota: the target. A target combines location, device, language and search engine. SEO and Starter give you a single target per campaign; want a second city, or the mobile/desktop pair, and you need another campaign — which is where the rule that surprises most people kicks in.

Semrush's help center (article 692, checked September 10, 2026) states it plainly: every new target you add — even if you are already tracking those same keywords under a different target or campaign — counts those keywords against your account limit again. There is no discount for reusing the same keyword list: every location-and-device combination draws from your quota from zero.

This is exactly the kind of rule worth comparing across tools before you pay, because not every rank tracker counts the same way — there is a full breakdown of how each rank tracker counts your keywords if you are weighing more than one option. What follows here is the math applied specifically to Semrush.

Nobody runs this math in the comparisons floating around online. Here are four scenarios asking the same question: if you need X keyword-city-device combinations, which Semrush plan actually covers you, and what does each combination cost? Semrush's prices are the ones from the table above (semrush.com/prices, Sep 10, 2026), before tax. Rankiamos Pro starts at $14.99/month or $119.99/year ($9.99/month), and these four scenarios track Google only: Bing is a Pro feature and is tracked by city just like Google, but it draws its own unit — the same keyword tracked on both engines costs 2 units, not 1 — so adding it would double the unit count for the same keyword set.

A note on Rankiamos' units: since 1.1.3, every device draws its own unit, just like on Semrush, so none of these four scenarios fits inside Rankiamos Pro's quota — not even A, the simplest one, which is already double the real ceiling of 50 units with no higher plan to move to. On Semrush, meanwhile, every new target re-counts the full quota (KB 692), though at a fully loaded plan the per-combination cost drops to roughly $0.20 on Pro+. Rankiamos is built for a different volume: smaller-scale tracking at a flat price, not the large combinations that require Pro+ or Advanced.

It is worth explaining why scenario B tracks two devices instead of one: your ranking on mobile and on desktop does not always match, and proving that with data instead of a hunch is exactly the subject of why your mobile ranking does not match your desktop one. Tracking a single device when your traffic splits across both is not savings, it is a blind spot.

The overall read: Semrush's per-combination cost drops the fuller you fill the plan, because the same enterprise software does not cost much more whether you track 500 keywords or 5,000. Rankiamos runs the opposite curve: the per-unit cost is already low from the start ($3.00 per unit if you filled only the Free plan, though that is not its intended use), but it never scales past 50 units, because there is no plan above $14.99 a month or $119.99 a year.

Full plan limits, no surprises, are on Rankiamos' pricing page, with Pro at $14.99 a month or $119.99 a year.

What you pay for in Semrush and never touch if you only track rankings

This is not a knock on Semrush — it is a genuinely broad suite and worth every dollar for plenty of teams — it is an honest question about what your subscription funds if your actual use case is limited to Position Tracking. That same monthly price also buys keyword research across an entire domain's universe, backlink analysis, technical site audits, content generation and optimization tools, and more recently, AI search visibility.

If that AI visibility piece is exactly what you care about measuring — whether ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI Overview cite you — that is its own topic with its own cost breakdown: see knowing whether Google's AI Overview cites you. Here we are staying with Position Tracking, which is the one part of Semrush this post is actually testing.

What you gain

What you give up

If, beyond watching your own rankings, you need to map which keywords a competitor ranks for that you have never tracked yourself, that is a different job — covered in researching a competitor's keywords is not the same as watching who outranks you on yours — and today Semrush handles that better than any dedicated tracker. Everything Rankiamos does track continuously, including multi-city, multi-device tracking, is laid out on the features page.

Before you cancel Semrush: export your history

If you decide to move off Semrush, do it with a plan, not overnight. Export every Position Tracking campaign and target separately before you cancel — check which export formats are available in your account at that point, since Semrush has changed them before — and save the files with the date in the filename. Also read the current terms on what happens to your data after cancellation.

One thing worth knowing before you set a cutoff date: no new tool starts with your Semrush history already loaded. In Rankiamos, a keyword's history starts the exact day you add it to the tracker — it is not retroactive, and it is not a Pro-only perk: history is never deleted on any plan, it simply never looks backward.

So if the decision is already made, the safer move is to run both tools in parallel for 2 to 4 weeks before fully canceling Semrush. That gives you a data bridge instead of a blank gap in the chart, right when you need to compare before and after the most.

When paying for Semrush actually makes sense

This entire post questions the spend for one specific use case: pure rank tracking. Outside that case, there are real reasons to keep Semrush, or to subscribe to it even if you never have before. It is worth it if you need to research a competitor's entire keyword universe — not just watch your own rankings, but discover what they rank for that you do not — because that is something a dedicated tracker simply does not do; we cover that distinction in researching a competitor's keywords is not the same as watching who outranks you on yours.

It is also worth it if you actively work with backlinks, if you need automated technical audits of a site, if you already track your presence in ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini on top of Google's AI Overview, if your operation exceeds the 50 keyword-by-city units Rankiamos Pro's ceiling allows, or if your team needs shared access to one dashboard — Rankiamos accounts are individual, with no member invites and no plan above Pro. And of course, if your team is not on Apple hardware: Rankiamos today runs only on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch.

Outside those cases, if all you do each week is open a report to see where each keyword landed, you are paying for a lot more than you use. That is where Rankiamos' multi-city, multi-device tracking comes in — the same data point you check in Semrush, without the rest of the suite behind it.