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Prices on this site are read off vendors’ own pages and carry the day they were read.

Rank tracking · prices read at the vendor · 24 Sept 2026

A position is a reading, not a fact

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The board: rank trackers by cost per keywordTracking AI answers

Rank trackers, priced by the only unit that scales — the tracked keyword. Every figure on this site was read off the vendor's own page and carries the day it was read, and the tools that publish no price are listed as publishing no price.

What one tracked keyword costs a monthEntry plan price divided by the keywords that plan allows. Read at each vendor on 24 September 2026; Nightwatch prices in euro, the rest in dollars.
  1. SE RankingCore · 2,000 keywords$0.06per keyword / mo$129/mo
  2. AccuRankerProfessional · 2,000 keywords$0.11per keyword / mo$224/mo
  3. NightwatchStarter · 500 keywords€0.16per keyword / mo€79/mo
  4. AhrefsLite · 750 keywords$0.17per keyword / mo$129/mo
  5. SemrushSEO · 500 keywords$0.28per keyword / mo$139/mo

The board, in one paragraph

On 24 September 2026, SE Ranking published the cheapest tracked keyword of anything here: $129 a month on its Core plan for 2,000 keywords tracked daily, about six cents each. AccuRanker starts at $224 for 2,000 keywords on Professional; Ahrefs' Lite plan is $129 and holds 750 tracked keywords; Nightwatch starts at €79 for 500; and Semrush's entry SEO plan is $139 for 500 keywords tracked daily, which is the dearest keyword on the board because you are buying a whole suite around it. Mangools publishes plan names but no prices that a request for the page ever receives.

That ordering is the entire argument of this site. Trackers are sold on dashboards and bought on allowances, and the allowance is what you are still paying for in year two.

What this site will not tell you

It will not tell you which tracker is most accurate. Nobody can: a rank tracker is a camera pointed at a results page, there is no reference reading to compare it against, and two tools watching the same keyword from the same city can return different numbers on the same morning. Every claim of accuracy in this category is a claim about confidence, not measurement.

It also will not tell you that you need one. Google Search Console is free, covers every query you appeared for rather than a list you chose in advance, and is the honest first answer for a site watching twenty keywords. It pays this site nothing, which is worth saying on a page where several of the other names do.

What it will tell you

What each tool costs per tracked keyword, which engines and places it can look at, how often it looks, whether you can get your data back out, and what the vendor admits it cannot see. Those five things, plus room to grow, are the whole scoring rubric, and it is published below so you can disagree with the weights rather than take a number on trust.

Prices are read at the vendor and dated in the sentence that carries them. Where a vendor's page shows no price even once it has fully rendered — true of Mangools on the day — this site writes not published rather than copying a figure out of a review that may be a year old. A price that only appears once JavaScript runs still counts as published, and is read that way.

How a tracker is scored here

100 points across six things you can verify on the vendor’s own pages in about ten minutes. Not one of them is a claim about accuracy, because nobody — this desk included — can audit a rank reading against the engine that produced it.

Cost per tracked keywordthe one number that scales with your list24
What it can look atengines, countries, devices, local packs22
How often it looksdaily, on demand, or when the plan allows16
Getting data back outAPI, exports, Looker Studio, raw results14
Honesty of its own limitswhat the vendor admits it cannot see14
Room to growthe price of the next step up your list10

Cost per keyword carries the most weight because it is the only figure that keeps growing after you buy: a tool that is pleasant at 200 keywords can be unaffordable at 2,000.

Five questions the desk gets most

What does a rank tracker actually do?
It asks a search engine for your keywords on a schedule, from a place and a device you choose, and records where your pages appeared. That is all it does: it is a camera pointed at the results page, not a measurement coming out of Google, so two trackers watching the same keyword from the same city can hand you different numbers on the same morning. Anything past that — difficulty scores, traffic estimates, share-of-voice — is the tool's own modelling laid on top of those readings.
Is there a genuinely free rank tracker?
Yes, two kinds, and one of them is the right answer for most people. Google Search Console is free, unlimited and comes from Google itself rather than from scraping, though it reports an average position across the queries where you appeared rather than a position you can watch move, and it pays this site nothing. The second kind is desktop software you run yourself: SEO PowerSuite's Rank Tracker publishes a free edition whose own feature page lists unlimited keyword position tracking and one competitor per project, with scheduled checks and white-label reporting reserved for the paid editions.
What does rank tracking cost per keyword?
Between roughly six and twenty-eight cents per tracked keyword per month at the entry tier, depending which tool you buy. Read off vendors' own pricing pages on 24 September 2026: SE Ranking's Core plan is $129 a month for 2,000 daily keywords, Semrush's SEO plan is $139 for 500, Ahrefs' Lite plan is $129 for 750, and AccuRanker's Professional plan starts at $224 for 2,000. Allowances come in steps, so you buy the step rather than the keyword, and the cheapest plan that fits your list is usually the whole decision.
Why does my rank tracker disagree with Search Console?
Because they are measuring two different things. Search Console reports what Google calls the topmost position occupied by a link to your property, averaged across all queries in which your property appeared, and only counts a position when the result actually got an impression; a rank tracker records one scripted look-up from one chosen location and device. Personalisation, the searcher's location, the device, and result types that push the ten blue links down all move one number without moving the other.
Can anything track whether AI answers mention my site?
A growing set of tools tries, by running fixed prompts on a schedule and recording which brands and sources come back. They are prompt monitors rather than rank trackers: Semrush's Starter plan at $199 a month lists 50 prompts to track daily, Writesonic's Starter plan at $79 a month lists 50 prompts and 50 answers tracked daily across ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, and Otterly.AI's Lite plan is $29 a month for 15 prompts, all read on 24 September 2026. None of them can give you a position number, because an AI answer does not have positions.

From the field notes

Every note →
  1. AccuRanker Review: What $224 a Month BuysA rank tracker that does one job and charges accordingly. What AccuRanker publishes about its plans, what it deliberately leaves unpublished, and the size of list where it starts to make sense.Sep 24, 2026
  2. Mangools SERPWatcher Review: The Unpriced TrackerSERPWatcher is the rank tracker inside the Mangools bundle, and the one tool on this site whose price cannot be quoted. What is published, what is not, and how to judge it anyway.Sep 24, 2026
  3. Writesonic AI Visibility Review: 50 Prompts at $79Writesonic now sells prompt monitoring for ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews. What each tier tracks, which assistants are gated to Enterprise, and a pricing page that does not add up.Sep 24, 2026
  4. Free Rank Trackers: What Actually Exists in 2026Two genuinely free routes, one of which most sites should take. What each covers, what it deliberately withholds, and the point where free stops being enough.Sep 23, 2026
  5. Search Console vs a Rank Tracker: What Each KnowsOne is free and comes from Google; the other costs money and comes from scraping. They measure different things, and knowing which is which decides whether you need to buy anything.Sep 23, 2026
  6. Local Rank Trackers: Why One Position Isn't EnoughFor a business with an address, there is no such thing as a position — there is a different position on every street. What geo-grid tools measure and what they cost.Sep 22, 2026