Semrush Free vs Paid: What You Get (and Hit) on Free

Semrush free vs paid comes down to four caps. The free plan is a permanent account limited to one project, 10 analytics report requests a day, 10 tracked keywords and a 100 page Site Audit crawl, as of July 2026. Paid starts with the SEO plan at $139 (about £102) a month, or $117.33 (about £86) a month billed annually, which lifts you to 5 projects, 500 tracked keywords and room to work without rationing. Free is fine for learning the interface and checking the odd keyword. It is not enough for real research or a monthly SEO routine, and this guide shows exactly where the wall sits.

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What the free Semrush plan includes

A free Semrush account costs nothing, never expires and never asks for a card. You register at semrush.com, close the trial offer if it appears, and keep a permanent login. Most of the toolkit is visible from a free account; the caps decide how much of it you can actually use. These are the numbers we keep bumping into when we run free accounts for testing (as of July 2026).

Free plan cap	Limit as of July 2026
Projects	1
Analytics report requests	10 a day
Tracked keywords (Position Tracking)	10
Site Audit crawl	100 pages

The cap that bites first is the report requests. A report request is any analytics view you load: a Domain Overview, a search in the Keyword Magic Tool, an Organic Research page. Ten of those a day sounds workable until you remember that answering one ordinary question usually burns three or four views.

What ten requests a day feels like in practice

Here is a real morning. You sit down at nine to research keywords for a new service page. Request one: Domain Overview on your own site, to remind yourself of the baseline. Requests two and three: Domain Overview on two competitors. Request four: a Keyword Magic Tool search on your main seed term. You apply a difficulty filter, open a topic group, then run a second seed because the first split into two angles. That is five. You check one rival’s Organic Research report to see which page carries their traffic: six. By half past nine you have four requests left for the whole day and a shortlist of perhaps a dozen keywords, when a proper job wants 30 to 50. Our seven day beginner plan simply cannot be run at free plan pace; what takes a week on a paid account stretches to the best part of a month on free.

The other caps behave the same way. Ten tracked keywords covers roughly one service and its close variants, when even a small local business should be watching 30 to 50 terms. The 100 page audit crawl comfortably covers a brochure site, but a shop or a site with a few years of blog archive blows straight past it, and everything beyond page 100 goes unchecked.

What paid actually unlocks

Paid Semrush starts with the SEO plan at $139 (about £102) a month, or $117.33 (about £86) a month billed annually, as of July 2026. That buys 5 projects, 500 tracked keywords and the working room the free tier withholds: enough daily report requests to research without counting them, audits that cover real sites rather than the first 100 pages, and rank tracking broad enough to watch a whole keyword strategy rather than a sample of it.

Higher tiers (Starter, Pro+ and Advanced) run from $199 (about £146) to $549 (about £403) a month and add AI prompt allowances, historical data and API access, but almost every small UK business we work with starts and stays on the SEO plan. If a review quotes Pro at $139.95 or Guru at $249.95, it describes the retired lineup Semrush no longer sells. Our Semrush pricing breakdown works through the current tiers in detail, including the annual versus monthly maths and the VAT a UK card pays on top.

When free stops being enough

Free stops being enough at a predictable point, and it is usually not a missing feature but a cap you hit twice in the same week. Upgrade, or at least trial a paid plan, when any of these is true:

• You hit the 10 report request ceiling on two working days in a row
• You need to track more than 10 keywords, which in practice means any business with more than one service
• Your site has more than 100 pages and you care about the unaudited remainder
• You manage more than one website, because the single free project cannot hold a second site
• You are planning a quarter of content and need sustained keyword research, not a handful of searches a day

If none of those applies yet, stay free with a clear conscience. The upgrade case builds itself; you will feel it, and the checklist above just names the moment.

The 7-day trial is not the free plan

The free plan and the free trial get confused constantly, and they are different products. The free plan is permanent, capped and card free. The trial is seven days inside a full paid plan: pick SEO, Starter, Pro+ or Advanced and you get that plan’s limits for the week. It requires a card, Semrush places a temporary $1 (about £1) authorisation to validate it, and the account converts to a paid subscription on day eight unless you cancel through the cancellation form first, which takes a few days to process. Two honest wrinkles: data exports stay locked during the trial even where the paid plan allows them, and Semrush offers the trial once per customer, so spend it on a planned week of real work rather than the week you first register. We keep a separate guide covering the trial’s inclusions, the exact cancellation steps and the refund rules.

Read Our Semrush Free Trial Guide

Who should simply stay on free

If you run a small brochure site, publish occasionally and mostly want to sanity check the odd keyword or keep an eye on a handful of rankings, the free plan plus free tooling is genuinely enough, and we would rather say so than upsell you. Google Search Console gives you your real queries at no cost, and it reports actual clicks rather than estimates. Pair a free Semrush account with our roundups of the best free SEO tools and the genuinely free keyword research tools and you can cover keyword ideas, technical checks and rank awareness for £0 a month. Until a trigger on the checklist above fires, the $139 (about £102) is better spent on content or links. The wider set of guides lives in our SEO tools hub.

The middle option: a cheaper paid tool

There is a third answer to the free versus paid question: pay less to a different tool. SE Ranking’s Core plan costs £95 a month, or £76 a month billed annually, as of July 2026, priced in pounds rather than dollars, and it covers the same beginner workflow of keyword research, rank tracking, site audits and competitor checks for less than the Semrush SEO plan. Its trial is 14 days and needs no card, which makes it the easier evaluation if the Semrush card requirement puts you off. Our hands on SE Ranking review covers where it beats Semrush and where it falls short.

Try SE Ranking Free For 14 Days

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between Semrush free and paid?

The free plan is a permanent, capped account: one project, 10 analytics report requests a day, 10 tracked keywords and a 100 page audit crawl, as of July 2026. Paid plans remove the daily rationing and raise every cap; the entry SEO plan carries 5 projects and 500 tracked keywords. In short, free shows you the interface, paid lets you run a genuine monthly SEO routine on it.

What are the Semrush free account limits?

As of July 2026, a free account is limited to one project, 10 analytics report requests a day, 10 keywords in Position Tracking and a 100 page Site Audit crawl. The daily report cap is the one you feel first, because every Domain Overview, keyword search or Organic Research view consumes one request. Limits change without much notice, so check the notices inside your own account.

Does the Semrush free plan expire?

No. The free plan is not a trial: it never expires, needs no card and stays usable indefinitely within its caps. The 7-day free trial is the thing that expires, converting to a paid subscription on day eight unless cancelled. If you only ever register the free account, you will never be billed anything.

Is the Semrush free trial better than the free plan?

They do different jobs. The trial gives seven days of a full paid plan’s limits, requires a card and converts to paid automatically; the free plan is permanent and card free but tightly capped. Use the free plan to learn the interface, then spend the one trial you get on a planned week of real work. Exports stay locked until you actually subscribe.

How much does Semrush cost if free is not enough?

The entry SEO plan costs $139 (about £102) a month, or $117.33 (about £86) a month billed annually, as of July 2026, with higher tiers running up to $549 (about £403). Prices are in dollars, so UK buyers pay the day’s exchange rate plus VAT. A cheaper paid route is SE Ranking’s Core plan at £95 a month, or £76 a month billed annually, as of July 2026.