How many keywords can you track with Semrush?

Keyword limits are the single most common reason a team outgrows an SEO plan, and they are usually discovered three weeks after the annual invoice has been paid. The numbers below were read off semrush.com in August 2026. They are worth checking on the day you buy, because Semrush has changed both its plan names and its allowances in the recent past, and a great deal of what is written about its limits online refers to plans that no longer exist.

The limits, plan by plan

Annual billing lowers the price without changing the allowances: $117.33, $165.17, $248.17 and $455.67 a month. Enterprise is sold on request against user count and data limits, and Semrush does not publish a keyword figure for it. The full price breakdown, including what each step up actually buys, is on our Semrush pricing page.

Why the $199 plan tracks no more than the $139 one

This is the part worth reading twice. Both the SEO plan and the Starter plan list five websites and 500 keywords tracked daily. If you are shopping because your keyword list has outgrown its current home, upgrading from SEO to Starter solves nothing. The extra $60 a month buys keyword research and optimization tools, competitor insight tools and the AI visibility features. Those are real products and plenty of teams want them, but they are not capacity.

The practical consequence is that the real decision is between $139 and $299. If 500 keywords covers you, take the SEO plan and skip Starter unless you specifically want the research suite. If 500 does not cover you, the next stop is Pro+ at $299, which is a 115 percent price increase for a 200 percent capacity increase. There is no tier in between, and Semrush does not sell keyword capacity as a standalone add-on the way some competitors do.

What actually consumes a keyword slot

A keyword limit sounds like a count of phrases. In practice, across this whole category, it is usually a count of the combinations you ask the tool to check. The same phrase watched in two cities is frequently two slots. The same phrase watched on desktop and on mobile is frequently two more. Mangools, for example, states plainly that desktop and mobile consume separate slots.

Semrush publishes a flat keyword number rather than a formula, so before you size a list around it, set up one campaign the way you actually intend to run it and watch what the counter does when you add a second location or a second device. Do this inside the trial or the first billing month. A list of 300 phrases that you want in three cities on two devices is not a 300 keyword problem, and finding that out in month two is expensive. This is also why comparing plans on the headline number alone tends to mislead, a theme that runs through our cost comparison across eleven tools.

How many keywords do you actually need?

Most teams track far more than they use. The honest test for any keyword on a daily report is whether a change in its position would cause somebody to do something differently this week. If nothing would happen, it does not need a daily slot. It needs a monthly glance in Search Console.

As rough sizing, a single local business is usually well served by 20 to 60 terms. A content site or a SaaS product with a real blog tends to land between 150 and 600 once you include the money pages, the comparison pages and the top performing articles. An agency needs roughly its per client figure multiplied by its client count, which is why agencies hit ceilings so much faster than in-house teams and why the website limit, not the keyword limit, is often what breaks first. Five websites disappears quickly at $139.

For solo operators and small teams the constraint behind the constraint is time rather than licence capacity. If nobody has three hours a week to read a rank report and act on it, buying a bigger allowance changes nothing. That is the point at which it makes more sense to put the repetitive marketing work on autopilot and keep the tracked list small enough that a human can genuinely respond to it. We work through the sizing question in more depth in how many keywords should you track.

What to do when you hit the ceiling

There are three sane moves and one expensive one. The expensive one is upgrading on reflex. Before you do that, try pruning: export the current list, sort by position, and remove everything that has sat outside the top 50 for six months without a plan attached to it. Those are not rankings you are tracking, they are rankings you are hoping for. That exercise alone routinely frees 30 to 40 percent of a list.

The second move is to split the job. A large number of teams keep a suite for the research, audit and backlink work they genuinely use, and move the daily position watching to a dedicated tracker where the same 1,500 keywords cost a fraction as much. At $299 for 1,500 daily keywords, Semrush works out at roughly $0.199 per keyword per month. Dedicated trackers in the same bracket sit between $0.05 and $0.11. Whether that split is worth the extra login is covered in do you need a rank tracker with Semrush or Ahrefs.

The third is to reduce frequency rather than count, if your tool allows it. Semrush lists its allowance as keywords tracked daily on every plan, which is a genuine advantage over several rivals: Ahrefs refreshes weekly by default and charges for daily, and Moz and Mangools run weekly on most tiers. If daily is not actually necessary for a chunk of your list, some tools will let you trade cadence for volume. Whether you need daily at all is its own question, answered in weekly versus daily rank tracking.

Does Semrush track keywords daily on every plan?

Yes. Semrush lists its Position Tracking allowance as keywords tracked daily on all four plans, including the $139 SEO tier. That is not the norm in this category, and it is one of the stronger arguments for the entry plan. A daily cadence is what lets you connect a ranking movement to the change you shipped that week rather than to a fortnight of unrelated activity.

Can you add extra keywords to a Semrush plan?

Semrush does not list a standalone keyword top up on its pricing pages the way it lists additional user seats. The published route to more tracked keywords is moving up a plan, which means the jump from 500 to 1,500 costs $160 a month at Pro+, or from 1,500 to 5,000 costs a further $250 at Advanced. If you need an unusual shape, for example a great many keywords across a small number of sites, it is worth asking sales rather than assuming the ladder is the only option.

How many websites can you track with Semrush?

Five on the SEO plan, five on Starter, 15 on Pro+ and 40 on Advanced. For agencies this is frequently the binding limit rather than the keyword count, because a roster of 12 clients at 40 keywords each is only 480 keywords, comfortably inside the 500 ceiling, yet needs three times the website allowance the plan provides. Check both numbers against your roster before choosing a tier.

The short version

500 keywords daily at $139 and again at $199, 1,500 at $299, 5,000 at $549, across 5, 5, 15 and 40 websites. Skip Starter if capacity is your reason for upgrading. Confirm how your locations and devices are counted during the first month rather than after it. Prune before you upgrade, because most lists contain a third that nobody reads. And if the only part of the account anyone opens is the position report, the arithmetic on the Semrush pricing breakdown makes the case for splitting the job better than we can here.