Semrush vs Ahrefs: an independent comparison for SEO teams (October 2026)

Semrush or Ahrefs: the verdict

Semrush vs Ahrefs: comparison table

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Semrush vs Ahrefs: what it costs per year

Pricing: Ahrefs starts lower, Semrush bundles more per step

Both vendors publish their price lists, which is not a given in this category: 2 tools in our SEO category quote prices only on request. Both pages display euros when we read them. Semrush sells four self-serve plans: SEO at €112.52 a month, Starter at €158.40, Pro+ at €238 and Advanced at €436.99, all with annual billing. The SEO plan costs €134 a month if you pay monthly, and the page says annual billing saves up to 17 percent. Plans are tiered by websites (5, 5, 15 and 40), keywords (500, 500, 1,500 and 5,000) and AI prompts. Enterprise is quote only.

Ahrefs lists Lite at €119 a month, Standard at €229 and Advanced at €419, which fall to €99.17, €190.25 and €348.25 with annual billing. Enterprise costs €1,394 a month with an annual commitment. A cheaper Starter plan at €27 a month sits next to these. The limits for Lite, Standard and Advanced are 5, 20 and 50 projects, 750, 2,000 and 5,000 tracked keywords, and 100,000, 500,000 and 1,500,000 crawl credits. History reaches back 6 months, 2 years and 5 years. We could not read the limits of the Starter plan, so check them on the page before you rely on it.

Put side by side on annual billing, the mid tiers are the fairest comparison. Ahrefs Standard at €190.25 gives 20 projects and 2,000 tracked keywords. Semrush Pro+ at €238 gives 15 websites and 1,500 keywords. The two vendors do not define a project or a keyword in exactly the same way, so treat this as a pointer and not as a ranking. At the top, Semrush Advanced (40 websites, 5,000 keywords) costs about €89 more a month than Ahrefs Advanced (50 projects, 5,000 tracked keywords).

Seats and add-ons change the picture. Each Ahrefs plan includes one user. Extra seats cost €37.40, €56.10 and €74.80 a month on Lite, Standard and Advanced, and the number you can add is capped at 2, 5 and 10. Semrush lists additional users from €43 a month. Ahrefs also sells Content Kit from €89 a month and Brand Radar AI from €179 a month on top of a plan. Semrush folds AI visibility prompts into the plan tiers. A team of five that needs AI tracking should price the exact bundle at both vendors before comparing the headline numbers.

On the free side, Semrush gives a free plan with one demo project and a 7-day trial for paid plans. Ahrefs has no trial. Ahrefs Free offers Web Analytics, a Site Audit that checks for more than 170 issues with 5,000 crawl credits a month, and Site Explorer showing up to 1,000 backlinks and 1,000 keywords at a time. It works only on websites you own and verify, so it does not let you look at a competitor. Anyone who wants to test competitor research has to buy a plan at Ahrefs, or use the Semrush trial.

Data and tools: both sell scale, but the counts are not comparable

Semrush's home page cites 28 billion keywords, 43 trillion backlinks, 808 million domain profiles, 142 geographic databases and 317 million+ AI prompts. Ahrefs' About page cites 3 trillion external backlinks, 28 trillion internal backlinks, 3 trillion HTML snapshots and 320 petabytes of data, and its enterprise page counts 3,300 servers. These are vendor claims, and the units differ. One page counts all backlinks the index knows, another splits external from internal links. A bigger number does not show better data, and we know of no independent audit of either index that we could verify. If link data decides your purchase, run the same ten domains through both trials of the data you care about.

The tool lists overlap. Semrush groups its work into toolkits for SEO, content, local marketing, advertising, social media and digital PR, and ships a knowledge base with 12 categories. Ahrefs centers on Site Explorer for competitor and backlink research, Keywords Explorer, Site Audit, Rank Tracker, Content Explorer and Web Analytics, with Report Builder included from the Advanced plan. Semrush spreads wider into advertising research and social scheduling. Ahrefs stays closer to organic search and its own crawler, AhrefsBot, which it names as the source of its data.

Enterprise use shows the same split. Ahrefs says that more than 50,000 companies pay for the platform and that 44 percent of the Fortune 500 use it, and lists Portfolios for tracking up to 10 domains as one project. Semrush names clients such as Shopify, Amazon and Netflix on its home page and reports 33 percent year-over-year recurring revenue growth in its enterprise segment for the quarter before the Adobe deal, according to MarTech. Both are vendor statements, so use them as signals of market presence only.

AI features: Semrush bundles prompt tracking, Ahrefs sells it as a module

Both tools now measure visibility in AI answers, the discipline Gartner calls answer engine optimization. Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit tracks a brand at prompt level in Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, and AI Brand Sentiment shows how AI platforms describe it. The Content Toolkit scores drafts in real time. On the pricing page, the daily prompt allowance rises with the plan: 50 on Starter, 100 on Pro+ and 200 on Advanced. Our two reads of the page disagreed on whether the SEO plan carries 50 prompts, so we leave that cell open.

Ahrefs built Brand Radar, which covers Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot and draws on a prompt database of 449 million+ monthly prompts, with AI Overviews alone at 315 million+. The base plans include 5, 10 and 20 tracked AI prompts for Lite, Standard and Advanced. Brand Radar AI is an add-on from €179 a month. Tracking of YouTube, TikTok and Reddit mentions is labeled free while in beta. Ahrefs also lists Ask Ahrefs (free during beta on Lite and above), AI Content Helper, an AI Detector, AI Translations into more than 40 languages and an Always-on Audit. AI Content Inventory is marked coming soon, so we do not count it.

Both vendors connect to outside assistants through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Semrush includes MCP access from the Starter plan and launched an official connector for Claude on August 26, 2026. PPC Land reports that the announcement named Semrush One and SEO Classic subscribers, and that it gave no rate limits or word on whether queries use API quota. Plan names on the pricing page differ from that wording, so confirm which plan includes which connection. Ahrefs MCP works with Claude, ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot.

Gartner's 2026 Market Guide for Answer Engine Visibility Tools names Semrush Enterprise as a representative vendor, according to Semrush's own release of July 7, 2026. We did not find Ahrefs named in sources we could read, which says nothing about quality: a market guide lists examples and does not rank them. The practical question for a small team is smaller. How many prompts do you need to watch, on which platforms, and does the vendor's definition of a prompt match yours? Ask both for a sample report on your own brand before buying.

Company and ownership: a new Adobe unit against an independent Singapore firm

Adobe announced on November 19, 2025 that it would acquire Semrush for about $1.9 billion in cash, or $12 a share, according to MarTech. Semrush's newsroom confirms that the deal closed on April 28, 2026. On June 17, 2026 Adobe and Semrush launched Adobe Brand Visibility, which combines Semrush AI visibility data with Adobe's content tools. Adobe's partner FAQ says that Semrush products are sold and managed through the Semrush ecosystem and are not transactable through Adobe partner programs. So for a buyer, Semrush remains its own contract for now. It is reasonable to ask how roadmap, pricing and support will change under Adobe, and to ask who the contracting entity will be at renewal.

Ahrefs calls itself bootstrapped and says it has taken no external venture capital. It is based in Singapore and reports 149 teammates across 27 locations, and it also runs the search engine Yep. For a buyer this means no acquisition-driven change of terms, but also less public financial information. Its customer counts are its own claims, and we found no independent figure to check them against.

Contract terms read differently too. Ahrefs' Terms of Service renew subscriptions automatically, end at the close of the paid period when you cancel, give no refunds unless the law requires them, and forbid scraping its data outside the official API. They are governed by Singapore law. We did not locate a Semrush terms page that we could read for this comparison, so on auto-renewal, refunds and API fair use, ask Semrush directly.

Country fit and compliance: neither names EU hosting

Our directory lists 8 of the 15 SEO tools with a US headquarters, and only 2 state EU data hosting. Neither Semrush nor Ahrefs is one of them. Semrush's security page says service data sits with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and a third data center provider, all in the United States. Semrush Inc. in Boston and Semrush CZ s.r.o. in Prague are named joint controllers, and the Prague entity is the contact for EU data protection questions.

Ahrefs Pte. Ltd. in Singapore is the controller. Its privacy policy says personal data is transferred to and stored in the United States, and gives VeraSafe Ireland as the EU representative. Its sub-processor list, updated May 13, 2026, names more than 40 providers, including AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, DigitalOcean, OVHcloud and OpenAI, in the US, the EU, Singapore and Canada. It does not tie your data to a single region. The enterprise page names ISO/IEC 27001. Semrush's security page names PCI DSS Level 1, TLS 1.2 or higher and AES-256 encryption, but we found no ISO 27001 or SOC 2 statement there. Request current reports from both vendors if your security team needs them.

Both publish a data processing addendum, which is what Article 28 of the GDPR requires when a vendor processes personal data for you. Semrush's July 2025 version uses Module Two of the EU Standard Contractual Clauses and the UK transfer agreement, requires notice of a breach without undue delay, lets you object to new sub-processors within 14 days and allows an on-site audit once a year with 30 days' notice at your cost. Ahrefs' version of September 15, 2025 includes Modules Two and Three, with the Annex I to be signed and returned to activate them, and also requires notice of a breach without undue delay. We read no objection period or audit clause in the Ahrefs text.

For companies in Germany and the rest of the EU the question is smaller than for an HR system, because SEO tools mostly process public web data and the business contact data of your own staff. Your team accounts, logins and project notes are still personal data, and a works council may want to know about shared tools that log user activity. Neither vendor offers an EU-only region, so the legal basis for transfers to the US and Singapore must be documented in your records either way.

Interface languages and where the products diverge

Ahrefs' help center lists 15 interface languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Indonesian, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. We could not confirm the Semrush interface language list on a vendor page, so we leave it out. Semrush does state 142 geographic databases, which matters for local rankings in many countries. Check that the country and language you target exist in the plan you buy.

The products diverge on how they are sold. Semrush asks you to buy a stack: toolkits for several channels, AI prompts and users on top of a plan. That helps when one team runs SEO, content and paid search, and costs more if you only need links. Ahrefs asks you to buy a core and add modules. That keeps small plans cheap but adds up when you want the content kit, Brand Radar and several seats. In both cases the add-ons decide the total.

What to test before you buy

Write down five domains: your own, three competitors and one site in a market you do not know yet. Run the same tasks in both tools: a keyword list for one topic, a backlink gap against a competitor, a site audit of 500 pages and a rank tracking setup for 50 keywords. Compare how long each takes, what each exports and whether the numbers agree with Google Search Console for your own site. Use the Semrush trial for the first run. Because Ahrefs has no trial, ask the sales team about a short evaluation, or start with the lowest paid plan and use the monthly option.

Then price the real bundle. Count seats, tracked keywords, AI prompts and the add-ons you expect to use, and ask each vendor in writing what happens when you exceed limits, whether prices change at renewal and which sub-processors handle your account data. Sign the data processing addendum before anyone enters client data.

Who should pick Semrush and who Ahrefs

The bottom line

If your team runs SEO, content and advertising research together, wants a trial week and accepts that Adobe now owns the vendor, Semrush is the simpler single purchase. If your work centers on links, keywords and rankings, and you want a low entry price, stated limits and an independent vendor, Ahrefs is the better start. In both cases, price the exact bundle of seats and AI prompts, test the same five domains and get the data processing terms signed before real client data goes in.