Semrush Site Audit Limits Explained: Free Tier, Page Caps and Crawl Settings
By Seth Black · Published
Semrush Site Audit on a free account crawls 100 pages a month, 100 per audit. Paid limits in Semrush’s help center are 100,000 pages a month and 20,000 per audit on Pro, 300,000 and 20,000 on Guru, and 1,000,000 and 100,000 on Business; limits reset on the 1st of each month and unused pages don’t roll over. JavaScript rendering is only on Guru and Business.
All of the figures below were checked on 31 October 2026 on Semrush’s own Site Audit limits page, Site Audit configuration page and pricing page.
What are the Semrush Site Audit limits per plan?
| Plan (help center name) | Pages per month | Pages per audit | JavaScript rendering |
|---|---|---|---|
| Without SEO Toolkit (free account) | 100 | 100 | No |
| Pro SEO Toolkit | 100,000 | 20,000 | No |
| Guru SEO Toolkit | 300,000 | 20,000 | Yes |
| Business SEO Toolkit | 1,000,000 | 100,000 | Yes |
Source: Semrush KB: Site Audit, checked on 31 October 2026. The page says “your limits reset on the 1st day of every month” and “any leftover pages from your crawl budget do not roll over month to month.”
Two things in that table catch people out:
- The per-audit cap matters more than the monthly one. On Pro and Guru, a single audit stops at 20,000 pages no matter how many you have left for the month. A 60,000-page site never gets a complete audit below Business.
- Guru doesn’t crawl more per audit than Pro. You pay for Guru for JavaScript rendering and the larger monthly pool, not for bigger audits.
How do those plan names match what Semrush sells today?
They don’t, exactly. The Semrush pricing page lists these plans, checked on 31 October 2026:
| Plan | Monthly | Billed annually (per month) | Websites to monitor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Not applicable | 1 demo project |
| SEO | $139 | $117.33 | 5 |
| Starter | $199 | $165.17 | 5 |
| Pro+ | $299 | $248.17 | 15 |
| Advanced | Custom, request demo | Custom | 40+ |
Extra users start at $45 a month, and there’s a seven-day free trial. The pricing page shows no Site Audit page limits for any plan. The help center still uses the older Pro, Guru and Business toolkit names. Going by websites monitored, SEO looks like the old Pro, Pro+ like Guru and Advanced like Business, but Semrush doesn’t say that directly. Ask Semrush support which limits apply to the plan you’re about to buy, especially if JavaScript rendering is the reason. When I checked the same pages on 16 September 2026, Advanced was listed at $549 a month; it’s now quote only.
How does Semrush crawl a site?
The configuration page covers the settings that change how many pages you use and what the bot sees:
| Setting | Options |
|---|---|
| Crawl source | Website (follows links from the homepage), Robots.txt sitemap, Sitemap by URL, Import URLs from file |
| User agent | SiteAuditBot (Mobile, the default), SiteAuditBot (Desktop), OpenAI-Search. Googlebot is no longer offered. |
| Crawl delay | Minimum (about 1 second between pages, the default), 1 URL per 2 seconds, Respect robots.txt |
| Schedule | Once, Daily, Weekly |
| Restrictions | Bypass robots.txt disallow and meta robots with a verification file; crawl password-protected sites with your login; crawl with a Web Bot Auth signature |
Choosing a sitemap as the crawl source is the way to make a 20,000-page cap count: the audit spends its pages on URLs you listed rather than on whatever the homepage links to first. If you only care about one section, import a file of those URLs.
At the default crawl delay of about one page a second, a 20,000-page audit takes over five hours. That’s the speed complaint behind most “Semrush Site Audit is slow” threads, and it’s deliberate politeness, not a bug.
What does the free Semrush Site Audit get you?
100 pages a month, 100 per audit, on one demo project, without JavaScript rendering. That’s enough to see what the reports look like and to check a small brochure site. It isn’t enough to audit anything with a blog or a product catalog. The seven-day paid trial is the realistic way to test it on a real site.
When is Semrush Site Audit enough?
If you already pay for Semrush for keyword research, rank tracking or backlinks, the site audit comes with it and covers a lot of sites well. The limits only bite when:
- your site has more than 20,000 URLs and you’re not on the top plan,
- the site is built with a JavaScript framework and you’re on the entry plan,
- you audit many client sites and the monthly pool runs dry mid-month, or
- you need crawl data you can script against rather than reports in a browser.
At that point the choice is a bigger Semrush plan or a separate crawler. A desktop crawler has no page quota: bseoa, for example, runs on your own machine, renders JavaScript with headless Chrome, and costs $279 once with no page limit. It has no keyword or backlink data, so it sits next to Semrush rather than replacing it. The 14-day trial has every feature and no page cap. If you’d rather ask questions about a crawl from Claude or ChatGPT, there’s also a connector.
Further reading
The full comparison is on bseoa vs Semrush, and every vendor’s price is on SEO tool pricing. I’ve written before about Screaming Frog vs Semrush Site Audit, about how Ahrefs and Semrush site audits really compare, and about a faster alternative to Semrush Site Audit.
-Sethers