Semrush and Ahrefs are the two most widely used paid SEO suites for keyword research, competitor analysis, backlinks, technical audits and rank tracking: Semrush is a marketing platform that also covers ads, local search and content, while Ahrefs is built around its own crawler and its own link index. Both price in US dollars: on 10 October 2026 Semrush's SEO plan cost $139 a month and Ahrefs Lite $129, about £105 and £98 at the Bank of England rate of 8 October 2026, before VAT.
The short answer: Semrush if you need rankings updated every day and tools beyond SEO, Ahrefs if you work on links and want to see new pages on the web first. We measured the second half of that sentence ourselves.
If you search "semrush vs ahrefs" on Google UK from a phone, you won't find a single result that gives you the price in pounds. On 10 October 2026 the first page had blogs and review sites, two Reddit threads, a Quora discussion and YouTube videos, and the AI Overview drew on Ahrefs' own comparison page. Every price in the snippets was in dollars.
So what? The American comparisons are well done.
Some are. But they have two limits:
- almost all of them repeat the same line, "Ahrefs has the freshest backlinks", taken from the vendors' pages and never checked;
- they quote dollar prices without VAT, and often old ones: the AI Overview put Semrush's entry plan at "$117-$165" and Ahrefs' at "$108-$129", mixing plans and years.
Then there's a detail SEOmator found: in the US top 10 for this search, 3 pages out of 9 earn a commission on the tool they declare the winner (scan of 13 July 2026, US sample).
We use the two tools for different jobs. The ranking table for Macropix, which moved from position 88 to 2 for the Italian keyword "monitor pubblicitario" (advertising monitor), is a Semrush export. When we need to understand who links to a site, we open Ahrefs.
And to decide which of the two sees the web better?
We opened our server logs. Forty days of visits from AhrefsBot and SemrushBot on visilay.com, with 137 new articles published in between.
In this guide you'll find:
- the figures the vendors declare, taken from their own pages;
- the log test: how many hours each crawler needs to find a new page;
- the prices in pounds and what a rank check costs on each plan;
- which one to choose, based on the work you do every week.
Let's start.
Semrush vs Ahrefs: the figures side by side (as the vendors declare them)
Semrush was founded in 2008, is based in Boston and since 28 April 2026 has been owned by Adobe; Ahrefs is based in Singapore and is independent. These are the figures the two companies publish, checked on 10 October 2026.
| Figure | Semrush | Ahrefs |
|---|---|---|
| Keywords in the database | 28.8 billion | 29 billion (filtered) |
| Keywords in the UK | 1.3 billion (April 2022 figure) | 1.4 billion |
| Backlinks | 43 trillion | 35 trillion records |
| Crawler | about 10 billion pages a day | 5 million pages a minute |
| Declared backlink update | interface every 15 minutes, new links in about 40 minutes | every 15-30 minutes |
| Full entry plan | SEO, $139 a month | Lite, $129 a month |
| Tracked keywords on the entry plan | 500, updated daily | 750, updated weekly |
| Extra user | from $45 a month | from $40 a month |
On paper the two databases are level: on the UK the gap is 100 million keywords in Ahrefs' favour, with Semrush's figure dating from 2022. On backlinks Semrush declares more, Ahrefs declares it's faster.
And on speed both promise minutes. It's the only row in the table you can check from outside, so we checked it.
The test: how many hours the two crawlers take to find a new page (137 Italian articles)
A crawler is the program a tool uses to visit pages on the web and read their links: a new backlink only shows up in the tool after its crawler has visited the page that contains it. That's why crawler speed puts a limit on how fresh the link data can be, whatever the interface says.
The method:
- we read the visilay.com access logs from 31 August to 9 October 2026;
- we kept only visits from AhrefsBot and SemrushBot coming from IP addresses that, on a reverse DNS check, really belong to ahrefs.net, ahrefs.com or semrush.com: 1,402 addresses, all verified;
- we took the 137 Italian-language articles published between 1 September and 2 October and never requested by anyone before publication, so each one had at least seven days of observation;
- for each one we measured the hours between publication and each crawler's first visit.
The site's robots.txt doesn't restrict either bot, and the site doesn't use IndexNow, the protocol for telling search engines about a new page. We measured Googlebot and Bingbot as a reference.
| Crawler | Articles visited | Within 24 hours | Within 72 hours | Median time to first visit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AhrefsBot | 137 of 137 | 117 | 137 | 17.5 hours |
| SemrushBot | 137 of 137 | 17 | 124 | 50.1 hours |
| Googlebot | 127 of 137 | 84 | 104 | 14.8 hours |
| Bingbot | 133 of 137 | 123 | 125 | 6.2 hours |
AhrefsBot saw 85% of the articles within 24 hours, SemrushBot 12%. After three days Ahrefs had seen them all, Semrush 124 of 137. After a week they were level.
AhrefsBot's median, 17.5 hours, is close to Googlebot's. SemrushBot's is almost three times longer.
So where does the difference come from?
The logs say so fairly clearly. In forty days AhrefsBot read the site's sitemaps 168 times, SemrushBot 14. Ahrefs probably discovers new pages from the list the site publishes, and Semrush mostly by following links. AhrefsBot also downloaded 822 stylesheets, scripts and images, a sign that it renders pages the way a browser does; SemrushBot downloaded none.
It isn't all one way, though. SemrushBot comes back to the same pages more often: 2,291 requests across 884 different URLs, against AhrefsBot's 2,161 across 1,637. Ahrefs covers more pages, Semrush rereads them more often.
Two limits of the test, stated plainly. It's a single site, with a blog that publishes every day and an up-to-date sitemap, and the articles are in Italian: on a UK site without a sitemap, Ahrefs' lead might shrink. And it measures when the crawler arrives, not when the link appears in the tool's interface. But the second step can't happen before the first.
Promises in minutes and what happens on a small site (40 minutes against 50 hours)
The Semrush knowledge base says new backlinks are added to the database within an hour of being published and that on average the tool reports a recently appeared link in around 40 minutes. Ahrefs' Big Data page talks about an index refreshed every 15-30 minutes.
On our site, SemrushBot took a median of 50 hours to reach a new article and AhrefsBot 17. The two things don't contradict each other: the vendors' averages apply to their whole index, where the large sites that crawlers visit constantly carry the most weight. An average business site isn't a large site.
In the comparisons on the first page, the freshness figures are even further apart:
| What it says | Source | Market |
|---|---|---|
| Ahrefs updates backlinks every 15 minutes, Semrush every 2-4 weeks | OneLittleWeb, May 2026 | United States |
| Semrush collects new backlinks every day | Astute Copyblogging, July 2026 | United States |
| Semrush reports a new link in about 40 minutes | Semrush knowledge base | vendor |
| AhrefsBot is the most active SEO crawler on Cloudflare Radar | Ahrefs' comparison page | vendor |
| AhrefsBot saw 85% of new pages within 24 hours, SemrushBot 12% | Visilay test, October 2026 | Italy, one site |
OneLittleWeb's "2-4 weeks" doesn't fit our logs: no article waited more than seven days for SemrushBot. The "15 minutes" doesn't hold on a small site. The working truth is somewhere in between, and it changes from site to site.
Who really cares about this difference?
Anyone doing link building. If you get a link from a trade site and want to check it the next day, or want to see your competitors' new links as they get them, a day's lead on the crawler is worth more than a few billion archived backlinks. How to read a link report without being fooled by round numbers is in our guide to checking backlinks; the work of earning them is on the page about link building, and the dedicated tools are in our roundup of off-page SEO tools.
Prices in pounds: both bill in dollars (and add 20% VAT if you're not registered)
On 10 October 2026 Semrush and Ahrefs both set their prices only in US dollars, so what a UK buyer pays depends on the exchange rate. Ahrefs lets you pay in pounds, but at an exchange rate it sets itself and updates from time to time; Semrush's price list is in dollars only. The table converts at the Bank of England rate.
| Plan | Monthly in dollars | In pounds | Billed annually (per month) | With 20% VAT (monthly) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Semrush SEO | $139 | £105.10 | $117.33 (£88.71) | £126.12 |
| Semrush Starter (with AI) | $199 | £150.46 | $165.17 (£124.88) | £180.55 |
| Semrush Pro+ | $299 | £226.07 | $248.17 (£187.64) | £271.28 |
| Semrush Advanced | $549 | £415.09 | $455.67 (£344.53) | £498.11 |
| Ahrefs Lite | $129 | £97.54 | $107.50 (£81.28) | £117.04 |
| Ahrefs Standard | $249 | £188.27 | $207.50 (£156.89) | £225.92 |
| Ahrefs Advanced | $449 | £339.48 | $374.17 (£282.90) | £407.38 |
On the entry plan the gap between the two is $10 a month, about £7.56. Billed annually it widens slightly: $117.33 against $107.50, about £7.43 a month in Ahrefs' favour.
Ahrefs also sells a Starter plan at $29 a month, with reduced features. Semrush has a free plan with one demo project and 10 reports a day.
Everything else, meaning VAT rules, refunds, Ahrefs' credits and the toolkits Semrush sells separately, is set out in our guides to Semrush pricing and Ahrefs pricing, with the annual cost for five typical set-ups.
Rank tracking: daily or weekly (the cost of 1,000 checks)
Rank tracking is the regular check of where a site appears on Google for a fixed list of keywords. Here the two tools don't do the same thing: Semrush updates tracked keywords every day on every plan, Ahrefs every week on every plan, as the Ahrefs help centre confirms in an article updated on 3 September 2026.
So counting only the keywords included in the plan is misleading. The right sum is how many rank checks you buy each month.
| Plan | Monthly price | Keywords | Frequency | Checks a month | Cost per 1,000 checks |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Semrush SEO | £105.10 | 500 | daily | 15,208 | £6.91 |
| Semrush Pro+ | £226.07 | 1,500 | daily | 45,625 | £4.95 |
| Semrush Advanced | £415.09 | 5,000 | daily | 152,083 | £2.73 |
| Ahrefs Lite | £97.54 | 750 | weekly | 3,250 | £30.01 |
| Ahrefs Standard | £188.27 | 2,000 | weekly | 8,667 | £21.72 |
| Ahrefs Advanced | £339.48 | 5,000 | weekly | 21,667 | £15.67 |
A rank check costs 4 to 6 times more on Ahrefs than on Semrush. Ahrefs includes more keywords per plan, but looks at them one day in seven.
But do you really need daily data?
It depends on what it costs to spot a drop late. For "ledwall" (LED wall), 4,400 searches a month in Italy, Macropix was first on Google Italy in 2025: if it slips to page two on a Monday, a weekly update can show it up to six days later, and in the meantime the quote requests go to competitors. For a blog publishing guides, on the other hand, a week is plenty.
Some US reviews, such as Style Factory, write that on Ahrefs daily rank tracking means paying for a $200-a-month "Project Boost" add-on. On the price list of 10 October 2026, Project Boost Max does cost $200 a month per project, but the features listed are site audit, IndexNow and AI tools: daily rank tracking isn't among them, so we leave it out of the sum.
There's also an option that costs nothing. Search Console shows average positions day by day, a few days late, along with real impressions and clicks. That's the data we use to report growth for Sunscape, an Italian solar land company: from 329 impressions in March to 5,809 in August 2026. What a position really measures is explained in our guide to keyword rankings, and the dedicated tools are in our roundup on rank tracking.
A drop spotted six days late costs enquiries
You've just seen how much it matters to know today, not next week, that a keyword bringing in enquiries has slipped to page two. We'll choose with you the keywords to track every day and the ones where weekly is enough, using your site's Search Console data.
Book a strategy consultationHow much weight Semrush and Ahrefs carry in the UK (27,100 searches against 18,100)
In the UK "semrush" gets 27,100 searches a month, "ahrefs" 18,100 (average for September 2025 - August 2026, Google Ads data via DataForSEO). But the more telling figure is another one: "ahrefs backlink checker" gets 1,300 searches a month, "semrush backlink checker" 90. UK searchers associate Ahrefs with links, and our test bears them out.
The imbalance shows on Google too, the other way round. On 10 October 2026, according to DataForSEO Labs, semrush.com ranked on Google UK for 12,103 English-language searches, 5,045 of them on page one; ahrefs.com for 5,022, with 1,619 on page one. Both have their help centre and blog in English, so in the UK the language advantage Semrush has in other markets disappears.
So what changes for the buyer?
Less than the brand numbers suggest. Semrush is searched for more and ranks for more, Ahrefs is the name people pair with backlinks: neither fact tells you which one fits your work. If you only work on Google UK, it's worth putting the lighter suites into the comparison as well, as we do in our guides to Semrush alternatives and Ahrefs alternatives.
Which one to choose (starting from what you check every week)
The choice comes from your recurring work, not from the feature list.
| If your work is mainly | Choice | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Tracking the rankings of a site that sells | Semrush | daily updates, £6.91 per 1,000 checks |
| Link building and checking competitors' links | Ahrefs | 85% of new pages seen within 24 hours in our test |
| A team of two or three people | Ahrefs | extra user from $40 against $45 |
| SEO plus ads, local and content | Semrush | dedicated toolkits on the same platform |
| Technical audit of a large site | Ahrefs | 500,000 crawl credits a month from Standard |
| One site, minimal budget | neither | Search Console, Ahrefs Free and Semrush's free plan |
The comparison with the third name that often comes into the decision is in Semrush vs Moz and Ahrefs vs Moz; the full ranking is in the best SEO tools. If you'd rather not buy the tools at all, access to the suites and reading the data are included in our SEO service.
Frequently asked questions
It depends on the work. Semrush updates tracked keywords every day and adds tools for ads, local search and content to SEO. Ahrefs updates rankings every week, but in our test on the visilay.com logs it saw 85% of new articles within 24 hours, against 12% for Semrush. For rank tracking Semrush is the better buy, for link building Ahrefs.
It depends on the plan. Both price in US dollars: on 10 October 2026 Semrush's SEO plan was $139 a month, or $117.33 a month billed annually, and Ahrefs Lite $129, with Ahrefs Starter at $29. At the Bank of England rate for 8 October 2026 that's about 105 and 98 pounds a month, before 20% VAT for buyers who aren't VAT-registered.
No. According to the Ahrefs help centre, tracked keywords in Rank Tracker are updated weekly on every plan. Semrush updates them daily on every plan, which is why a rank check costs 4 to 6 times more on Ahrefs.
On the vendors' own figures, Ahrefs: it declares 1.4 billion UK keywords, while Semrush's latest published UK figure is 1.3 billion, from April 2022. In UK searches Semrush is the better-known name, 27,100 searches a month against 18,100.
Yes, both with limits. Semrush has a free plan with one demo project and 10 reports a day. Ahrefs Free only works on sites you verify as your own. For a single site, together with Google Search Console, they cover most of the job.
Before you pay, open your logs (the test costs nothing)
In short:
Ahrefs sees new pages first: a median of 17.5 hours against 50.1;
Semrush updates rankings every day, Ahrefs every week;
both bill in dollars: $139 against $129 a month to get in, about £105 and £98 before VAT;
a rank check costs 4 to 6 times more on Ahrefs.
One last thing no comparison mentions. You can repeat our test on your own site in half an hour, if your hosting keeps access logs (on cPanel, like ours, they're in the logs folder): just search for "AhrefsBot" and "SemrushBot" to see which of the two visits more often, and how long it takes to reach your new pages. The tool with the freshest data for you is the one that visits sites like yours most often, and your server logs are the only place you can see that without taking anyone's word for it. How to read them is in our guide to crawling.
Until next time!
