# Semrush Site Audit limits: free account, pages per audit and per month

> A free Semrush account audits 100 pages a month. Paid plans allow 20,000 or 100,000 pages per audit. Every limit, checked November 2026, and how to stretch it.

Source: https://seofix.ai/blog/semrush-site-audit-limits  
Published: 2026-11-05  
Updated: 2026-11-02  
Author: SEOFix Team  
Category: Comparisons  
Tags: Technical SEO, Guides  
Length: 1,761 words, 8 min read

The Semrush Site Audit free limit is **100 pages per audit and 100 pages per month**, with one audit running at a time, according to Semrush's [Site Audit limits article](https://www.semrush.com/kb/338-how-many-pages-can-i-crawl-in-an-audit). Paid plans raise that to **20,000 pages per audit** on Starter and Pro+, and **100,000 per audit** on Advanced, with monthly budgets of 100,000, 300,000 and 1,000,000 pages. Unused pages don't roll over, and the budget resets on the 1st of each month.

So the free account is enough to check a homepage and the 99 pages closest to it. It isn't an audit of a real site. Below: every limit per plan, what happens when you hit one, how to get more out of a small budget, and the free options that crawl further.

**Disclosure:** SEOFix is our product. **Last checked:** 2 November 2026, on Semrush's own pricing page and knowledge base. Prices are USD, as of November 2026. Semrush changes plans often, so check the linked pages before you buy.

## Semrush Site Audit limits by plan, November 2026

Semrush sells plans under new names (SEO, Starter, Pro+, Advanced), but the Site Audit article still describes limits by the old toolkit names. It maps them in one line: "Semrush One Starter includes Pro SEO Toolkit", "Semrush One Pro+ includes Guru SEO Toolkit", "Semrush One Advanced includes Business SEO Toolkit" ([KB 338](https://www.semrush.com/kb/338-how-many-pages-can-i-crawl-in-an-audit)). Combined with the [pricing page](https://www.semrush.com/prices/):

| Plan | Price, monthly | Pages per audit | Pages per month | Audits at once | JS rendering |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Free | $0 | 100 | 100 | 1 | No |
| Starter (Pro toolkit) | $199 ($165.17/mo yearly) | 20,000 | 100,000 | 2 | No |
| Pro+ (Guru toolkit) | $299 ($248.17/mo yearly) | 20,000 | 300,000 | 2 | Yes |
| Advanced (Business toolkit) | Custom, "Request demo" | 100,000 | 1,000,000 | 5 | Yes |

Notes on the table:

- **JavaScript rendering.** "JS rendering is available with a Guru or Business SEO Toolkit subscription" ([KB 338](https://www.semrush.com/kb/338-how-many-pages-can-i-crawl-in-an-audit)). On today's names that is Pro+ and Advanced. Starter audits the HTML your server sends.
- **The SEO plan ($139, $117.33/mo yearly).** The pricing page lists it with 5 websites and 500 tracked keywords, and Semrush's [plans article](https://www.semrush.com/kb/1011-subscriptions) says it includes Site Audit. Neither page, nor the limits article, says which toolkit level it maps to, so we can't give you its page limits. Ask Semrush, or check during the 7-day trial.
- **Advanced has no public price today.** When we checked in October, the pricing page showed a monthly price for Advanced. On 2 November it shows "Custom" and a "Request demo" button instead. The page also lists "Multi-million-page crawling" for Enterprise.
- **Projects.** The paid plans list 5, 15 and 40+ "websites to monitor". The free plan lists "1 demo project" and "10 reports per day across all vital tools" ([plan comparison](https://www.semrush.com/kb/856-subscription-plans-comparison)).

## What the free account gets you

On a free account, Site Audit stops at 100 pages, and those 100 pages are the whole month's budget. The crawler starts at your homepage and works outward link by link (Semrush calls it [breadth-first](https://www.semrush.com/kb/539-configuring-site-audit)), so the 100 pages are your homepage, your main navigation and whatever those pages link to first.

That's useful for:

- a small brochure site or portfolio that has fewer than 100 pages;
- checking that the homepage and top navigation return 200, have titles and aren't marked noindex;
- seeing what the report looks like before paying.

It's not useful for anything templated. A shop, job board or blog with a few hundred posts has most of its issues in the deep pages (product, listing, article templates) that a 100-page crawl doesn't reach. And because the budget is monthly, you can't run a second audit to look at another section until the 1st.

## What happens when you hit a limit

There are three different caps, and each behaves differently:

1. **Pages per audit.** You set a page limit when you configure the audit, and it can't exceed your plan's per-audit maximum ([configuring Site Audit](https://www.semrush.com/kb/539-configuring-site-audit)). The crawl stops when it reaches that number. The report covers only the pages crawled, so a 20,000-page audit of a 50,000-page site is an audit of the 20,000 pages closest to the homepage.
2. **Pages per month.** Every audit draws on the monthly budget. "Any leftover pages from your crawl budget do not roll over month to month, but your limits reset on the 1st day of every month" ([KB 338](https://www.semrush.com/kb/338-how-many-pages-can-i-crawl-in-an-audit)).
3. **Audits running at once.** One on free, two on Starter and Pro+, five on Advanced. Start one too many and you get "You've reached the limit for simultaneously run campaigns" ([troubleshooting](https://www.semrush.com/kb/681-site-audit-troubleshooting)).

The per-audit cap is the one that hurts larger sites, because no amount of monthly budget lifts it. We wrote up what a 20,000-page cap does to a bigger site, and which tools crawl the whole thing in one audit, in [Semrush Site Audit alternatives for big sites](https://seofix.ai/blog/semrush-site-audit-alternatives).

## Does the monthly budget cover weekly audits?

Site Audit can re-run "Weekly (choose any day of the week), Daily, or Once" ([configuring Site Audit](https://www.semrush.com/kb/539-configuring-site-audit)). A month has about 4.33 weeks, so a weekly audit of the full per-audit cap uses:

| Plan | Weekly audit at the cap | Monthly budget | Room left |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Starter | 20,000 × 4.33 ≈ 86,700 | 100,000 | ≈ 13,300 pages |
| Pro+ | 20,000 × 4.33 ≈ 86,700 | 300,000 | ≈ 213,300 pages |
| Advanced | 100,000 × 4.33 ≈ 433,000 | 1,000,000 | ≈ 567,000 pages |

On Starter, one site audited weekly at 20,000 pages leaves barely enough for a second, small project. Daily audits on Starter are only realistic below about 3,200 pages per audit (100,000 ÷ 31). On Pro+ the monthly budget is generous relative to the per-audit cap: you can audit three or four sites of 20,000 pages weekly, but none of them past 20,000.

## How to get more out of a small budget

Site Audit's settings let you choose which pages use the budget. All of these are in [Configuring Site Audit](https://www.semrush.com/kb/539-configuring-site-audit):

- **Crawl from a sitemap or a URL list instead of the homepage.** The crawl source can be the website, the sitemaps listed in robots.txt, a sitemap URL you enter, or a CSV/TXT file of URLs. A file of 100 hand-picked URLs (one per template, plus your top landing pages) gets far more out of a free account than 100 pages from the homepage outward.
- **Include or exclude subfolders.** Audit `/blog/` this week and `/products/` next week instead of the whole site at once. Links between sections won't be seen, so orphan and internal-link counts get less reliable.
- **Ignore URL parameters.** Listing parameters such as `?page=` or `?sort=` stops the crawler from spending budget on variants of the same page.
- **Pick the right user agent.** The options are SiteAuditBot (Mobile), the default, SiteAuditBot (Desktop) and OpenAI-Search. The last one shows what OpenAI's search crawler can reach.

### Sample one URL per template

On a templated site, most issues repeat across every page built from the same template. If 5,000 product pages share a template with a missing canonical, 20 of them prove the point as well as 5,000 do. A URL list that takes a handful of pages from each template (`/products/[slug]`, `/category/[slug]`, `/blog/[slug]`, and so on) shows which templates are broken. You then fix the template, not the pages. We explain the approach in [fixing by template](https://seofix.ai/help/fixing-by-template).

What a sample can't do is find the problems that only exist on some pages: one broken link in one product description, a page that 404s, an orphan. For those you need a full crawl.

## Before you spend the budget: make sure the crawler gets in

An audit that Semrush can't fetch still uses pages. Semrush's [troubleshooting article](https://www.semrush.com/kb/681-site-audit-troubleshooting) lists the usual blockers, and two are worth checking first:

- **robots.txt.** Site Audit crawls as `SiteAuditBot`. To let it in explicitly:

```
User-agent: SiteAuditBot
Disallow:
```

- **Firewalls and bot protection.** Semrush says Site Audit uses the subnet `85.208.98.128/25` on ports 80 and 443. If you run Cloudflare, a WAF or a security plugin, allow that range before you start, or you'll spend the budget on challenge pages. If Cloudflare is also blocking Google, see [is Cloudflare blocking Googlebot?](https://seofix.ai/blog/cloudflare-blocking-googlebot)

The same article says a page counts as "couldn't be crawled" when the server takes more than 5 seconds to respond or refuses access, and that landing pages over 2 MB and pages behind a login cause problems too.

## Free alternatives with higher limits

If you need more than 100 pages and don't want a Semrush plan, two free options crawl further. Neither replaces Semrush's keyword or competitor data.

| Tool | Free crawl | Catch |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Semrush Free | 100 pages per audit, 100 per month | One demo project |
| Ahrefs Free (formerly Webmaster Tools) | 5,000 crawl credits per verified project per month | You must verify the site |
| SEOFix | One free audit of up to 500 pages, plus a 50-page preview without an account | One free audit per user and per site |

Ahrefs is the more generous of the two for ongoing monitoring. It gives "5,000 crawl credits per verified project per month" on an unlimited number of verified sites ([Ahrefs Free](https://ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools)), and only "internal HTML pages that return the 200 (OK) HTTP status code" use credits ([Ahrefs help](https://help.ahrefs.com/en/articles/3119402-how-are-site-audit-credits-spent)). Redirects and 404s are free. We describe the set-up in Ahrefs Webmaster Tools setup and how it fits with Search Console in [Ahrefs Webmaster Tools + SEOFix: a $0–9 stack](https://seofix.ai/blog/ahrefs-webmaster-tools-free-seo-stack).

SEOFix's free audit is a one-off: up to 500 pages, no card, and it doesn't use credits ([plans and credits](https://seofix.ai/help/plans-and-credits)). After that, the Starter plan's smallest tier is $9 a month for 10,000 pages, which covers a weekly audit of a site up to about 2,300 pages. SEOFix reads the HTML your server sends and doesn't check backlinks or keywords, so it's a different tool from Semrush, not a cheaper copy.

## FAQ

**Is Semrush Site Audit free?** Yes, up to 100 pages per audit and 100 pages per month on a free account, with one audit at a time.

**How many pages can Semrush crawl?** 20,000 per audit on Starter and Pro+, 100,000 on Advanced. Monthly budgets are 100,000, 300,000 and 1,000,000 pages. Semrush lists "multi-million-page crawling" for Enterprise.

**Do unused Semrush crawl pages roll over?** No. They reset on the 1st of every month.

**Does the 7-day trial raise the limit?** The pricing page offers a 7-day free trial of the paid plans. We couldn't find a page that states the Site Audit limits during the trial, so check them in the project settings once the trial starts.

---

If your site is bigger than your Semrush per-audit cap, run a [free SEOFix audit](https://seofix.ai/) of up to 500 pages and see which templates the issues come from.