Semrush costs $130–$500/month. If you only need site auditing — not keyword research or backlinks — there are free alternatives worth knowing.
Semrush is one of the most widely used SEO platforms in the industry, and for good reason. Its keyword research database, backlink index, and competitive analysis tools have no truly free equivalent. But most conversations about "Semrush alternatives" are driven by a more specific frustration: the price.
At $129.95 per month for the Pro plan, Semrush is a hard sell for an early-stage SaaS company, a solo developer managing their own site, or a small business that doesn't have a dedicated SEO hire. When most of that cost is going toward features you're not using, the platform's value proposition breaks down quickly.
This guide is focused specifically on the site audit use case. If you use Semrush primarily for keyword research and backlink analysis, read on — but be aware that the honest answer to that question is that there's no free alternative worth recommending. The comparison in this guide applies only if you're using Semrush's site audit tool and want to know whether you can get equivalent or better technical auditing without the monthly fee.
Before comparing alternatives, it's worth being precise about what's included in a Semrush subscription.
Keyword research is the core feature. Semrush's keyword database contains billions of search terms with volume estimates, difficulty scores, intent classification, and historical trend data. This is where most professional SEOs spend the majority of their time in the platform.
Backlink analysis is the second major pillar. The Semrush backlink index is one of the largest available, showing referring domains, anchor text distribution, authority scores, and toxic link identification. Backlink auditing and disavow workflows are built around this data.
Site audit is the technical SEO module. It crawls your site and identifies issues across categories including crawlability, HTTPS implementation, Core Web Vitals, internal linking, duplicate content, and structured data. Results are scored on a 100-point scale.
Competitive analysis rounds out the platform — keyword gap analysis, backlink gap, and position tracking relative to competitors.
Pricing runs from $129.95/month (Pro, 5 projects, 500 tracked keywords) to $499.95/month (Business, 40 projects, 5,000 keywords). An annual subscription reduces these by roughly 17%.
The most common reason is simple: the price is high relative to how much of the platform actually gets used.
For a developer running their own SaaS product, the primary need is usually technical — checking that the site is crawlable, that schema is valid, that Core Web Vitals pass. The keyword research and backlink features are genuinely useful, but not at a volume that justifies $130/month at early stage.
For an SMB owner who manages their own site, the site audit feature is the main draw. Keyword research happens occasionally; the audit is run regularly to check for regressions.
For both groups, the specific question is: can I get comparable technical site auditing at a lower cost?
The answer depends on what "comparable" means. For traditional technical SEO checks — crawlability, metadata, redirects, HTTPS, Core Web Vitals — free alternatives now cover most of what Semrush's site audit provides. But there are meaningful gaps.
This section is worth reading before the comparison table. Some limitations of free alternatives are genuine and significant.
Keyword research at scale. No free tool provides keyword volume, difficulty, and intent data across a large keyword set with the reliability of Semrush's database. Google Keyword Planner provides limited data, and there are free tools with rough estimates, but none are comparable for professional keyword strategy work.
Backlink analysis. Semrush's backlink index is among the largest available. Free tools offer very limited backlink data — typically incomplete counts with no authority scoring, link toxicity assessment, or historical data.
Competitor analysis. Semrush's competitive gap analysis — showing which keywords competitors rank for that you don't — has no meaningful free equivalent. Google Search Console shows your own data; it shows nothing about competitors.
Position tracking at scale. Tracking hundreds or thousands of keywords with daily updates is a paid feature across every platform. Free tiers are limited to very small keyword sets with limited update frequency.
If any of the above describes your primary use case, this guide is not the right read. The tools described below complement or replace Semrush's site audit feature specifically — not the full platform.
seo.yatna.ai is a cloud-based technical SEO auditor built specifically for the current search landscape, where AI search readiness and structured data depth are as important as traditional crawl issues.
The free tier runs a full audit on up to 5 pages. The paid tiers scale to 25, 100, or 500 pages depending on plan.
What distinguishes it from Semrush's site audit in particular:
robots.txtllms.txt, which AI assistants use as a site summaryBest suited for: developers and SaaS founders who need AI readiness auditing, teams whose sites are primarily technical products targeting AI-visible keywords.
Google Search Console is the most important free SEO tool available and should be the baseline for any site. It provides real data from Google's crawl and index — not estimates or simulations.
What it covers: query and click data by page and keyword, indexing status, Core Web Vitals field data, structured data status, mobile usability, and manual action notifications.
What it doesn't cover: it shows you that pages are underperforming but generally doesn't diagnose why. A page with a low click-through rate gets flagged; the reason it has a low CTR (poor title, missing schema, thin content) is not explained. GSC is essential but not sufficient for technical auditing.
Screaming Frog's free tier crawls up to 500 URLs and is genuinely powerful for traditional technical SEO checks. It finds broken links, audit redirect chains, checks meta tag completeness, identifies duplicate content, and surfaces missing canonical tags.
Limitations of the free tier: 500 URL cap, no JavaScript rendering, no scheduled crawls, no cloud storage. The paid version (£149/year) removes the URL cap and adds JavaScript rendering and Google Analytics/Search Console integration.
Screaming Frog has no AI readiness coverage, no E-E-A-T analysis, and limited schema validation (detection only, not property-level validation).
Built directly into Chrome DevTools, Lighthouse runs a Core Web Vitals lab test with specific recommendations for LCP, CLS, and INP improvements. It also checks accessibility, best practices, and basic SEO signals at the page level.
Limitations: single-page testing only, no site-wide crawl, lab data rather than field data (can differ significantly from real-user performance). Essential for diagnosing performance issues on individual pages; not a site-wide auditing tool.
The Rich Results Test validates structured data markup and shows which rich result types your page is eligible for. It's authoritative — it uses Google's actual rendering and validation logic.
Limitations: one URL at a time, structured data only. No crawl issues, no performance data, no E-E-A-T or AI readiness coverage.
| Feature | Semrush Site Audit | seo.yatna.ai |
|---|---|---|
| Cloud-based | Yes | Yes |
| Crawl issues (broken links, redirects) | Yes | Yes |
| Meta tag audit | Yes | Yes |
| Core Web Vitals | Yes (basic) | Yes |
| Schema validation depth | Basic (presence check) | Deep (12 types, property-level) |
| AI readiness scoring | No | Yes |
| robots.txt AI crawler check | No | Yes |
| llms.txt check | No | Yes |
| E-E-A-T analysis | No | Yes |
| Actionable fix recommendations | Yes (generic) | Yes (specific) |
| Keyword research | Yes | No |
| Backlink analysis | Yes | No |
| Competitor analysis | Yes | No |
| Price | $129.95–$499.95/month | Free (1 audit) or paid tiers |
The table above compares Semrush's site audit module specifically against seo.yatna.ai. It is not a comparison of the full Semrush platform — which includes substantially more capability than any free tool replicates.
Semrush remains the right tool when your work requires any of the following:
For any of these use cases, Semrush is not being replaced by free alternatives at a comparable level of capability. The cost is real, but so is the product.
The free alternative case is strongest when your primary need is technical site auditing and you don't need Semrush's marketing intelligence features.
If you're a developer who built a SaaS and wants to confirm the site passes technical SEO checks before launch, the combination of seo.yatna.ai (for AI readiness, schema, and E-E-A-T), Google Search Console (for real query and indexing data), and Screaming Frog free tier (for crawl issues and broken links) covers the same ground as Semrush's site audit at no cost.
If you're an SMB owner maintaining a small business website, the same combination applies. The technical auditing use case is well-served by free tools. The keyword research and backlink use case is not.
Semrush is a powerful platform and its site audit module is genuinely useful. But the site audit feature exists inside a platform priced for marketing teams doing keyword research and competitive analysis at scale. Paying $129.95/month to run periodic technical site audits is a poor value trade when free alternatives cover the same technical checks.
The specific categories where free alternatives — and seo.yatna.ai in particular — are better than Semrush's site audit are the newer ones: AI readiness, schema validation depth, E-E-A-T analysis, and llms.txt. These didn't exist as audit categories five years ago, and Semrush hasn't built them into its audit module.
The specific categories where Semrush is irreplaceable are keyword research, backlink analysis, and competitor intelligence. If those are your needs, the honest advice is to pay for Semrush — or accept that free tools have a genuine capability gap.
If you're ready to run a free technical SEO audit, seo.yatna.ai's free audit tool audits up to 5 pages at no cost — no credit card required. For a detailed comparison of Semrush vs seo.yatna.ai focused on the site audit feature, see the Semrush alternative page.
About the Author
Ishan Sharma
Head of SEO & AI Search Strategy
Ishan Sharma is Head of SEO & AI Search Strategy at seo.yatna.ai. With over 10 years of technical SEO experience across SaaS, e-commerce, and media brands, he specialises in schema markup, Core Web Vitals, and the emerging discipline of Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO). Ishan has audited over 2,000 websites and writes extensively about how structured data and AI readiness signals determine which sites get cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. He is a contributor to Search Engine Journal and speaks regularly at BrightonSEO.