Two subscriptions at the same price can be very different tools once you know what they meter. These are the meters used by the products in our catalogue, with the figures each vendor publishes.
Tracked keywords
The most common meter, and the least surprising: how many search terms the tool checks positions for on a schedule.
Ahrefs Lite holds 750, Standard 2,000, Advanced 5,000. Moz Standard holds 300, Medium 1,500, Large 3,000. SE Ranking Core holds 2,000 and Growth 5,000. Advanced Web Ranking sells nothing else: 7,000, 14,500, 35,500 and 50,000.
Rank Math tracks keywords too, in a plugin: 500 on PRO, 10,000 on Business, 50,000 on Agency.
Pages crawled and crawl credits
This meter limits site audits. Moz publishes it as pages crawled a month: 400,000 on Standard, 2 million on Medium, 5 million on Large. Ahrefs publishes crawl credits instead: 100,000, 500,000 and 1.5 million.
Sitebulb caps a single audit rather than a month: 10,000 URLs on Lite, 500,000 on Pro. Screaming Frog's paid licence publishes no ceiling at all, because the crawl runs on your own machine.
Searches a day
Serpstat is the notable user of a daily cap: 100 searches a day on Individual, 500 on Team, 1,000 on Team x2, 5,000 on Agency. Position checks are metered separately, from 10,000 to 500,000.
A daily meter suits steady weekly work. It is the wrong meter for a migration audit, where the research happens in two days.
Analysis units and rows
Majestic meters access to its link index in analysis units and in rows returned by Site Explorer: 1 million units and 5,000 rows on Lite, 20 million and 30,000 on Pro, 100 million and 50,000 on the API plan.
Rows returned is the limit people notice: a large site's backlink profile does not fit in 5,000 rows.
Websites and projects
Almost every platform also limits how many sites you can set up. Ahrefs: 5, 20 and 50 projects. Semrush: 5, 15 and 40 websites. Moz: 3, 10 and 25 tracked sites. SE Ranking: 10 and 30 projects. Serpstat: 5 on Individual and unlimited above it. Advanced Web Ranking: unlimited everywhere.
For an agency, this is usually the number that decides the plan, not the keyword count.
Seats
Seats are a quota too, and the easiest to overlook. One user is included on Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz Standard, SE Ranking Core and Serpstat Individual. Moz Medium includes two and Large three; SE Ranking Growth includes three; Sitebulb Pro adds users at £7 a month; Ahrefs adds them at US$40, US$60 or US$80 depending on the plan.
