Home / SEO Tools Cost Calculator / By task
How much extra do you pay for the AI features in SEO tools?
Summary
At Semrush the AI premium is easy to see: the Starter plan costs $60 a month more than the plain SEO plan ($199 against $139 on monthly billing) and adds 50 prompts tracked daily in AI answers. Ahrefs puts five tracked prompts into every plan from Lite up, but charges $99 a month for AI Content Helper. "AI" on a pricing page usually means one of two separate things, measuring how AI assistants talk about your brand or helping you write, and each is billed on its own meter.
Surfer's upgrade is almost all tracking
Surfer's Standard and Pro plans both include 360 content documents. The $83 monthly gap between them on annual billing ($99 against $182) buys AI tracking and seats. Tracked prompts double from 25 to 50, refreshes go from weekly to daily, coverage widens from ChatGPT alone to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, AI Overviews and Gemini, and team seats rise from three to five. Anyone upgrading to write more articles gets no extra documents. The cheaper Discovery plan ($49) has 120 documents and no prompt tracking at all. Surfer's page shows annual rates; its FAQ says annual billing saves up to 17% over monthly.
Semrush sells the AI layer as a plan step
On monthly billing, Semrush's plans run like this:
- SEO, $139: lists custom prompt monitoring and AI visibility reports, with no prompt count.
- Starter, $199: 50 prompts tracked daily, one domain for AI brand performance, 300 AI visibility reports a day, an AI-ready site audit and MCP access.
- Pro+, $299: 100 prompts, plus 15 websites and 1,500 tracked keywords.
- Advanced, $549: 200 prompts, 40 websites and 5,000 keywords.
Only the step from SEO to Starter isolates the AI cost. The higher plans raise site and keyword limits at the same time.
Writing help is billed separately
Ahrefs' AI Content Helper allows one document a month on a free account. It's $99 a month for 50 documents on its own, or $299 for 250 documents as part of Content Kit, which adds a content grader. Sharing documents with teammates is limited to Enterprise accounts. It's sold apart from the Lite, Standard and Advanced plans, so a Lite subscriber still pays extra to draft with it.
Both Semrush (from Starter) and Ahrefs (from Lite) also list MCP access. MCP is a connector that lets outside AI assistants such as ChatGPT or Claude pull data from the tool directly.
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.