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Will a rank tracker tell you when something breaks on your site?
Summary
It will tell you that rankings moved, not why. A page switching to noindex, a broken redirect or a key URL returning 404 shows up in a site crawl, not in rank data. Semrush's Position Tracking updates daily and alerts on organic position changes, while Ahrefs runs a separate always-on audit on Lite and higher plans that crawls one URL per minute without using crawl credits.
One URL a minute is slower than it sounds
One URL per minute works out to 1,440 URLs a day. On a 10,000-page site, the Ahrefs always-on audit needs about a week to get through every page once, so a problem on a page it just checked may wait days to be seen.
Ahrefs sells project boosts for verified sites. The Pro boost costs $20 a month per project and raises the rate to 10 URLs a minute, about 14,400 a day. The Max boost costs $200 a month per project for 30 URLs a minute, about 43,200 a day. On the Free and Starter plans, the always-on audit is available only on boosted projects.
The always-on audit doesn't draw on crawl credits. Scheduled audits do, and Lite comes with 100,000 crawl credits a month.
When the audit finds a new page hit by an error-level issue, Ahrefs sends an email. Issues are grouped and sent once every half hour.
What rank tracking does record
Semrush checks positions for your chosen keywords every day, split by device (mobile, tablet, desktop) and by location down to postal code. Besides Google, it can track Bing, Baidu, ChatGPT Search and Google AI Mode. Daily data is kept for 60 days. After that you see one weekly data point, captured on Wednesdays by default and kept for 140 weeks.
Custom triggers send an email when organic positions change. You get up to 10 per campaign, and the email goes only to the address on your Semrush account.
Semrush's Site Audit is the tool that looks at the pages themselves, but it runs daily, weekly or on demand, not continuously, so a broken page shows up after the next run. The SEO reporting guide compares tools that put rankings and site issues in one report.
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.