Semrush One Explained: Starter vs Pro+ vs Advanced

What Semrush One is, and what it leaves out

Semrush One is the name Semrush gives the plans that combine its SEO Toolkit with its AI Visibility Toolkit: Starter, Pro+ and Advanced ^[1]. In one subscription and one interface, it covers how you rank on search engines and how often AI chat platforms mention you. Semrush pitches it at SEO and content marketers, at brands tracking visibility beyond Google, and at agencies that report on both. If you already pay for Semrush, existing data and projects carry over when you upgrade. This guide compares the three plans with each other and with the SEO-only plan, using the pricing page read from the US and the help center on 12 October 2026. The arithmetic is ours.

Two things are easy to get wrong. First, the US$139 SEO plan is not Semrush One. It includes AI visibility reports and sentiment monitoring, but no prompt tracking, no AI-ready Site Audit and no per-domain AI brand performance. Second, Semrush One does not include the Local, Content or Social toolkits. Those, along with Advertising, AI PR and Traffic & Market, still cost extra, and extra users start at US$45 a month. If your plan depends on any of them, price them in before you compare.

The three plans and what they cost

Annual billing saves 17% on all three plans ^[2], but the year is charged at once, and add-ons bought later are prorated to the same renewal date. That trade matters more than the discount, because monthly plans cannot be refunded ^[3]. The only refund window is 7 days, and it covers only a first annual purchase. So a buyer who is unsure has two options: pay monthly with no way back, or pay for the year with a week to change their mind.

The SEO plan sits underneath all of this. It shares Starter's 5 sites and 500 keywords and costs US$117.33 a month on annual billing, against US$165.17 for Starter. For a business that only cares about Google rankings, it is the cheaper route. What Starter adds on top is AI tracking, and the next section prices each step up the ladder. For the full plan-by-plan picture, see our Semrush pricing guide.

Climbing the ladder, one plan at a time

SEO to Starter: paying for AI tracking

For US$60 more a month, Starter adds 50 tracked prompts a day, 1 domain for AI brand performance, 300 AI visibility reports a day, an AI-ready Site Audit, fuller keyword and competitor tools, and MCP access. On annual billing the gap is US$47.84 a month, or US$574.08 more than SEO over a year. That is the price of AI prompt tracking and MCP access at the smallest scale. Semrush's own FAQ recommends Starter or Pro+ to agencies with numerous clients, but Starter fits a freelancer or a business with up to 5 sites best.

Starter to Pro+: history and locations

Pro+ triples the sites to 15 and the keywords to 1,500, doubles prompts to 100, and adds historical SEO data, content optimization, keyword cannibalization analysis and multi-location and device tracking. It costs US$100 more a month, or US$83 a month more on annual billing. In practice, historical data lets you compare past rankings, cannibalization analysis catches pages competing for the same keyword, and multi-location tracking follows rankings city by city. These matter most to agencies and multi-site businesses. Smaller sites can skip them.

Pro+ to Advanced: share of voice and the API

Advanced raises the limits to 40 sites, 5,000 keywords and 200 prompts, and adds SEO Share of Voice and API data integration. It costs US$250 more a month, or US$207.50 more on annual billing. Share of Voice measures your visibility against competitors across tracked keywords, and API integration lets you pull data into your own systems. Only Advanced can add the Standard API, and the API units are bought separately. It is the plan for teams that report Share of Voice to leadership.

The old names behind the plans

Starter inherits the limits of the legacy Pro SEO Toolkit, Pro+ those of Guru, including the SEO Writing Assistant and Topic Research, and Advanced those of Business, including 1 million crawled pages a month and 50,000 results per report. The help center still lists Pro, Guru and Business at US$139.95, US$249.95 and US$499.95. If you see those prices, you are reading a legacy page. Existing subscribers on legacy plans cancel them by choosing SEO Toolkit in the cancellation form.

What a prompt and a keyword really cost

Counting the whole plan price against prompts alone, Starter's 50 prompts cost about US$3.30 each a month on annual billing, Pro+'s 100 about US$2.48 and Advanced's 200 about US$2.28. On month-to-month billing the figures rise to about US$3.98, US$2.99 and US$2.75. The plans include far more than prompts, so this is only a rough guide. It is still useful for a brand whose main question is how AI assistants describe it, because that brand will use the prompt quota every day and the keyword tools only occasionally.

Keywords follow the same pattern. On annual billing, Starter costs about 33 cents per tracked keyword a month, Pro+ about 17 cents and Advanced about 9 cents, while Starter's 500 keywords cost about 40 cents each month-to-month. Bigger plans are cheaper per unit, as usual. The other benchmark is the AI Visibility Toolkit on its own, at US$99 a month per domain on annual billing, with 25 tracked prompts and 300 reports a day. If you need AI monitoring without SEO tools, it costs less than Starter. If you need both, Starter is the better deal. It costs US$66.17 more a month and adds the full SEO toolkit for 5 sites and 500 keywords.

What the AI reports track, and how

Which AI platforms each report covers

Coverage differs by report, which is the first thing to check. AI Analysis reports cover Google AI Overviews, AI Mode and ChatGPT. Brand Performance covers AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. Prompt Tracking covers AI Overviews, AI Mode and ChatGPT, so Gemini and Perplexity appear in Brand Performance but not in prompt tracking, according to the help center. Microsoft Copilot, Grok, Claude and DeepSeek appear only in the Enterprise offer. If one assistant matters most to your audience, find the report that covers it. Then choose.

Where the data comes from, and how fresh it is

Semrush says its prompt database is captured "from real requests and not via any APIs of LLMs", covers 117 regional databases and updates daily on a rolling basis. It also uses AI search clickstream data and Google's keyword data for AI Overviews to build its topics. Freshness differs by report. Semrush databases update daily, weekly or monthly depending on the report, Brand Performance updates weekly, and Position Tracking updates arrive within 24 to 48 hours. Keep that in mind when numbers in two reports disagree. Semrush published an expanded AI Visibility Index in June 2026, analyzing 126 million US AI search prompts from January to April 2026, and the same prompt data feeds the toolkit's reports.

How the AI Visibility Score works

The score runs from 0 to 100 and combines topic coverage with mention consistency: how many topics include your brand, and how often within them. A brand that dominates fewer topics can outscore one mentioned thinly across many. The score is also relative to other domains, so it moves when competitors gain or lose mentions, not only when you change something. Do not read a dip as your own mistake. Check what competitors did before you rewrite anything.

The reports you will actually open

Visibility Overview and Brand Performance

The Visibility Overview is the first report to open. It shows an AI Visibility Score, mentions, citations, cited pages and estimated monthly audience, broken down by AI model and country, with trend lenses and past months for history. Brand Performance goes further: it answers how AI describes you, not just whether it mentions you, tracking Share of Voice, sentiment, narrative drivers and the questions people ask AI about your market. Each analysis is tied to one domain, location and language. Changing a tracked domain starts a 14-day cooldown for that slot ^[4], and extra domain slots cost US$99 each. Historical data is kept if you return to a domain, with a gap for the untracked period.

Prompt Research and Competitor Research

Prompt Research works like keyword research for AI. You enter a topic and see related topics, prompts, estimated AI volume, intent, the brands mentioned and the source domains AI platforms cite, with intent split into informational, navigational, commercial, transactional and task intent. Writers planning content will like it. Competitor Research compares your brand with up to four competitors and sorts topics into strong, weak and missing, with history building to six months. Missing topics are where competitors are cited and you are not. Semrush pitches this kind of analysis to agencies as the way to win new clients.

Rankings and reporting with AI

Tracking on Google and AI Overviews works on every plan, while tracking on AI platforms such as ChatGPT and AI Mode needs Semrush One or the AI Visibility Toolkit. On any plan, Organic Rankings shows which of a domain's keywords trigger AI Overviews and whether the domain is cited, which shows how much AI summaries affect an existing SEO portfolio. For clients who ask whether they appear in AI answers, My Reports adds a widget that tracks AI referral traffic and conversions through Google Analytics on any paid plan. Two related tools sit outside One: the AI Traffic dashboard belongs to Traffic & Market, and the Content Toolkit is a separate subscription at US$60 a month.

MCP, the API and team seats

Starter and Pro+ include 50,000 MCP API units that refresh at renewal, while Advanced users need a separately bought API unit package for MCP use. Through MCP, assistants such as ChatGPT and Claude can query Semrush data read-only. Each query consumes units, so Semrush advises asking for a set number of results, a database and filters to save them. You can check the balance under Subscription Info. Plan for it. An assistant that pulls broad, unfiltered reports will burn through units faster than one asked a narrow question.

Teams need a little planning too. View-only access to folders is free, so people who only read reports need no seat. Extra users start at US$45 a month, and AI Visibility limits cannot be shared through the team pool; they must be assigned to users individually. Decide who owns AI tracking before you add colleagues. A colleague who sets up Brand Performance on the wrong domain and then switches it locks that slot for 14 days, and the team waits two weeks for the analysis it actually needed.

Trial, billing and upgrades

A trial is the only way to see your own data in the AI reports before paying. Semrush One has a 7-day trial, and its page says the offer is "available to new users only". Exports are disabled during trials, and trials convert to paid plans unless canceled. The card is checked with a small authorization that Semrush says is refunded, and past customers are refused a free SEO trial. In other words, a lapsed customer cannot test One for free.

Upgrading is simpler than leaving. Paid customers can upgrade from the pricing page, existing data and projects appear in the new interface, and upgrades are prorated against the unused part of the current plan. Remove unwanted add-ons first, because active add-ons carry over and are charged on the new plan. Downgrades, by contrast, need support. That asymmetry is the strongest argument for starting on the smallest plan that covers your sites.

Which plan fits which buyer

Three examples make the ladder concrete. A bakery with one site and 200 keywords that wants to see AI mentions belongs on Starter. A 10-client agency tracking cities belongs on Pro+, the plan Semrush's own FAQ steers growing agencies toward, and it also suits a single brand watching 100 AI prompts in several countries, since multi-location tracking starts there. A retailer with 30 country sites feeding a data warehouse needs Advanced plus an API package. More broadly, Pro+ fits teams tracking 6 to 15 sites, and Advanced fits organizations with 16 to 40 sites or a need for Share of Voice and the API.

Some buyers should skip One. If you do not need AI prompt tracking, the SEO plan costs US$60 less a month. If you only need AI tracking, the AI Visibility Toolkit costs less. At the other end, Enterprise AIO is a different product for large teams managing many markets or brands. Semrush positions One as the affordable option, while Enterprise AIO offers unlimited prompt tracking across nine AI platforms, forecasting, ROI attribution and multi-million-page crawling, at custom prices it does not publish.

Before you choose

Run the free checks first. Domain Overview shows mentions, citations and an AI visibility score for any domain on the free plan, so run it on your own site and two competitors before deciding whether you need One. Site Audit also checks, on every plan, whether your site blocks AI crawlers such as ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot. If it does, its pages cannot appear in AI answers, whatever its rankings. That check costs nothing on the free plan, which audits 100 pages. Then write your numbers down before you open the pricing page:

• Count your sites, keywords and the prompts you really need tracked every day.
• Price any extra users, and decide who owns AI tracking.
• Decide on annual or monthly, knowing the 7-day refund covers only a first annual purchase.
• Confirm the Brand Performance domain is final, because changing it locks the slot for 14 days.
• List any toolkit you need outside One, such as Local, Content or Social.

The bottom line

Semrush One is good value if you use both SEO and AI tracking, and poor value if you only need one of them. Start with the free AI checks, then buy the smallest plan whose site count and prompt quota cover your real questions, because upgrades are prorated while downgrades need support. Starter suits a single business, Pro+ an agency, and Advanced a large team that needs the API. Mind the refund rule before you pay: monthly plans have none at all.