We make Limecube, which competes with Semrush. Every Semrush figure below was read from semrush.com and its own knowledge base on 28 July 2026, with prices and plan limits re-checked on 17 August 2026, not from a review site, and we say plainly where Semrush is the better buy. If you want the whole category rather than this one comparison, start with the nine-tool roundup.
What Semrush does better
Worth saying first, because it is true and because a comparison that concedes nothing is worth nothing.
- The keyword database. Larger than anything else in this comparison, by a distance. This is about the size of the historical index, not about whether you can do keyword research elsewhere. If your work depends on deep SERP history, many-years-back trend data or exploring a market you know nothing about yet, that is a real reason to pay for Semrush.
- Traffic and market intelligence. Competitor traffic estimates, market share, audience overlap. Its Traffic & Market toolkit starts at $289 a month, and Limecube has no equivalent at any price. Neither do most of the tools in this category, but we are the one making the comparison, so we should say it plainly.
- Five AI engines, including AI Mode. Genuinely good coverage. Wider than most dedicated AI visibility tools at the same tier.
- The name. If your clients already know Semrush, a report with that logo needs no explaining. That is worth something and it is silly to pretend it is not.
If any of those is load-bearing for you, stop reading and buy Semrush. The rest of this page is about the case where they are not.
What it costs, and what the price is sized for
Semrush SEO plan is $139 a month, with Starter at $199, Pro+ at $299 and Advanced at $549, billed monthly. Annual billing saves around 17%. AI search tracking is included in all of them, from 50 prompts a day on Starter to 200 on Advanced.
So the add-on question has gone, and the useful question is what those plans are sized for. The answer is one brand.
- Five websites on the SEO and Starter plans. Fifteen on Pro+ at $299, forty on Advanced at $549.
- One domain for AI brand performance on Starter.
- Prompts per day, not per client. Fifty daily on Starter is a healthy allowance for a brand watching itself, and thin spread across a client list.
- Extra users from $45 a month each, and the other toolkits are priced separately again: Content from $60, Advertising $99, Local SEO $30, Social $20.
For one brand with one team, none of that bites and the entry price is the real price. For fifteen clients it decides your plan before any feature does: you are on Pro+ at $299 on website count alone, before seats. At the same fifteen clients Limecube Professional is $99, with the client list as the unit the plan is built around rather than the thing that pushes you up a tier.
That is not a claim to be better at AI visibility than a team with Semrush resources. It is a claim about which shape you are buying.
Semrush is not unusual in any of this. What AEO and SEO tools actually cost puts the same arithmetic next to every other tool in the category, including what buying from Australia adds.
Engine coverage
Semrush’s own knowledge base lists five AI surfaces: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini and Perplexity. Several published roundups still say three with Gemini rolling out, which is out of date, and we are not going to repeat it.
Claude is the one gap. It is not on Semrush list, and it is not on SE Ranking or Ahrefs Brand Radar either. Limecube tracks it as standard, alongside ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Whether that matters depends entirely on your buyers. Claude has a smaller share of consumer search than ChatGPT but a disproportionate share of technical, professional and developer questions, and it sits inside a growing number of work tools. For a B2B or technical audience it is a real blind spot. For a local trades client it probably is not. The mechanics of earning a mention are similar across assistants either way: see how to get cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity.
The agency question
Semrush is built for a marketing team working on a brand. Most of what an agency needs on top is priced as an extra: a seat per person, a toolkit per discipline, a report template at $10 or $20 a month.
The alternative shape is a tool built around the client rather than the brand: a workspace per client, per-client feature flags so a Google-Ads-only engagement does not show content tabs, client logins that show only what you want them to see, and reporting that comes with the workspace rather than as a line item. That is the difference in shape, and it matters more than any single feature comparison.
It is also the honest limit of this page. If you are one brand with one team, that shape buys you nothing and Semrush depth wins.
Which to choose
Stay with Semrush for competitor traffic estimates and market research, for work that leans on years of SERP and keyword history, or if your clients expect to see its name on the report. Limecube does not replace any of those.
Limecube does keyword research. The research wizard pulls real Google search volumes, sorts keywords from questions, clusters them by intent and maps each one to the page that should rank for it, on Professional and above. The line above is about the size of Semrush historical index, which matters when you are exploring a market you do not know yet, and matters much less when you are planning content for a site you already run.
Look at a dedicated AI visibility tool if AI citations are the only gap and your SEO tooling is already settled. Otterly starts at $29, Peec at $95. The roundup covers all of them.
Look at Limecube if the website count and the seat count are what keep pushing you up a tier, and you would rather the client list were the unit the plan is built around. Fifteen clients on one $99 plan, six surfaces including Claude, from $35 a month, with a 7-day trial and no card at signup.