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What does it cost to see which keywords are sending traffic to a competitor?
Summary
A quick look at a handful of competitors fits inside Ahrefs Lite at $129 a month or Semrush's SEO plan at $139 on monthly billing. The limits show up once you track several rivals over time: Lite gives each user 1,000 credits a month, caps reports at 2,500 rows and only goes back six months. Whatever you pay, the traffic and keyword figures for another site are the vendor's estimates, not that site's real analytics.
How far back can you look?
History is the limit people run into first. Ahrefs Lite keeps six months of historical data, Standard ($249 a month) keeps two years, and Advanced ($449) keeps five. If a competitor overtook you last spring, Lite can't show you which pages did it.
Report size comes next. Lite shows up to 2,500 rows per report and 500,000 export rows a month. Standard raises that to 30,000 rows and 1.5 million exports, and removes the credit cap: Lite users get 1,000 credits a month each, while Standard and Advanced are unlimited. Every plan lets you add 20 competitors to a project. Batch Analysis, for comparing a list of URLs in one pass, starts on Standard.
Ahrefs also sells a $29 Starter plan pitched as a way to "spy on competitors," but the pricing page lists no credits or row limits for it. All the prices on that page are monthly. It mentions annual billing only as "save up to 17%," with no annual figures.
What Semrush's cheapest plan covers
At $139 a month ($117.33 billed annually), Semrush's SEO plan is the entry point, and the pricing page describes its competitor features as "Basic keyword research and competitor analysis." Starter ($199 monthly) adds "Competitors insights tools," and Pro+ ($299) adds historical SEO data. Row limits per report aren't in the comparison table, so the plans can't be lined up against Ahrefs row for row.
Traffic sources are a separate product. A rival's acquisition channel mix lives in Semrush's Traffic & Market Toolkit, whose Pro plan is $289 a month billed annually and covers up to 100 competitors.
Why the numbers won't match your own
Only a site's owner can see its Search Console data. Competitor traffic in any SEO tool is modeled from the vendor's own crawl and ranking data, so Ahrefs and Semrush can put the same site's traffic far apart. The gap between two competitors inside one tool, and how it moves month to month, tells you more than either absolute number. The guide on why SEO tools show different numbers covers how each vendor builds its estimates.
Work out your own number: the SEO Tools Cost Calculator finds the cheapest published plan for your sites, tracked keywords and users.
Sources
Figures come from each vendor's own pricing pages and documentation. We have not tested these tools hands-on, and no ranking here is paid for.