What a big marketing team pays for its search tools in 2026

Every big search team works with paid software. Some of it estimates data about other people's websites: which words a competitor appears for, which other websites link to it, how its visibility changes from month to month. Some of it reads a whole website page by page, the way a search engine does, and lists every problem it finds.

What does all this cost? We went to each company's own pricing page on 27 September 2026 and copied the list prices. Then we set them beside the free tools that Google and Microsoft give to every site owner. The prices are in US dollars, except Screaming Frog, which prices its licence in British pounds. Prices change, naturally, so treat every figure here as a record of that day.

Which paid tools does a big search team use?

The paid tools fall into four groups, and each company describes its own product in its own words.

• Research suites. Semrush, Ahrefs and Moz Pro sell keyword and competitor data in one package. Semrush lists "keyword research and competitor analysis" inside its plans, and Ahrefs describes its Site Explorer as a way to "study your competitors' websites".
• Site crawlers. A crawler is a program that visits every page of a site, the way Google's own program does, and reports broken links, missing titles and other faults. The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is one such program.
• AI answer tracking. Newer tools follow how often a brand appears in answers from ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews. Profound sells this to companies "operationalizing AI Search insights".
• Market data. Similarweb sells data about websites and markets to businesses and enterprises.

A big team can hold several of these at once, and each plan below is priced on its own. The software is one part of the cost, of course: someone must read what it shows. We describe those people in what a big company's SEO team does each week.

What do Semrush, Ahrefs and Moz Pro cost?

Here are the list prices on 27 September 2026, taken from each vendor's pricing page. Semrush and Moz show two prices for each plan, one for monthly billing and a lower one per month when you pay for a year. For Ahrefs we recorded the monthly-billing prices.

| Tool and plan | Price per month, billed monthly | Price per month, billed yearly | What the vendor says about the plan | |---|---|---|---| | Semrush SEO | $139 | $117.33 | "For freelancers and small businesses" | | Semrush Starter (SEO + AI Search) | $199 | $165.17 | "For small teams and agencies" | | Semrush Pro+ | $299 | $248.17 | For teams working "across multiple markets, locations, or websites" | | Semrush Advanced | $549 | $455.67 | "40 websites to monitor", "5,000 keywords to track daily" | | Ahrefs Lite | $129 | Not recorded | Smallest listed plan | | Ahrefs Standard | $249 | Not recorded | | | Ahrefs Advanced | $449 | Not recorded | | | Ahrefs Enterprise | $1,499 | Annual commitment required | "Talk to sales" | | Moz Pro Standard | $99 | $79 ($950 billed for the first year) | "For small businesses that just need the basics of SEO" | | Moz Pro Medium | $179 | $143 ($1,719 billed for the first year) | "For growing businesses" | | Moz Pro Large | $299 | $239 ($2,868 billed for the first year) | "For larger businesses" |

Look at how the vendors themselves describe the plans. The smallest ones are named for freelancers and small businesses. The large ones speak of many markets, many locations, 40 websites and thousands of keywords tracked every day. Semrush says annual billing saves up to 17%, and Ahrefs asks for an annual commitment on its Enterprise plan. These are tools priced and built for teams that manage many sites, or one large site.

What does Screaming Frog cost, and is the free version enough?

Screaming Frog prices its SEO Spider in a different way. The program is free, and you buy a licence to crawl more than 500 URLs and to use its advanced features. On 27 September 2026 a licence cost £199 per licence, per year, for 1 to 4 licences.

A URL is simply the address of one page. So the question for a small business is easy to answer: count the pages of your site. If the site has fewer than 500 page addresses, the free version reads all of them, and you pay nothing. A retailer with a page for every item in a large catalogue needs the licence; a dental clinic with one page for each service may never reach the limit.

What do Profound and Similarweb cost?

Here the answer is short, and it says something in itself. Neither company publishes a price for business customers.

Profound's pricing page offers a free Trial "for companies who want to trial Profound before getting a demo", and an Enterprise plan with "Custom" pricing, described as "Tailored packages For companies operationalizing AI Search insights and running marketing agents at scale." Similarweb's pricing page asks businesses and enterprises to "contact our sales team to discuss a custom package tailored to your needs."

For a small business the practical meaning is simple. You cannot compare these two tools on price without a sales conversation, and the language on both pages speaks to companies working at scale.

What do the free Google and Bing tools give you?

Now the other side of the bill. Google and Microsoft each give site owners free tools that show how their own site appears in search. Google goes further than offering them: it writes that "we strongly encourage using our first-party tool, Google Search Console", because it gives data "directly from Google Search itself."

| Free tool | What the maker says about the cost | What it shows you | |---|---|---| | Google Search Console | "A free service offered by Google" | How your site appears in Google Search: clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position, with AI Overviews and AI Mode included under the "Web" search type | | Bing Webmaster Tools | "Get started for free", with "free SEO/GEO tools" | Your site's performance data in Bing search results | | Google Business Profile | Creating a profile and listing your business on Google "is free" | Your listing on Google Search and Maps, with hours, photos and reviews | | Google Analytics | Tools "free of charge" | What visitors do on your site once they arrive | | Screaming Frog SEO Spider, free version | Free up to 500 URLs | Faults on each page, read the way a search engine reads them |

One detail matters for anyone curious about AI search. Google says that sites appearing in its AI features, AI Overviews and AI Mode, "are included in the overall search traffic in Search Console", in the Performance report under the "Web" search type. So the free tool already counts those visits. The same report shows clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position, and its default view covers the past three months. We walk through each free tool in the free tools.

What can the paid tools do that the free ones cannot?

The free tools show data about your own site, the one you have proven you own. The paid suites add their estimates about other people's sites: the words your competitors appear for and the sites that link to them. For a big company that competes across a whole country, this view of competitors is what the subscription buys.

It is wise to remember where those numbers come from. Google states it directly: "Third-party tools don't have access to our internal ranking data. They can't guarantee performance." Every figure a paid tool shows about someone else's site is that tool's own estimate. Your own clicks and impressions in Search Console come from Google.

Let us say you own a bakery in one neighbourhood. Do you need to know the whole keyword list of a national bakery chain? More likely, you want to know three things: whether people find you on Google, what they type when they do, and whether your listing on Maps is complete. The free tools answer all three.

So what should a small business pay for?

In the end, the order is clear. Start with the free tools: Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, a complete Business Profile and Google Analytics. Pay for a research suite only when you have a specific question the free tools cannot answer, such as which words a named competitor appears for, and consider the smallest plan first.

The billing choice matters too. Yearly billing lowers the monthly price, but it asks you to pay for twelve months at once, and on Ahrefs Enterprise it is required. Monthly billing costs more per month, and each bill covers one month. For a small business that needs a research suite for one project, such as studying competitors before a new website goes live, one or two months of the smallest plan may be enough. Our page on what big companies pay for puts the tool bill beside the team that uses it, and what SEO costs covers the fees of agencies and freelancers. If you want the whole picture of search for a business your size, begin with small business SEO.

There is a third road. Licheo offers the website, search and AI work that big companies pay whole teams for, done for your small business. Specialist AI agents do the research, the pages and the monthly checks, and you learn no tools and manage no dashboard. Nothing goes live until you approve it. Contact us for pricing.

Before any of that, the free Get Found Check reads your homepage, your domain records and your security certificate, and gives your site a grade in under 60 seconds. And once your free tools are running, our guide to setting up analytics the way big companies do shows how to read them.

Sources

1. Semrush Plans and Pricing, Semrush, prices as shown on 27 September 2026, accessed 27 September 2026.
2. Ahrefs Plans & pricing, Ahrefs, prices as shown on 27 September 2026, accessed 27 September 2026.
3. Moz Pro pricing, Moz, prices as shown on 27 September 2026, accessed 27 September 2026.
4. SEO Spider Pricing, Screaming Frog, prices as shown on 27 September 2026, accessed 27 September 2026.
5. Profound Pricing, Profound, as shown on 27 September 2026, accessed 27 September 2026.
6. Similarweb pricing, Similarweb, as shown on 27 September 2026, accessed 27 September 2026.
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9. Google Business Profile, Google, accessed 27 September 2026.
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