SEOmonitor vs Semrush (and Ahrefs): One Bills by the Keyword, the Others by the Seat

SEOmonitor vs Semrush: the short answer

SEOmonitor's agency plan costs €299 a month, and everyone on the team can have a login at no extra charge. Semrush's Pro+ plan costs $299 a month for one login, and each colleague adds $80. For an agency that tracks thousands of keywords a day across many client sites and renews retainers on rankings and non-brand traffic, SEOmonitor is the cheaper and more focused tool. For an agency that needs keyword research in many countries, technical site audits and white-label PDF reports on one bill, Semrush does more. Ahrefs, the usual third option, matches Semrush on research data but refreshes rankings only weekly.

The rest of this piece shows the working, taken from each vendor's own pricing pages and help documentation as they stood on 22 October 2026. The argument running through it is that the billing unit tells you what a tool was built for. SEOmonitor meters keywords because tracking them is its product. Semrush and Ahrefs meter people because research is theirs.

How SEOmonitor pricing works now, against Semrush and Ahrefs

SEOmonitor: per tracked keyword

The SEOmonitor pricing page lists two plans. Starter, labelled "for businesses", covers one website, from €79 a month for 500 keywords tracked daily to €249 for 3,000, its ceiling, with one GA4 and Search Console connection and weekly AI tracking on one model.

Pro is the agency plan. It costs €299 a month ($335 on the page's dollar setting) and includes 3,000 keywords tracked daily and 1,000 AI tracking units, shared across unlimited websites. Each further 1,000 keywords costs €49 ($55) and each further 1,000 AI units €19 ($21). Connecting a client's GA4 or Search Console is optional and costs €10 ($11) per website a month, whether you connect one service or both. Yearly billing takes 17% off, which puts Pro at €248 a month, or €2,978 a year. Users, tracked competitors, exports, the API and unlimited draft campaigns for pitches are included.

Two billing rules matter more than the headline. The billing article in SEOmonitor's help center says keywords are counted across the account and bought in batches of 1,000; a keyword counts once across groups in one campaign, but again in another campaign or location. It also warns that "archiving alone does not reduce the paid allowance". An agency that drops a client must archive the keywords and then lower the allowance in Billing, or keep paying for the capacity.

Semrush: per plan and per seat

The Semrush pricing page now sells SEO at $139 a month ($117.33 billed annually) for five websites and 500 keywords tracked daily; Starter, which adds AI search tracking, at $199 ($165.17); Pro+ at $299 ($248.17) for 15 websites and 1,500 keywords; and Advanced, for 40 or more websites, at a price set by sales. Semrush's user management article says every plan comes with one seat. Extra seats cost $45 a month on the entry tiers, $80 on Pro+ and $100 on Advanced, and a colleague who also needs the AI Visibility Toolkit costs $99 more.

The agency bundle is gone. Semrush's knowledge base says the Agency Growth Kit "has been discontinued as a toolkit", taking the Client Portal and CRM with it. What remains is sold piece by piece: Base reports at $10 each a month, Pro reports with branding and white labelling at $20 each, and a listing on the Agency Partners directory at $90 a month.

Ahrefs: per plan and per seat, weekly ranks

The Ahrefs pricing page lists Lite at $129 a month ($108 billed annually) with 750 tracked keywords, Standard at $249 ($208) with 2,000, Advanced at $449 ($374) with 5,000, and Enterprise at $1,499 a month with an annual commitment and at least 10,000 keywords. Each of the first three includes one user; Lite can add two more at $40 a month each, Standard five at $60 and Advanced ten at $80. Lite allows only five projects whose ownership you have not verified, which matters when clients will not share Search Console access. Asked in its FAQ about discounts or trials, Ahrefs says it never runs discounts and points website owners to its free plan.

What a 12-client agency pays on each

Take a sample agency, not a real one: 12 client sites with about 125 keywords each (1,500 in all), four staff who need logins, Search Console connected for every client, and a monthly report per client. The table is list-price arithmetic on monthly billing, before tax.

The rows buy different things. SEOmonitor's figure carries 1,500 keywords of unused headroom, because Pro starts at 3,000, and its client reports are built in Looker Studio rather than sent as white-label PDFs. Ahrefs costs $61 more and checks rankings once a week. Semrush costs most, sells the only branded report of the three, and leaves the sample at its Pro+ keyword cap.

Scale the sample up and the gap widens. At 40 client sites and 10,000 keywords, SEOmonitor Pro costs $335 plus seven extra blocks of 1,000 keywords at $55 and 40 connections at $11: $1,160 a month, with unlimited users. Semrush has no self-serve plan that size; 40 websites and more than 5,000 keywords means Advanced, priced by its sales team. Ahrefs needs Enterprise, at $1,499 a month on an annual commitment, and its rankings would still update weekly. Per-keyword pricing rewards agencies whose work is tracking at volume. Per-seat pricing rewards small teams who mostly research.

SEOmonitor vs Semrush vs Ahrefs at a glance

Rank tracking: daily, weekly, and on which device

Rank tracking is where SEOmonitor makes its case. Its pricing FAQ says it checks each tracked site daily on a primary device, desktop or mobile, chosen per campaign "based on search demand", down to position 100. The other device, and the full list of competitor results, refresh weekly. AI Overviews are checked daily. Campaigns can target a country, region or city, and country campaigns can add extra locations. The daily history, in other words, belongs to one device.

Semrush's knowledge base says Position Tracking data is "generally updated daily within 24-48 hours". Its Position Tracking guide covers mobile, tablet and desktop, locations "down to postal code level", and Google, Bing, Baidu, ChatGPT Search and Google AI Mode as engines. Tracking several locations or devices in one campaign needs Pro+ or above.

Ahrefs tracks mobile and desktop and locations "from country, to city, to ZIP code", according to its Rank Tracker page, but its help center says the default update frequency on all plans is weekly. For an agency that reports month to month, weekly points are enough. For one that has to explain to a client on Tuesday why a page fell on Saturday, they are not.

What the SEOmonitor forecast actually calculates

The forecast turns a pitch into a number, and neither rival sells an equivalent at agency prices: Semrush's pricing page lists none, and Ahrefs lists "forecasting and trends" only on Enterprise, without describing it. SEOmonitor's algorithm documentation, updated on 15 September 2026, sets out the mechanism. You choose keyword groups, a target rank for each between 2 and 10, a start date, a timeframe and a progression speed (Conservative, Moderate, Optimistic or custom), which sets how many months keywords take to reach the top 100, then the top 20, then the target.

The model then works keyword by keyword. It takes current rank and monthly search volume, adjusted for trend and seasonality and split by device, discounts the volume by the share of searches that click an organic result when SERP features are present, and converts the rest to sessions with an organic-only CTR curve (generic, or your own), plus a long-tail effect for related keywords. Sessions are multiplied by a conversion rate and by average order value from GA4; without GA4 or Search Console, you supply both.

The forecast overview lists what comes out: additional non-brand sessions, conversions and revenue, month by month and keyword by keyword; a Google Ads cost equivalent, which SEOmonitor pitches as price anchoring for SEO budgets; and a Goal Chance rating from Realistic to Too Ambitious, built from ranking difficulty, target rank and how fast you have asked keywords to move. You can save up to five scenarios and set one as the campaign's objective, which the Agency Dashboard then tracks.

Read the tracking part closely. Progress is measured against what SEOmonitor calls total traffic: an "inertial" baseline, made by extrapolating the last 30 days of non-brand organic traffic and adjusting for seasonality, plus the forecast uplift. The baseline rests on the stated assumption that without SEO work, "the current ranks will stay more or less the same". That is a reasonable planning device and a weak test of cause. A core update or a competitor's botched migration can push actual traffic above or below the line with no help from the agency. The forecast is the best tool of the three for setting a target. Whether the work hit it needs a comparison with pages nobody touched, the method in our guide to proving an SEO change worked with a control group.

Keyword research and site audits: where Semrush and Ahrefs pull ahead

Research is the clearest gap. Semrush's data article puts its database at more than 28.8 billion keywords across 142 geographic databases. Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer page claims 28.7 billion keywords across 217 locations. SEOmonitor's pricing FAQ says its research datasets "cover US, UK and RO". Rank tracking works anywhere, but an agency pitching a client in Germany or Australia will do its keyword discovery somewhere else. Within its three markets, SEOmonitor researches by topic, domain or URL and clusters keywords with AI: research in service of a tracking list, not a research suite.

SEOmonitor also sells no technical crawler. Its Content Mapping Audit flags cannibalization, intent mismatches, keywords with no matching page, weak titles and headings, and overloaded pages, and its page issues detection works from Google results for the tracked keywords rather than from crawling the site. The pricing page lists no site audit, so status codes, redirects, canonicals and indexability are left to another tool.

Both rivals crawl. Semrush's Site Audit limits run from 100,000 pages a month on the entry tier (20,000 per audit) to 300,000 on the tier behind Pro+, and its Semrush One article says the audit also checks whether a site blocks AI crawlers such as PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot. Ahrefs gives 100,000 crawl credits a month on Lite, 500,000 on Standard and 1.5 million on Advanced.

AI search tracking in each tool

All three now sell AI visibility tracking, and each counts it differently. SEOmonitor turns each tracked keyword into a question. Its AI Search Tracking article says it folds a keyword's intents into "the one question a real person would ask an LLM", asks it in a fresh session, reuses it on every crawl, and reports mentions, citations, citation rank, sentiment and a share of voice weighted by search volume. Pro tracks any mix of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, weekly, at one unit per keyword per model (five on Claude); Starter tracks one model. At €19 per 1,000 units, that works out to about €0.004 per answer by our arithmetic. The low price buys one answer a week, and SEOmonitor's note on collection concedes that "LLM answers are non-deterministic" without saying how often each question is asked per crawl. Treat a week's mention rate on a small keyword set as a sample, not a measurement.

Semrush tracks prompts daily: 50 on Starter, 100 on Pro+, or 25 on the standalone AI Visibility Toolkit at $99 a month per domain, billed annually. Its Semrush One documentation names AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, with coverage varying by report. Ahrefs includes 150 daily-updated AI prompt checks a month on Lite, 300 on Standard and 600 on Advanced, a check being one prompt on one platform in one location, and sells Brand Radar AI from $199 a month for researching any brand across what it calls more than 496 million prompts. If AI answers are the main deliverable, start with our comparison of the best AEO tools for AI visibility tracking rather than with any of these three.

Client reporting, white label and integrations

SEOmonitor's pricing page lists Looker Studio connectors, a Google Sheets add-on, scheduled email reports, API access on Pro and MCP access for AI assistants, but not white labelling. Its connector documentation covers rankings, competitors, organic traffic, forecast against actual and, through a newer unified connector, AI Overview and AI search data. In practice the client sees a report the agency designed in Google's free dashboard tool, renamed Data Studio this year, as our guide to AgencyAnalytics alternatives explains. For the agency itself, Pro adds an Agency Dashboard with portfolio metrics and client health tracked by monthly retainer value.

Semrush sells the branded report directly, $20 per client a month for a white-label Pro report, though with the Client Portal gone, clients get a PDF or a link rather than a login. Ahrefs' Report Builder emails scheduled PDFs to recipients who need no Ahrefs account; plans include five to 25 reports, the add-on 50 for $99 a month, and the page does not mention branding.

On integrations, SEOmonitor uses GA4 and Search Console for keyword-level traffic and the brand split its forecast depends on, and Semrush connects both through Organic Traffic Insights. Ahrefs imports up to 16 months of Search Console data, and its Web Analytics can import GA4 data, free up to 1 million events per project a month.

Is SEOmonitor better than Semrush or Ahrefs? Which agency should pick which

Pick SEOmonitor if rankings are the product

Choose it if your agency tracks thousands of keywords across many client sites, sells retainers on rankings and non-brand traffic, and pitches with forecasts. Unlimited users and unlimited draft campaigns make it cheap to put every account manager in the tool and to forecast a prospect before they sign. It fits best in the UK, the US and Romania, where its research data lives. Budget for a crawler beside it.

Pick Semrush if you need one bill for everything

Choose it if your team is small, your keyword sets are modest, and you want research in many countries, site audits, AI prompt tracking and branded client reports from one vendor. Its weakness for agencies is arithmetic: seats at $80 each on Pro+, reports at $20 per client, and a 1,500-keyword cap before you are talking to sales.

Pick Ahrefs if research and content come first

Choose it if your agency's work starts with competitor and keyword research and content planning, and weekly rank snapshots are enough. For a two-person shop doing research it is the cheapest of the three, at $169 a month on Lite with one extra user, and it is the weakest for daily rank reporting.

Pick none of them if your clients buy leads, not ranks

A local agency with five clients and 50 keywords each is overbuying with any of these. An agency whose reports are mostly paid social needs a reporting tool, not a rank tracker. And an agency whose clients ask whether the work paid will not get the answer from rank history or a forecast baseline.

That last gap is the one AIO Copilot, which publishes this blog, was built for. It is not a rank tracker, and it replaces none of the three above. It measures each SEO change against pages nobody touched, shows the math behind every figure, and sends the result to the client under the agency's name. Skip it if your problem is tracking 10,000 keywords a day.

How to use SEOmonitor: setting up the first campaign

These are the first steps as SEOmonitor's own help center describes them. The trial lasts 14 days, needs no card, and includes AI search on the first campaign for up to 1,000 keywords. The campaign lifecycle article adds that trial campaigns cannot be archived or deleted, so set up a real client rather than a throwaway test.

1. Create the campaign and define the brand

A campaign is one website in one location and language, from global down to a city, and it starts as a free draft. When you register it, enter the brand name with its common variations and misspellings, up to 20, separated by commas. The brand settings article explains that this drives the brand and non-brand split; get it wrong and branded searches end up in the non-brand traffic the forecast is built on.

2. Add keywords

Paste a list or upload a CSV. The import guide says any file with a column called Keywords works, and an optional Groups column places them in groups; duplicates are added once. Or let the wizard choose: automatic keyword research draws on SEOmonitor's database, then the connected Search Console, then an AI reading of the site's top pages, and drops terms under 40 searches, close variants and competitor brands. Its advice on what to track: keywords that already bring organic visits and those you plan to target, without your own brand terms, other brands or near-zero volume.

3. Connect Search Console and GA4

In the Traffic tab, open the settings icon to see connected accounts and click + to add Google Analytics. Choose Google Analytics 4, pick the account and the stream ID, and click Connect Analytics 4. The GA4 guide says the Google account needs admin access to the campaign, and the GA4 property's default URL must match the campaign's site. On Pro, each connected site adds €10 a month.

4. Start tracking, then check unallocated traffic

Click Start Tracking in the yellow bar at the bottom of any module, or in Campaign Settings. Only the latest draft snapshot carries over, and daily history starts from that day. Once the campaign is tracked, look at unallocated traffic: the fine-tuning article suggests keeping it under about 20 to 30%, usually by connecting the missing Search Console properties (an https version, a blog or m subdomain) under Campaign Settings, Connected Accounts, then reprocessing.

5. Build and read the forecast

In the Scenario Navigator, click Create a new Scenario. The scenario guide walks through the settings: keyword groups, a target rank between 2 and 10, a start date within the next three months, a timeframe of 6 to 12 months, and a progression speed. Adjust targets until Goal Chance stops reading Too Ambitious. Then read the Overview tab for additional sessions, conversions and revenue by month, and the Detailed tab for the keywords carrying the estimate. If a handful of high-volume terms carry most of the uplift, the forecast is a bet on those terms, and the client should hear that before it becomes the campaign objective.

A forecast with its assumptions printed underneath is more than most agency projections offer. Treat it as a promise all the same: check the inputs, keep the scenario modest, and decide before the work starts how you will tell, six months on, whether the work is what moved the line.

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