Semrush API Pricing: What It Costs Before the First Call

Semrush does not publish a price for its API, so the honest budget has two halves: a floor you can read and a meter you cannot. The floor is the plan that unlocks the API, which in our reading of its pricing page from Europe on 29 September 2026 is Advanced, at EUR 436.99 a month billed annually or EUR 526 paid monthly. The meter is the units every request consumes, sold separately inside the account.

The mistake is to treat the first half as the price. This piece works through both from Semrush's own pages, shows how to size the meter before you subscribe, and says when a pay-per-call vendor is the better buy and when it is not. The four figures below are the ones the argument rests on.

All four come from two Semrush pages, the pricing page and the API access guide in its developer documentation. What they mean for a buyer is that the subscription buys permission and nothing else: the guide notes that after the upgrade the number of units in the account will still be zero.

Which Semrush plan includes API access?

On the pricing page it is the top self-serve tier. In our reading of that page on 29 September 2026, SEO at EUR 112.52, Starter at EUR 158.40 and Pro+ at EUR 238 a month, all billed annually, do not list the API. Advanced lists API access and API data integration, and Enterprise lists custom integrations at a custom price. The paid tiers from Starter up also list MCP access, the plug that lets an assistant such as Claude query Semrush, which is a different thing from the API.

The documentation names the plan differently. The access guide says the Standard API, which carries the SEO and Projects data, is available to SEO Toolkit users who have a Business subscription, and no plan called Business appears on the pricing page we read. The two pages were evidently written at different times, and the practical consequence is that a price quoted elsewhere for a Semrush Business plan may describe a plan that is no longer on sale.

Prices are also regional. We read euros because we read from Europe, and a visitor elsewhere may be shown another currency, so open the page from the country your company is billed in before a number goes into a budget.

How are Semrush API units priced?

By the package, inside the account, and with nothing to start on: the access guide says the number of units is still zero after the upgrade, and on the pricing page the three lower tiers carry a Try for free button while Advanced carries Subscribe. The guide's instructions are to open Subscription info, go to the API Units tab, select a package and buy it, and neither page prints what a package costs.

Figures for unit packages circulate on review sites. We could not confirm any of them on a Semrush page, so none appears here.

What Semrush does publish is the rate at which requests burn units, and that is the number to build a budget from. In the guide's example, one line of the Domain Organic Search Keywords report costs 10 units for live data and 50 for historical data. The charge is per line returned and not per call, so the size of the response decides the bill.

The same worked example shows how quickly that compounds. To list 1,000 organic keywords for 100 domains, the sort of job a competitor dashboard runs every month, it says you will be charged 1,000,000 units for live data and 5,000,000 for historical. Multiply your own rows by ten before you ask for a quote, and by fifty if you want history.

What does the same job cost on a pay-per-call API?

The comparison that matters is the same 100,000 rows bought by the unit. DataForSEO's Labs pricing prints $0.012 per task and $0.00012 per item for its standard endpoints, so 100 tasks returning 1,000 rows each come to $13.20, against a minimum payment of $50 and no subscription. The rows come from DataForSEO's index and not from Semrush's, which is the catch, and the next section returns to it.

Building on AI answer data?

The Honeyb API returns AI search visibility as JSON: which brands each engine named, in what position, with what sentiment and which pages it cited. $0.08 per answer, no subscription.

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The table below sets out what each vendor asks for before it answers a single request, in our reading of each vendor's own pricing page on 29 September 2026.

The table is not a ranking, because these vendors do not sell the same data. SerpApi and Serper sell result pages, DataForSEO sells its own keyword and backlink index, and Semrush sells the index your marketing team already reads in its dashboard. What the first column shows is the cost of being wrong: a test on a pay-per-call vendor costs tens of dollars, and a test on Semrush costs a plan.

When is the Semrush API worth the floor?

When the subscription is already paid. A team that runs its reporting on the Advanced plan has bought it for the dashboard, and for that team the marginal cost of the API is the units alone. It also gets the one thing no other vendor can sell, which is numbers that match what the client sees on logging in.

That matters more than a unit price. Two tools that disagree about a keyword generate a client email, and the hour spent answering it costs more than the data did. Our comparison of DataForSEO alternatives reaches the same verdict for every suite: use the API of the index you already report from.

The floor is wrong for the opposite team, the one building a product or an agent from nothing. It would pay for 40 monitored websites and 5,000 tracked keywords, which is what the Advanced plan lists, in order to call two endpoints. For that team the order of operations is a pay-per-call vendor first, and Semrush later if customers ask for Semrush's numbers by name.

Which Semrush APIs do not use units?

Several, and they are all on the local side of the product. According to the access guide, the Map Rank Tracker API is available to all Semrush users with no unit purchase and no special subscription, and the Listing Management API comes with a Local Pro or Business subscription, again without units.

The list grew this month. Semrush's release notes for 1 September 2026 announce a Review Management API and a Google Business Profile Tool API, open to Local Pro and Business users who have connected their locations, and neither consumes API units. If local listings are the whole of your use, the unit meter may never start.

The Trends API, which carries traffic and market data, is separate again. It does not draw on Standard API units: the guide describes a Basic tier that can be bought directly and a Premium tier quoted by sales, with a default limit of 10,000 requests a month. A team that wants traffic estimates and keyword rows is therefore buying two products with two meters.

How do you budget for the Semrush API in an afternoon?

Count rows, not calls. Write down each report you would pull, the rows per pull and the pulls per month, then multiply by 10 for live data or 50 for historical, and you have a monthly unit figure to take to Semrush before you subscribe. Ask for the package price against that figure, in writing, in the currency you will be billed in.

Then price the same rows on one pay-per-call vendor, which takes ten minutes with a printed rate, and compare the totals. Put the subscription on the Semrush side only if you would not otherwise buy it. That single comparison settles most cases, and our guide to SerpApi alternatives prices the result-page vendors if pages, not keyword rows, are what you need.

The same test, a printed price and no floor, is the one we hold our own product to. Honeyb's AI visibility API sells a different kind of row, the answer an AI assistant gave about a brand, classified by whether the brand was named, where, with what sentiment and from which cited pages. Its page prints $0.08 per answer from prepaid credits. Its keyword and backlink lines are in early access, so it does not replace Semrush's index today.

If you are pricing data for a product and want the rate before the commitment, the Honeyb API lists every line with its price and its status, and access is a short form, not a plan.