Semrush Starter vs. Pro+: Which plan is right for you?

Choosing between Semrush Starter and Pro+ comes down to one question: How much SEO and AI visibility work does your team need to manage?

If you already know you want to track performance across traditional and AI search, Starter and Pro+ both cover the essentials. The decision comes down to the scale you need, and the two plans are built to suit different workloads.

This guide breaks down thothese differences to help you choose the plan that fits your team without underbuying or paying for capacity you won’t use.

Semrush Starter vs. Pro+: Main differences

Here’s a quick comparison of the two Semrush plans:

Semrush Starter covers the core SEO and AI visibility tools you need to manage one main website plus a few smaller or client properties. You can track keywords, study competitors, and monitor AI visibility from one place.

Pro+ gives you the same core capabilities, but with 3 times as many projects and tracked keywords. It also unlocks historical data, side-by-side domain comparisons, multi-targeting, and keyword cannibalization detection. For those reasons, it’s often chosen by agencies and growing teams. 

The simplest distinction is this: Starter fits a focused SEO + AI search operation. Pro+ supports teams ready to scale their brand visibility workflows to multiple markets or brands. 

Website and tracking limits

The comparison table above gives you the numbers. But choosing the right plan means working out what those numbers look like in practice.

Start with your active websites or client accounts. Think of it less as the number of websites you own and more as the number of separate SEO projects you’re actively running. 

Starter lets you create 5 SEO projects, while Pro+ increases that limit to 15. 

SEO Dashboard

Each SEO project gives you a unique SEO dashboard where you can configure tools such as Site Audit and Position Tracking and track high-level metrics in a single view.

For a freelancer managing their own site and 2 or 3 client sites, Starter should be more than enough to work comfortably. It would also fit an in-house team responsible for one primary site and a few secondary properties.

However, if you’re already managing more than 5 client accounts, brands, or sites, Starter will put a hard ceiling on your workload. Pro+ gives you room for 15 projects, so you can add clients and expand your business significantly without worrying about running out of capacity.

Daily SEO Position Tracking and AI visibility tracking

The next thing to consider is how many daily keywords and prompts you need to track in Position Tracking. 

Starter gives you 500 keywords and 50 AI prompts to track daily. Pro+ raises those limits to 1,500 keywords and 100 prompts. To give you an idea of what that looks like, here is an example of a Position Tracking campaign tracking 201 keywords:

The Position Tracking report charts daily visibility, estimated traffic, and competitors, allowing you to stay on top of the SEO progress of your campaigns. AI Visibility Tracking works similarly: each day, you receive an update of how often you have been cited and mentioned in AI answers for your tracked prompts.

Both Semrush Starter and Pro+ give you approximately 100 keywords and 10 prompts per site, when split evenly across each plan’s full project allowance. For small SEO programs, that’s typically enough to monitor a focused group of priority terms. The limit becomes more restrictive when you start tracking long-tail variations, multiple product categories, or separate keyword sets for multiple clients.

The same principle applies to AI prompts. Tracking more prompts isn’t always better. A focused set of approximately 25 prompts can cover branded, category, and competitor intent without filling your reporting with noise. Semrush’s guide to choosing AI search prompts to track can help you to build a lean, relevant prompt list to make the most of your allowance, whichever plan you choose.

Comparing the plans, Starter’s 50-prompt allowance is a strong fit for one focused AI visibility program. Pro+ gives you more room to divide your coverage across products, campaigns, or client accounts.

AI sentiment analysis with Brand Performance

To get a full picture of AI visibility, you also need to know how your brand is being described by AI. 

Both Semrush Starter and Pro+ also include Brand Performance, a separate AI visibility tracking tool that automatically tracks 200 prompts and reports on AI sentiment and share of voice. 

This data updates weekly, so it provides a near-live analysis of how your brand is described and positioned in AI answers, alongside the daily prompt tracking.

There’s one important constraint to consider: both Starter and Pro+ include Brand Performance for a single brand. Additional brands cost $99 each per month on both plans. This is the one area where Pro+ doesn’t scale beyond Starter — important to keep in mind if you’re comparing plans for an agency or multi-brand business.

Extra features you get with Pro+

In addition to higher limits for website and brand tracking, a subscription to Pro+ includes several tools that Starter doesn’t, including:

• The Compare Domains report
• SEO historical data
• Multi-targeting in Position Tracking
• The Keyword Cannibalization report

Compare Domains report

Compare Domains lets you benchmark up to 5 domains, subdomains, subfolders, or URLs. From a single view, you can analyze competitive metrics such as branded and non-branded traffic, paid and organic performance, keyword overlap, top keyword opportunities, and backlink trends.

This is especially useful for agencies pitching a prospective client.

By adding a prospect’s domain along with 2–4 real competitors, you get a detailed report that shows where the prospect is leading , and where it is falling behind.This gives you a clearer story to build your pitch, and show your prospect their wins and opportunities. 

In-house teams can use the same report to benchmark their site against market leaders, investigate a new competitor, or compare separate brand properties.

Starter does not include a limited version of the report. If regular side-by-side competitive benchmarking is part of your workflow, Pro+ is the clear choice.

Learn more about the available comparisons in the Compare Domains guide.

SEO historical data

In addition to live data, the Pro+ plan provides SEO historical data back to 2012, letting you look back at changes in rankings, traffic, and keyword performance.

While Starter shows you what’s happening now with your site’s SEO, Pro+ shows you how and why the site got there.

This is useful for agencies managing several client accounts or in-house SEOs who need to support their strategy with historical evidence. That context helps turn a report from a snapshot of the current moment into a more substantial and informative analysis. Instead of simply noting that something changed, you can explain the likely reasons to clients or senior leadership.

Historical data is especially valuable when evaluating a new prospect or competitor site whose internal analytics you can’t access. For example, if their estimated organic traffic dropped without explanation 6 months ago, SEO historical data can compare the timing with their keyword rankings or any Google algorithm updates at that time, and diagnose the cause.

Historical data can also be useful during onboarding a new client and understanding the past behavior of their site. You can study previous rankings, identify seasonal patterns, see where competitors gained ground, and understand which strategies produced movement before making your first recommendation.

SEO historical data is available in Domain Overview, Organic Rankings, Keyword Overview, and Keyword Gap.

Find out more with our guide to using Semrush historical data.

Multi-targeting in Position Tracking

For businesses serving a number of locations, multi-targeting enables you to track multiple targets per project and keep an eye on visibility in more areas. A target can be any location, device type, language, search engine, or AI platform where you track keywords or prompts.

For example, if you run a local business, it’s important to know how well it ranks in its home location. But if you serve customers in nearby towns, you’ll also need to monitor visibility in those areas.

Multi-targeting lets you add each area as a separate target within the same project, keeping everything in one place. Without multi-targeting, you would need to create a separate project for each target, and use up your available project slots faster.

With multi-targeting, you can track the same keywords across 4 unique locations, track locations down to the postal-code level and compare their visibility side by side, or track ChatGPT, AI Mode, and Google search within a single project.

Multi-targeting can be useful even for businesses that don’t operate multiple physical locations. It allows you to use device types as targets, so you can compare visibility for desktop and mobile results.

Find out more with our multi-targeting guide. 

Keyword Cannibalization report

Keyword cannibalization happens when multiple pages on your site target the same keyword. Instead of one strong page earning visibility, your rankings may shift between several URLs.

That can split your site’s authority and make it harder for any one page to rank consistently.

TheKeyword Cannibalization report within the Position Tracking tool identifies these pages so you can address the issue and improve your visibility.

When auditing a new client site or project, a Keyword Cannibalization report can be a source of quick wins, helping you to optimize your site and rank better for its target keywords. 

The report presents affected pages and keywords so you see exactly which URLs are competing across multiple keywords. 

You can then prioritize issues with the most traffic potential and decide whether to consolidate pages, adjust their targeting, or strengthen the page you want to rank.

Starter doesn’t include the Keyword Cannibalization report. You can still investigate competing pages manually, but Pro+ surfaces the problem directly, making it easy to fold into your SEO workflow. 

Which should you choose: Starter or Pro+?

When choosing which Semrush plan is the right one for your business, your current workload should drive the decision. Starter gives a focused team plenty of power without unnecessary capacity. Pro+ gives a busier operation the scale and deeper analysis required to handle more work from the same place.

Choose Starter if:

• You want core SEO and AI visibility capabilities without paying for extra capacity you won’t use
• You focus on 5 or fewer sites or markets
• You don’t need to track more than 500 target keywords
• You’re just getting started with AI visibility and only need to track 50 prompts or fewer per day
• You don’t currently need historical data, side-by-side domain comparisons, multi-targeting, or a dedicated cannibalization report

Choose Pro+ if:

• You manage SEO and AI visibility for more than 5 sites, clients, or markets
• You need to track broad keyword portfolios across multiple properties
• You regularly pitch new business and need fast competitive benchmarks
• You want to research past SEO performance of your sites, clients or competitors
• You operate across multiple locations or need to compare devices or search engines
• Keyword cannibalization is part of your SEO workflow

Review the Semrush pricing options and choose the plan that fits the work already in front of you.

Ready to test out a Semrush plan?