Sites like Semrush, each judged in a sentence

Every few weeks someone on the timeline asks for sites like Semrush, gets forty replies, and learns nothing. So here is the short version. Semrush's SEO plan costs $139 a month, the plan with its fuller research tools costs $199, and most people who complain about the bill open it twice a month to stalk one competitor. That habit, not the feature grid, should decide what you buy.

Prices were checked on each vendor's own page in October 2026.

The list, one verdict each

1. seogeoaeo.ai. The pick for people who look up rivals now and then. You buy credits from $29 a month for 2,000, and each report costs a fixed amount, shown before it runs. A domain overview is 50 credits. A rival's top 100 keywords is 35. A keyword gap is 85. Verdict: the cheapest way to answer "what does that site rank for" without a subscription that assumes you live in it.

2. SE Ranking. Core costs $129 a month and tracks 2,000 keywords daily across 10 projects, plus MCP and API credits. Verdict: the suite you switch to when you still want a suite.

3. Ahrefs. Lite costs $129 a month with 750 tracked keywords and six months of history. Verdict: the backlink people's home, priced like it knows that.

4. Moz Pro. Standard is $99 a month, or $79 paid yearly, with 300 tracked keywords and 400,000 pages crawled. There is also a $49 plan for one website. Verdict: the quiet, cheaper option nobody posts about.

5. Similarweb. Competitive Intelligence costs $199 a month, or $125 billed yearly, for traffic, engagement, demographics and competitor alerts. Verdict: buy it when the question is traffic, not keywords.

6. Ubersuggest. The Individual plan costs $29 a month for one project and 150 searches a day. Verdict: keyword research on a ramen budget.

7. Google Search Console. Free. Clicks, impressions and average position for sites you have verified. Verdict: already the best rank data you own, and useless for spying.

8. Google Keyword Planner. Free with a Google Ads account. Verdict: Google's numbers, built for people buying ads.

How the paid options stack up

Why the first pick is first

The usual Semrush complaint is not that the data is bad. It is that you pay a monthly rate for a toolbox and use two tools from it. seogeoaeo.ai's pay-per-report model prices those two tools directly. Its Competitor Finder (38 credits) tells you who you compete with in Google, Competitor Keywords tells you what they rank for, and Keyword Gap shows what they win that you miss.

The other point in its favour for this crowd: every plan, including the $29 one, includes MCP and REST access. Point Claude Code or Cursor at it and the agent can run the report and read the result. At Semrush, MCP starts on the $199 Starter plan.

The honest catch: it does not track rankings, keeps no link index of its own, stores no history of how a site changed, and does not show the keywords a competitor bids on. Its numbers are estimates from a third-party data provider. If you need a daily ranking chart, you need a suite.

When Semrush is still the right answer

If your team opens most Semrush modules every day, the breadth earns its price, and leaving resets your ranking history. Stay. Everyone else can probably downgrade to a credit balance and a free Search Console account. The longer write-up on Semrush alternatives goes through each option in more detail.