The Semrush alternative with AI visibility built in

Semrush is a capable platform, and for a long time it was the default. The two reasons people start shopping for an alternative are usually the same, and neither is a knock on the data.

The first is price. Semrush's entry SEO plan, Pro, is $139.95 a month billed monthly, or $117.33 a month if you commit to a year, as of September 2026. That is a serious line item for a freelancer or a small in-house team, and it only covers one seat and one project's worth of tracking before you move up a tier. The mid and top plans run into the hundreds of dollars a month.

The second is the way AI search is priced. The place your buyers now ask questions is not only Google. They ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude, and whether those answers mention you is a real ranking surface. Semrush does measure it, but on the classic SEO plans that measurement is the AI Visibility Toolkit, a separate add-on at $99 a month per domain. It is bundled into the newer Semrush One tiers, which start at $199 a month. Either way, tracking AI answers well on Semrush means paying more.

Metric Vault was built for both of those problems. It carries the standard SEO toolkit and the AI visibility tracking in the same product, on every plan, and it starts at zero.

It is a capable product, and the difference between it and Metric Vault is not really about quality. It is about shape. The Toolkit is sold separately from the SEO tools you already pay for: $99 a month, per domain, on top of a Pro subscription at $139.95. It comes bundled only in the Semrush One tiers, which start at $199 a month. Those figures are Semrush's own published prices, verified 7 September 2026.

That packaging has a practical consequence. Because the Toolkit is priced per domain, the cost of watching AI answers scales with the number of sites you look after, and it scales separately from the SEO subscription underneath it. An agency with six client domains is making that decision six times.

Yes, and it is worth being exact about what "free" means, because the word is doing two different jobs in this market. Most things marketed as a free alternative to Semrush are trials: a fixed number of days, a card on file, and a wall at the end of it. Semrush's own free offer is a seven-day trial; there is no permanent free plan.

Metric Vault's free plan is not a trial. There is no expiry date, no card, and no countdown in the corner. It stays free for as long as you use it, and it includes the AI visibility tracking rather than holding it back for a paid tier. If you never upgrade, nothing switches off.

The honest limit is volume, not features. Premium data reports run on credits, and the free plan carries fewer of them than the paid plans at $19, $79, $249 and $749 a month. What that buys you in practice is enough room to watch one domain properly: track your keywords, run the audits, and see whether the assistants name you.

Some of it needs no account whatsoever. If you want to judge this as an alternative to Semrush before you sign up for anything, run the free AI visibility checker on your domain, or the SEO competitor analysis tool against a rival. Both answer in about two minutes.

An honest comparison names the cases it does not win, and there are real ones. Stay on Semrush if your work depends on the depth it has spent years building.

If you need the largest possible keyword and backlink databases, with long historical trend lines going back many years, Semrush's index is bigger and older than ours and that gap is real. If a lot of your job is paid media, its advertising and PPC research runs deeper. The same goes for market and traffic analytics on domains you do not own, local listing management across directories, and the wide catalog of third-party integrations and agency-scale white-label reporting that large teams standardize on. If your reports, alerts and client deliverables are already built on those, the cost of rebuilding them can outweigh the saving.

Metric Vault is the better fit when you want the core SEO toolkit and AI search visibility together, without paying enterprise prices or bolting on a separate AI product to see it.