My old site had a list of the best SEO rank-tracking tools. Over sixteen months Google showed it about 12,000 times. It got no clicks.
It ranked around position 54 — the fifth or sixth page of results — which is where a list like that belongs. It said what every other list said. That address now points to its replacement: a page that answers one narrow question with numbers you can check.
The question
What does it cost to track 500, 1,000, 2,000 or 5,000 keywords every day, on Wincher, SE Ranking, Mangools, Nightwatch, Semrush and AccuRanker, at the price you pay month to month?
The last part turned out to matter most. Several of these pricing pages open on the annual price, written as a monthly figure. Nightwatch showed €79 a month; switched to monthly billing it is €99. Semrush showed £95.07, "billed annually instead of £113". If you compare tools on the numbers they show you first, you are often comparing prices you will not be charged.
So the agents that read these pages switched each one to monthly billing and picked each keyword amount from the page's own selector before copying a figure, and code checked every quoted sentence was really there.
What came out
- The cheapest tool changes at about 2,000 keywords. Wincher is cheapest at 500 and 1,000; SE Ranking from 2,000, at £95 a month.
- Semrush stops publishing a price past 1,500 keywords. Beyond that it is a custom quote.
- Ahrefs was left out. Its own pricing table lists rank updates as weekly on every plan, and the comparison is for daily tracking.
Euro and dollar prices are converted to pounds at the European Central Bank's reference rate for the day, which the page names. There are no affiliate links on it.
A price you can only get by booking a call is information too. It usually tells you which customers the vendor has decided to want.
The page this is about: What does SEO rank tracking really cost? — every figure sourced to the vendor's own page, with the date it was checked.