TL;DR:

I checked all three pricing pages on 18 August 2026 rather than trusting my own older post, and the entry-level gap most comparison articles describe has closed. These are three SEO platforms, and all three cover the basics like keyword research and site audits: Moz Pro Standard is $99 a month, Ahrefs Lite is $129, and Semrush’s SEO plan is $139. Ahrefs still has the deepest link data and domain analysis, Semrush the widest feature spread as an all-in-one digital marketing suite with SEO and PPC features, and Moz the most budget-friendly, beginner-accessible route into AI visibility tracking, with 50 tracked prompts bundled at $99. The decision comes down to three things almost nobody compares: seat costs, how each one charges for AI tracking, and whether your work actually depends on link data.

We pay for all three at Shortlist. Not because that is clever, but because different clients and different jobs pulled us in different directions and we never got round to cutting one.

That gives me a reasonable vantage point and also an obligation to write something more useful than the version of this article that is mostly affiliate links.

Start with today’s prices, because most comparisons are stale

In April I published a post on the 2026 SEO stack quoting Ahrefs at $99 a month and Moz at $39 on annual billing. Both are now wrong. That is not a swipe at whoever wrote the other articles. It is what this category does.

Ahrefs publishes its plan prices openly: Starter $29, Lite $129, which aligns with Ahrefs pricing starting at $129 per month for Lite, Standard $249, Advanced $449, and Enterprise at $1,499 with an annual commitment. Extra users are $40 a month each, capped at two more on Lite, though some comparison pages still cite $60 per extra Ahrefs seat, so check the live page before budgeting. They also state in their FAQ that they never run discounts, which is unusual in this category and worth knowing before you sit around waiting for a Black Friday deal that is not coming.

Semrush has restructured. The SEO toolkit page now lists SEO at $139 a month, Starter at $199, Pro+ at $299, and Advanced at $549, with roughly 17% off on annual billing, and many stale semrush pricing references come from older comparisons built around the Pro plan at $140 a month. The Pro, Guru, and Business names that most comparison articles still use do not appear on that page any more. Extra seats start at $45.

The Moz Pro pricing page leads with Standard at $99 a month, or $79 paid yearly. Medium is $179 and Large is $299 for up to three users. Competitor roundups also still mention older paid plans and entry pricing at $49 for a single user, which is exactly why you should not rely on outdated lists.

So the entry spread across all three is $99 to $139. That is a $40 gap, not the multiple that most write-ups imply.

The AI tracking line item is where the real difference sits

All three sell AI visibility now, and the terms are wildly different.

Moz bundles it. The $99 Standard plan includes an AI visibility dashboard, 50 tracked prompts, two tracked models, weekly prompt tracking, and two AI content briefs a month. Medium at $179 takes that to 100 prompts and three models.

Semrush separates it. The $139 SEO plan is search only. AI search coverage starts at the $199 Starter tier.

Ahrefs sells Brand Radar as its own product from $199 a month, either alongside a plan or standalone.

If AI visibility tracking is the reason you are shopping, that inverts the usual verdict. Moz is by a wide margin the cheapest way to get any of it. Whether 50 prompts across two models is enough depends entirely on how many topics you need to watch, and for most single-site owners it is.

What each one is genuinely best at

Ahrefs has the best link data. I have never seen a serious argument otherwise, and it is why the subscription survives months when nobody opens the rest of it. Its backlink analysis starts with a backlink checker backed by one of the largest, fastest-updating backlink databases on the market, and Ahrefs is built for SEO specialists doing deep competitor analysis and domain analysis. Ahrefs tracks over 35 trillion backlinks. Brand Radar now draws on more than 271 million organic prompts. If your work runs through link building, this is the one, with Site Explorer handling link analysis, referring domains, ranking keywords, and competitor analysis.

Semrush is the broadest. Keyword research, competitor work, site audits, PPC, content tooling, local, social. It combines SEO with PPC campaigns, advertising research, social, and content marketing, which is why the all-in-one pitch lands for agencies and in-house teams. It also gives you SERP analysis, keyword tracking, and position tracking in the same stack, which makes the breadth more useful in practice. If you want one login covering more of the job, it is Semrush. Model the seat costs before you commit, because the breadth is real and so is the per-user bill.

Moz is the easiest to learn and popularized Domain Authority, which is still the metric clients recognise on a slide, and Moz Pro remains notably beginner-friendly, especially for local SEO users who value simplicity. Moz tracks around 500 million backlinks, so the smaller backlink data set versus Ahrefs and Semrush is not subtle on anything competitive. The keyword and link databases are the smallest of the three, and that shows up on anything competitive. To its credit, Moz also published the study that undercuts a fair chunk of rank-tracking orthodoxy: 40,000 queries analysed, and 88% of Google AI Mode citations landing outside the organic top ten.

Seats are the cost nobody models

Working solo, the headline price is the price. On a team it is not, and this is where most people get the comparison wrong.

Seat costs are not the only hidden constraint on teams: project limits also differ across each platform’s site audit tool. For site audit capacity, Ahrefs crawls 25,000 pages per project on its cheapest plan, Semrush crawls 20,000 pages per project on its basic plan, and Moz’s On-Demand Crawl audits up to 5,000 pages. Semrush highlights top issues in red for easy visibility, while Ahrefs also advises on fixing issues found during audits.

Ahrefs Lite includes one user with up to two more at $40 each, so a three-person team is $209 a month. Semrush’s SEO plan includes one seat with extras from $45, so the same three people cost $229. Moz Standard includes one user and Medium includes two, which makes the step up to $179 less painful than it looks for a pair.

Run that calculation against your actual headcount. It moved our decision more than any feature table did.

What I would actually pick

Freelancer or a single site: Moz Standard at $99, mostly for the bundled prompt tracking you would otherwise pay $199 for elsewhere.

Anyone whose work depends on links: Ahrefs Lite at $129, especially if you want the pick for technical SEO, backlink analysis, and deep content research through Content Explorer. Unlike Semrush, it does not bring PPC data tracking into the same platform, so accept you are not getting PPC or social data in the box.

In-house marketer who wants one tool: Semrush, and go straight to the tier that includes AI search rather than paying for it twice, especially if you need one platform for SEO plus PPC data tracking across teams.

Agency: model the seats first, then pick. And whichever you land on, the tool is not the strategy. We wrote about that at more length in the 2026 SEO stack.

One honest caveat to close on. This category reprices and renames itself constantly. My own post from four months ago is already wrong on two of the three, and there is no reason to assume this one ages any better. Check the pricing pages yourself before you buy, including against this article.

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