Semrush API Pricing and Cost: $549 Plus Units

Semrush API access requires the top SEO subscription, listed at $549 a month or $455.67 a month billed annually, and the subscription does not include any data. API units are bought separately, and Semrush publishes no dollar price per unit on its pricing page, in its developer documentation or in its knowledge base. What it does publish is the unit cost of every report, charged per line of data returned, with historical data costing roughly five times what live data costs. Verified on semrush.com and developer.semrush.com on 9 September 2026.

That last point is where most budgets go wrong. People search for a price per unit, find a confident figure on a blog, multiply it out and present a number to their finance team. The figure is not published by the vendor. Below is what Semrush actually states, the full per report unit table for the advertising data, a worked budget for a competitor ad pull, and an honest look at what the API can and cannot tell you about a competitor's ads.

How much does the Semrush API cost?

There are two separate line items, and you pay both.

The rest of the SEO line, for reference, runs $139, $199 and $299 a month for the SEO, Starter and Pro+ tiers, discounted to $117.33, $165.17 and $248.17 on annual billing. None of those three carry Standard API access. If you want the wider picture of what each tier includes, our Semrush pricing breakdown covers the full lineup and where the competitor advertising reports sit.

So the honest floor for a Semrush API project is $549 a month before a single row of data arrives, plus whatever a unit package costs you. Treat any total you have seen quoted that does not separate those two things as incomplete.

What plan do I need for Semrush API access?

The developer documentation is specific and slightly out of date. It states that the Standard API requires an "SEO Business" subscription, and adds the line that catches people out: "after upgrading to the SEO Business plan the number of units will still be zero." The pricing page, meanwhile, has no tier called Business in the SEO line. The four tiers are SEO, Starter, Pro+ and Advanced, and Advanced is the one whose description names API access.

The sensible read is that "SEO Business" is a legacy plan name that the docs have not caught up with, and that Advanced at $549 is its current equivalent. It is worth confirming with sales before you commit a year, because that naming gap is exactly the kind of thing that turns into a billing dispute. The other API products sit outside this entirely: the Trends Basic API is bought directly, Trends Premium is quoted by sales and runs on a request limit rather than units, the Listing Management API needs a Semrush Local Pro or Business subscription, and the Map Rank Tracker API is included for all users.

What are Semrush API units?

A unit is Semrush's internal metering token. You buy a balance, and every call draws it down. Most analytics reports charge per line of data returned rather than per request, so a query that matches 500 keywords costs 500 times the per line rate. Requesting historical data instead of live data multiplies the rate, usually by five.

Semrush publishes the rate for every report. These are the ones that matter if you are pulling competitor advertising data, taken from the domain reports documentation:

Read that table next to the organic row at the bottom and the pattern is obvious. The advertising reports are the expensive ones. Domain Ad History costs ten times what an organic keyword line costs, and PLA Copies costs six times. If your project is ad research rather than SEO research, your unit burn will be several times higher than the examples you find in general tutorials, which almost always use the organic keywords report.

How many API units will I actually need?

Semrush gives one worked example in its own documentation: analyzing 50 domains with 500 keywords each costs 250,000 units for live data, or 1,250,000 units if you also want the historical view from 12 months back, for a total of 1,500,000 units. That is the organic report, at 10 and 50 units per line.

Run the same arithmetic on the published advertising rates and a modest competitor ad project looks like this:

Half a million units a month for twenty competitors, and that is before Shopping data or any historical pull. Those figures are our arithmetic on Semrush's published per line rates, not a quoted price. What they cost you in dollars is the part only your account or a sales rep can answer, which is the whole problem with budgeting this product from the outside.

What the ranking pages get wrong about Semrush API pricing

Nearly every page currently ranking for this question states a price per unit as though Semrush published it. It does not.

The $50 per million figure may well be accurate for some accounts. The point is that it is not a published rate, it is not guaranteed to be your rate, and a page that presents it as fact has not checked. If you are building a business case, get the number in writing from Semrush.

Is the Semrush API free, and is there a free trial?

No on both counts. Semrush does not offer the Standard API on any free plan, and it publishes no trial of it either. The general Semrush free plan does not include API access, and the free API calls that do exist are the balance check endpoints, which tell you how many units you have left rather than returning any data. If you have seen a "Semrush API key free" suggestion in autocomplete, that is people hoping, not a product. The nearest thing to a low commitment start is the Trends Basic API, which is bought directly rather than quoted, but it returns traffic and market data, not competitor ad copy.

How do I get a Semrush API key?

Subscribe to the tier that carries API access, then find your key in the Subscription info area of your profile, on the same page where you top up units. The key authenticates every request; the unit balance is what actually limits you. Rate limits and the endpoint list live in the developer documentation, which is public and worth reading before you buy, because it tells you the per line cost of each report you were planning to call.

What ad data do you actually get from the Semrush API?

This is the part worth being precise about, because it decides whether the $549 floor is money well spent for you.

The advertising reports return Google text ad copy, product listing ad copy, the keywords a domain appears to bid on, and the domains it competes with. All of it is modelled. Nobody reads a competitor's Google Ads account, so every keyword list, cost per click and spend figure in the API is inferred backwards from scraped search results. That method has known blind spots: brand campaigns are undercounted, narrowly geo targeted campaigns are close to invisible, and Performance Max is structurally invisible because it never ran on a keyword list at all. Those are not defects unique to Semrush. They apply to every vendor selling this data, and we walk through why in what competitor ad data is observed versus modelled.

What the API does not return is live creative. There is no Display banner, no YouTube video ad, no Shopping image beyond the copy fields. If your job is to see what a competitor is actually showing people right now, a keyword and text copy API is the wrong shape of tool, however much you pay for it.

Semrush API alternatives for competitor ad data

Four realistic routes, with the trade-offs stated plainly.

The SpyFu comparison is the instructive one. It sells the same category of modelled Google data, and it publishes a dollar rate per thousand rows on its developer site. You can price a SpyFu project on a whiteboard in five minutes. You cannot do that with Semrush without an account or a sales call, and that difference matters more than the headline subscription price when you are deciding what to build on. The full SpyFu rate card and worked budgets are in our SpyFu API pricing guide, the plan side sits in our SpyFu pricing breakdown and the wider ad spy tool pricing comparison. Similarweb sits in the same quote-only camp as Semrush, but it at least publishes its credit formula; our Similarweb API pricing guide turns that formula into a credit budget.

One practical note on all four routes. Rows arriving over an API are not answers. Once a few hundred thousand lines of competitor keyword and ad copy data land in your warehouse, somebody still has to shape the questions, and teams routinely underestimate that half of the project. Pointing something that turns plain English questions into SQL at the tables is usually cheaper than writing a reporting layer nobody maintains.

Is the Semrush API worth it for ad research?

It is worth it if you need Google paid keyword and text ad copy data inside your own systems at scale, you already run Semrush, and you can get a unit quote that survives contact with your finance team. It is poor value if you are buying it to see competitor creative, if you only track a handful of competitors, or if you were planning to build the business case on a per unit price you read on a blog.

For the creative half of the job there is a cheaper and more honest source. Google's Ads Transparency Center publishes the live ads a brand is running across Search, Shopping, Display and YouTube, free and without an API contract, and the reason people pay for a tool on top of it is that the native interface has no history, no export and no way to watch a competitor over time. That is what our Google ads library search does: the same public data, searchable by brand or domain, with each ad tagged by angle and format, sorted by how long it has been running, and exportable on the paid plans. If you specifically need it programmatically, the ad library API page sets out what is and is not available from the official platform APIs, and scraping the Ads Transparency Center covers the export routes in detail.

Run length is the honest signal in all of this. No API, at any price, will tell you what a competitor spent. An ad they have kept live for three months is one that is paying for itself, and that read costs nothing but the discipline to check on a schedule.