Is Semrush free? What the free plan and the 7-day trial really give you

Is Semrush free?

Yes. Semrush has a free plan that costs nothing and does not expire: its pricing page lists Free at $0 a month, “for trying out the platform”, with no credit card required. What it is not is a free version of the paid product. The free plan is a set of small daily and monthly allowances designed to show you what Semrush can do, so you can decide whether to pay.

Two different things are both called “free” on Semrush's site, and mixing them up causes most of the confusion:

• The Free plan. An ordinary Semrush account with no subscription. No card, no time limit, small allowances.
• The free trial. Seven days of a paid plan's features, which, according to Semrush, needs card details and turns into a paid subscription unless you cancel.

If you only want to look at Semrush's numbers for a few domains or keywords, the Free plan is enough. If you want to work in it daily, neither option lasts: the free plan is too small and the trial ends after a week.

What can you do with a free Semrush account?

A free Semrush account lets you run about 10 research reports a day, keep 1 project, track 10 keywords on 1 website and audit up to 100 pages a month. Semrush describes the allowance in two places. Its subscriptions knowledge base article says the Free plan includes “1 demo project, 10 reports per day across all vital tools, and a limited set of AI Visibility features”. Its own guide, What can you do with a free Semrush account? (published 10 December 2025), breaks that down tool by tool.

In practice, 10 reports go quickly. Looking up one keyword in the Keyword Magic Tool and then opening one of its ideas in Keyword Overview is already two searches. A single competitor check, Domain Overview plus its top keywords plus its backlinks, can use three or four. The free plan suits a quick look at a handful of competitors or keywords; it does not suit building a keyword list of a few hundred terms.

The free Position Tracking allowance is the most useful part for a site owner. Ten keywords is small, but it checks rankings in Semrush's own results data, so it works for keywords you do not rank for yet and for a competitor's site. Semrush's knowledge base says Position Tracking keeps daily results for 60 days and weekly data points after that. Our free rank trackers comparison puts that 10-keyword allowance next to every other genuinely free tracker.

How does the Semrush free trial work?

Semrush's free trial gives 7 days of a paid plan's features; Semrush says you need to enter card details to start it, and the first payment is taken automatically when the trial ends unless you cancel first. The pricing page's own line is “Try Semrush free for seven days. Cancel anytime.” The details are spread over several Semrush pages:

• Length. The subscriptions article says most toolkits include a 7-day trial (its Agency Partners add-on lists 14 days).
• Card. Semrush's free-account guide says that to start the 7-day trial “you'll need to enter credit card details”. The free plan itself needs no card.
• Once per toolkit. Each toolkit trial can be activated once per account.
• Exports. The subscriptions article says exporting data is disabled during trials, even if the paid plan includes exports. A September 2026 Semrush blog post about the trial suggests exporting your findings before it ends, so the two pages disagree. Plan for no exports and check inside your account.
• Cancelling. Semrush's cancellation article says you cancel a trial through its Cancellation Form, then click a confirmation link sent by email that is valid for 24 hours. If you do not confirm, the request is not processed and billing continues. The trial converts to a paid subscription if it is not cancelled before it ends.
• Refunds. Semrush's refund policy (last updated 20 August 2025) offers a one-time 7-day money-back guarantee only on initial subscriptions of twelve months or more, and says refunds are not available for month-to-month subscriptions.

The practical advice is simple: start the trial only when you have a week to use it, write down what you want to answer before you start, and cancel a day or two early so the email confirmation does not catch you out.

What do you lose without a paid Semrush plan?

Without a subscription you lose volume and history: the free plan caps research at about 10 reports a day, tracks 10 keywords instead of hundreds, crawls 100 pages a month, and leaves out historical data and multi-location tracking. Semrush's free-account guide marks AI prompt tracking, multi-location and device tracking, and SEO historical data as not included on the free plan.

For scale, Semrush's cheapest SEO plan on 31 October 2026 was listed at $139 a month ($117.33 a month billed annually), covering 5 websites and 500 keywords tracked daily, according to its pricing page. That is the jump from free: 1 website to 5, and 10 tracked keywords to 500. Our Semrush pricing guide covers every paid plan, what each one limits and the add-ons you pay for on top.

If you had a trial or a paid plan and cancel, Semrush says you keep a free-level account. Website Monitoring projects above the free limit are locked, their data is kept for a 30-day grace period, and after 30 days without a paid SEO Toolkit it is deleted, except for the oldest project. Export anything you want to keep before you cancel.

What you do not lose is your own site's data. Semrush's numbers about your site are estimates built from its own databases. The measured figures, the clicks and impressions Google and Bing actually recorded, live in Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and those are free.

Which free tools cover the same jobs as Semrush?

For work on your own website, Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Keyword Planner cover most of what people use Semrush's free plan for, at no cost; what none of them give you is research into other people's websites. The table sets out what each free option offers.

Can Google Search Console replace Semrush for your own site?

For your own site's rankings and traffic from Google, yes: Search Console is free and reports the clicks, impressions and average position Google measured for the queries you appeared for, apart from rare queries it hides for privacy. Google calls it a free service, and it has kept 16 months of performance data since 2018. It also covers indexing problems, sitemaps, Core Web Vitals and links to your site.

Where Semrush's free plan shows an estimate of your rankings for 10 tracked keywords, Search Console shows Google's own figures for the queries that brought impressions. Its limits are that it only covers verified sites you own, it reports an average position rather than a single daily check, and it keeps no history beyond 16 months. Our guide to Search Console average position explains how to read that number, and backlinks in Search Console covers its links report.

What does Bing Webmaster Tools add?

Bing Webmaster Tools adds a second search engine's measured data, plus two things Search Console lacks: a keyword research tool with Bing search volumes and a backlinks report that also covers competitors. Microsoft's June 2025 overview lists Search Performance with up to 16 months of data, URL Inspection, Site Explorer, backlinks, keyword research and a site scan. You can import your sites from Search Console in a few clicks; our Bing Webmaster Tools guide walks through setup. Bing's audience is smaller than Google's, so use its volumes to compare keywords with each other, not as Google figures.

Is Google Keyword Planner a free substitute for Semrush keyword research?

For search volume, mostly yes: Keyword Planner is free inside Google Ads and gives Google's own volume estimates, but accounts with little ad spend may see ranges such as 1K–10K instead of single numbers. Google said so in a 2016 notice reported by Search Engine Roundtable, and has never published the spend that unlocks single figures. Google's Keyword Planner help says you need to enter billing information to use its basic features, though you do not have to run ads. It has no organic keyword difficulty score; its Competition column measures advertisers. Our guide to using Keyword Planner free without running ads covers the setup step by step.

What does MrKeyword's Free plan include?

MrKeyword's Free plan covers 1 website with 25 tracked keywords, a 100-page site audit and 10 keyword lookups a month, built on your own Search Console and Bing data; it needs no card and does not expire. It is the layer we built on top of the free Google and Bing tools, for owners who want a daily history and alerts without reading raw reports.

• Rank tracking. The free rank tracker records the average positions Search Console and Bing report for your verified site each day, so you get a history instead of a snapshot. It does not check live search results, and never scrapes Google.
• Keyword research. The free keyword research tool asks the official Google Ads Keyword Planner API for each search, so you see Google's figure, or its range, without opening a Google Ads account. The Free plan includes 10 lookups a month.
• Site audit. The free site audit crawls up to 100 pages a month with MrKeyword's own crawler and writes out the fix for each issue.
• Other sites, roughly. The website traffic checker estimates any site's organic traffic and shows the range and model, and the free backlink checker lists referring domains from MrKeyword's own crawl and web graph.

When one site outgrows the free limits, Starter costs $10 a month for 1 website, 500 tracked keywords, 2,000 audit pages and 200 keyword lookups a month; every plan is on the pricing page. If you are weighing a full move away from Semrush, our Semrush alternative page sets out what you give up.

What MrKeyword does not do: it has no web-wide keyword and ranking database like Semrush's, so it cannot show every keyword a competitor ranks for; it does not track rankings for sites you have not verified; it has no advertising, social media or local listing tools; its traffic estimates are rough ranges, not measurements; and its backlink index is far smaller than Semrush's.

Should you use Semrush Free or a free alternative?

Use Semrush Free for an occasional look at a competitor or a keyword you do not rank for, and use Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and a free tracker for the weekly work on your own site. A simple way to decide:

1. You want to know how your own site is doing

   Start with Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. They are measured, free and uncapped for your verified sites. Add a free tracker if you want a daily history of chosen keywords.

2. You want to size up a competitor

   Semrush Free gives about 10 reports a day from its own databases, which is enough to look at a few domains. Free tools built on your own data cannot see a competitor's keywords.

3. You need search volume for new topics

   Keyword Planner is free with a Google Ads account. A tool that reads the Keyword Planner API gives the same figures without the Ads setup.

4. You need competitor research every day

   Then no free plan will do, and a paid suite is the honest answer. Use the 7-day trial with a list of questions ready, and compare it with the cheaper plans in our affordable SEO tools roundup before you commit.

Questions and answers