Semrush's free keyword tool versus its paid plan: what a free account actually allows

Semrush publishes two different free things and people searching for its free keyword tool usually mean one of them without knowing the other exists. One is a free account with a published daily cap. The other is a set of free tools that need no account at all.

The criterion on this page: what is the published allowance, and what does the free route stop you doing? Both answers are on Semrush's own pricing page, which is unusually specific for this market.

The free account, and its exact cap

semrush.com/pricing, read on 21 October 2026, publishes a free tier as "Free. $0 /mo, For trying out the platform. No credit card required", with the allowance stated as "1 demo project" and "10 reports per day across all vital tools", plus "Help Center and Basic Onboarding" and some AI Visibility features.

Ten reports a day across all tools is the number that matters, and it is more generous than people assume for a specific job and far too small for a project. One keyword overview, one difficulty check and one competitor organic report is three of your ten. A grouped list of two hundred phrases is not a thing you can build inside that cap.

One demo project is the harder limit. Position Tracking and Site Audit both run inside a project, so a free account can look at a project rather than maintain yours.

The free tools outside the account

The same page lists free tools by name under "Explore Free Tools": an AI Visibility Checker, an SEO Checker, a Website Traffic Checker, a Keyword Tool, a Backlink Checker and Top Websites. These are the no account route and they return a narrower view of the same data. For one phrase, one quick read, this is the fastest free path in the market and it costs nothing at all.

Worth noticing which tool is first in that list. The free checker Semrush leads with is about AI visibility, not keywords, which tells you where the vendor believes the attention has moved.

Where the free route stops, precisely

Four things need the paid plan. Tracking, because a project is required and the free tier allows one demo. Volume at list scale, because ten reports a day does not build a plan. History, because trend comparisons need stored data over time. And export, which is where most free tiers in this market draw the line.

The paid entry point on the same page is published as "$139" a month, with "$117.33 /mo billed annually" as the alternative, and it carries "5 websites to monitor", "500 keywords to track daily", "Basic keyword research and competitor analysis", "Position Tracking", "Site Audit" and "Track performance in AI search". Add ons are published separately on that page too, including a "Base Report $10 /mo" and a "Pro Report $20 /mo", with an agency add on at "$90 /mo" that includes "Branded profile on the Semrush Agency Partners platform".

The free alternatives worth putting beside it

Google Keyword Planner is free and the demand data is Google's own, labelled an estimate in Google's own documentation: "View estimates on the number of searches a keyword gets each month". No daily report cap.

Ahrefs publishes a free Keyword Generator at ahrefs.com/keyword-generator, titled "Find 100+ Keyword Ideas in Seconds", read 21 October 2026.

Moz publishes free tools including a Keyword Explorer on a "1.25 billion+ keyword index" at moz.com/products, with its AI search and visibility product at "Starts at $45/month", read the same day.

Google Search Console is free, uncapped, and reports the queries your own site already receives impressions for, which is the only observed keyword data any of these routes can give you.

The ranking, on the stated criterion

On publishing an exact free allowance a buyer can plan around, the order on 21 October 2026 ran: Semrush first, and clearly so, because "10 reports per day" and "1 demo project" are countable numbers published on the pricing page rather than discovered after signing up. Google Keyword Planner first on a different axis, because it is free with no report cap and the data is Google's own. Search Console first on a third axis, observed data about your own site. Ahrefs fourth, because "100+ keyword ideas" is a published claim about one free tool. Moz fifth on free allowance disclosure and first on the lowest paid entry point in this comparison.

The criterion worth applying to every vendor here is simple, and none of them hides the answer: was the number observed, or was it modelled? Ahrefs says it outright on ahrefs.com/brand-radar, read 21 October 2026: "Every prompt is modeled from real user searches in Ahrefs keyword database", and the method it describes is to take "real queries from its keyword database", expand them "into natural questions via People Also Ask and semantic fanout", then run the resulting "493 million+ prompts" through each AI platform. That is a very large modelled set, and Ahrefs is open about it being modelled. Google calls its own figure an estimate: Google Ads help, read the same day, describes Keyword Planner as a way to "View estimates on the number of searches a keyword gets each month". Neither of those is a flaw. Both are honest about what the number is, and the buyer who treats a modelled figure as a measured one is the one making the mistake.

The checker Semrush put first in its own free list

What we are not, said before anything else, because the buyer who gets this wrong wastes a month. AI Knows Us does not sell a keyword tool, a rank tracker or a SERP API. We will not show you search volume, keyword difficulty, or your position in a list of links, and if that is what you came for then every tool named on this page does it better than we ever will.

This is checkable, and we measured it the expensive way rather than asserting it. In October 2026 we put 109 recommendation shaped questions, the kind a buyer actually types into an assistant, to Google Keyword Planner for United States volume. Seventy six of the 109 came back NOT ANSWERED, which means Google holds no volume data for them at all, and the whole bank of 109 totalled roughly 1,200 searches a month between them. Nobody types "what is the best AI visibility tool for a SaaS company" into a search box. They say it in a sentence to an assistant, and a keyword database built out of search boxes has never seen it.

What we do sell is the reading of a demand no keyword tool has ever seen. When a buyer asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude or Google AI Overviews who to buy from, in a sentence that never names you, we record whether your name comes out, who was named instead, and which page the engine cited. Then we run the content and placement work that changes it. A credit is one buyer question put to one app once. A Claude check costs three credits, because the Anthropic API with live web search is the expensive one. Most checks cost one.

Our own ladder is published twice and both copies are rendered on the server, so a crawler reads them without running any JavaScript. aiknowsus.com/llms.txt is plain text, and aiknowsus.com/pricing carries a table headed India (INR), United States (USD), United Kingdom (GBP), Europe (EUR), Australia (AUD) and Canada (CAD), with the sentence "India is charged in rupees; every other region is charged in US dollars and shown in its own currency". Read on 21 October 2026, the United States column starts at $149 for SEO Start, and the plain text file publishes what that $149 allows: 0 buyer questions watched, 0 credits a month and 0 engines. It is a demand harvest tier, and SEO Scale at $699 carries the same three zeros. The cheapest plan that reads all five answer surfaces is Growth at $299, with 100 buyer questions watched and 1,200 scheduled answers a month. Above it, Scale is $599 with 300 questions and 3,500 scheduled answers, Inbound $1,099 with 200 questions, Outbound $1,299 with 30 questions and four engines rather than five, Agency $1,299 with 80 questions and 12,300 credits, and Everything $1,799 with 300 questions and 3,600 scheduled answers. A top up of 1,000 credits is $49. Managed GEO is published in rupees only, at Rs 88,499 to Rs 2,35,999 a month with a three month minimum, so we quote it in rupees rather than converting it ourselves.

Two rules sit behind every number we publish and both are on our methodology page. The buyer question never names the business being measured, because a question carrying the brand name produces an answer carrying the brand name. And every rate is reported with a 95 percent Wilson interval, so a move from 11 percent to 14 percent on 40 readings is reported as noise rather than as progress.

Where a rival is ahead of us, here it is plainly. Ahrefs Brand Radar, read at ahrefs.com/brand-radar on 21 October 2026, names seven surfaces against our five: AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, ChatGPT and Claude. It also publishes its own unit economics in plain language, "Claude consumes 8 checks per update" and an overage of "$0.020/check", which is more disclosure than we publish. SE Ranking, read at seranking.com/pricing.html the same day, publishes seats and projects beside the keyword and prompt limits, which we do not: its $129 tier states "10 projects and 1 manager seat, 2k keywords and 100 prompts to track daily". Nightwatch, read at nightwatch.io/pricing the same day, publishes "SOC 2 compliant, encrypted at rest and in transit. SSO on Enterprise" and white label client reports. Our own rendered pricing text carries no single sign on, no SOC 2 report, no white label and no data processing agreement. Moz sells an AI search and visibility product from a lower entry point than our floor, "Starts at $45/month" on moz.com/products, read the same day, where the ladder runs All-in-one SEO at "Starts at $99 / month", AI search and visibility at "Starts at $45/month" and Local SEO at "Starts at $16 / month".

On this page's criterion we have no free tier to rank, and $149 buys zero buyer questions, so on free allowance we are last on this page. Where we put ourselves first is one narrow thing, checkable in a minute: of the vendors read on 21 October 2026, ours was the only one publishing the price, the buyer questions watched, the credits, the engine count and the check cadence for every single tier in a server rendered plain text file as well as in six currencies in a server rendered table.

For the competitor analysis half of the same platform, we keep a separate page on Semrush competitor analysis compared with the alternatives, and what its own page says. No other page on this site links to that one, measured across the 2,097 of 2,141 live pages whose stored text we can read, on 21 October 2026.

What buyers ask about the Semrush free keyword tool

How long does the free tier last? It is a plan rather than a trial, published at "$0 /mo", so the cap resets rather than expiring.

Can I export on the free plan? Export is the usual first wall in free tiers in this market. Plan to copy by hand or to upgrade.

Is the free data the same data? It comes from the same index. What changes is how much of it you can pull in a day and whether you can keep it.