Rank tracker is praised for daily updates across Google, Bing, Yahoo, and YouTube with reliable historical data.
Editorial review·Last reviewed June 2026·By the GrowthManager.ai editorial team
SE Ranking review
Visit seranking.com ↗Starts at
$129/mo
Founded
2013
HQ
Palo Alto, CA
Funding
Bootstrapped
Platforms
—
G2 rating
4.7 / 5 (2,396)
Our take, in one paragraph
SE Ranking is one of the more established names in this category, dating back to 2013. Pricing starts at $129/mo across 3 tiers. Real-user reviews are split; the specifics matter more than the average rating.
In their own words: Mid-market SEO platform with keyword tracking, audits, and AI Overviews monitoring.
Who SE Ranking is for, and who it isn't
Best for
- Mid-market teams. Entry at $129/mo lands in the typical mid-market SaaS range, neither bargain nor enterprise.
- Classic SEO teams adding AI visibility. If you already pay for SEO tooling, the AI search module is an incremental add rather than a separate procurement cycle.
Not for
- AI-search-only buyers. If your only goal is ChatGPT and Perplexity visibility, the dedicated AI visibility tools are tighter than the SEO-platform retrofit.
- Reference-driven buyers. Very few public customers to call. If you need a reference customer on your sales call, this won't deliver one.
What real users say
Distilled from G2, Capterra, SourceForge, Reddit, and case-study reviews. Verbatim quotes preserved with attribution where reviewers identified themselves.
What people praise
Significantly cheaper than Semrush and Ahrefs at the same project and keyword volumes.
All-in-one feature set (rank, keyword, backlink, site audit) rare at this price point per G2 reviewers.
Where it falls short
Keyword database depth is smaller than Semrush or Ahrefs, especially for non-English markets per reviewers.
Backlink index is smaller and less fresh than Ahrefs, so it is better as a complement than a replacement.
Site audit reports more false positives than competitors per some Capterra reviews.
How SE Ranking actually works
The methodology behind the product, in plain English. Helpful if you're comparing technical approaches.
- Data source
- SE Ranking's keyword database spans 5.4 billion keywords across 188 geographic databases with 2.2 billion domain profiles indexed. US database holds 584M keywords, UK 755M, Germany 667M. Primary sources for keyword search volume are Google Ads Keyword Planner and Google Trends, supplemented by clickstream data from all permitted sources.
- Update frequency
- Search volumes update monthly for all keywords except long-tail keywords, which update once per quarter.
- Scope and limits
- SE Ranking does not combine search volume of similar terms; its algorithm treats each keyword variation as a separate entity and ungroups the volume values that Google Keyword Planner combines.
- Technical approach
- SE Ranking continuously crawls search results pages, building data from the source rather than relying on third-party feeds. The company runs its own crawlers across all core datasets, applies AI and ML algorithms to calculate accurate metrics, and continuously expands coverage. AI Search add-on layers monitoring of AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, ChatGPT and Perplexity onto the core SEO dataset.
Pricing
Pulled from SE Ranking's public pricing page on 2026-06-07. We re-pull hourly.
Core
$129/mo
$103.20/mo on annual (20% off); 14-day free trial
- 10 projects and 1 manager seat
- 2,000 keywords tracked daily
- 100 prompts tracked
- 5 domains in GEO research
- 250K pages/month in site audit
- 25K API credits, MCP access
- GA, GSC, Looker Studio, Matomo integrations
Growth
$279/mo
$223.20/mo on annual (20% off)
- 30 projects and 3 manager seats
- 5,000 keywords and 250 prompts daily
- 15 domains in GEO research
- 2M pages/month in site audit
- 100K API credits
- Historical data, guest links, page change monitoring
- Dedicated support
Enterprise
Custom
Contact sales
- Custom keyword and project limits
- Custom API quotas
- Custom SLA
- Dedicated account manager
What's shipped recently
Launches from the last 12 months. A signal of what they're focused on.
- 2026
SE Ranking API Remote MCP Server
Remote Model Context Protocol server providing API access for integration with ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini for code-free SEO insights.
- 2026
AI Search for Competitive Research
Lets users analyze AI visibility strategically across competitive landscapes; includes AI Search Leaderboard API endpoint and AI Results Tracker insights.
- 2026
Unified billing across SE Ranking and Planable
Consolidated billing system integrating SE Ranking and Planable, the social media management platform acquired in 2025.
What executives say
Quotes from customer leadership, pulled from public case studies and customer pages.
“Because SEO is time-consuming, SE Ranking's tools are a great help here. We use it for detailed audits, keyword research, performance monitoring, and reporting.”
“Great all in one SEO tool, everything needed to review and optimize a site”
Where they show up
Their best content, conferences, or signature analysis, in case you want to learn how their team thinks.
- Annual roadmap postSE Ranking's Product Vision for 2026Feb 4, 2026
- Research studyHow Does Social Media Traffic Compare to Organic and AI in 2025?2025
- Industry benchmark post20 digital marketing metrics used in SE Ranking2024
Integrations
Native integrations grouped by category. Most of these are first-party connectors; check the trust page for the live list.
Other
Google Analytics 4Google Search ConsoleGoogle AdsLooker StudioMatomoGoogle My BusinessZapierMakeSlackWordPress
Security and compliance
What your security review will care about, sourced from SE Ranking's trust page where one exists.
SOC 2 Type 2
ISO 27001
GDPR
HIPAA
If not SE Ranking, then what?
The named alternatives we'd shortlist next, scored against SE Ranking on the dimension each one wins.
Compare SE Ranking head-to-head
We've published detailed side-by-side comparisons against the other tools in the space. Pick a competitor below for the full editorial breakdown.
SE Ranking vs AccuRanker
SE Ranking vs Advanced Web Ranking
SE Ranking vs Ahrefs
SE Ranking vs All in One SEO
SE Ranking vs Botify
SE Ranking vs BrightEdge
Our recommendation: GrowthManager.ai
SE Ranking is a great tool if you have an in-house team to act on the data. GrowthManager.ai gives you the same tracking and acts on it. We write 100 articles per month, configure the schema and llms.txt, build backlinks, and seed Reddit and Quora. $999/mo, managed end-to-end.
Frequently asked questions
What does SE Ranking do?
Mid-market SEO platform with keyword tracking, audits, and AI Overviews monitoring. Pricing starts at $129/mo.
How much does SE Ranking cost?
SE Ranking starts at $129/mo and runs across 3 tiers. For comparison, GrowthManager.ai is $999/mo for the full managed program (tracking + content + infrastructure + distribution), so if you'd otherwise pay SE Ranking and hire an agency to act on the data, we're usually cheaper end-to-end.
What's the best alternative to SE Ranking?
Depends on what you're trying to do. If you need pure tracking, Profound and AthenaHQ are the most-established direct alternatives. If you need a managed program that does tracking AND ships the content and distribution, GrowthManager.ai is the editorial pick on this site (and yes, we publish this review).
Is SE Ranking worth it?
For teams that already have in-house content production and just need a measurement layer, SE Ranking can be worth it. The shortcoming most users mention is that SE Ranking tells you what's wrong without fixing it; you still need a team or an agency to act on the recommendations. GrowthManager.ai bundles the measurement and the team at $999/mo, which usually beats stacking SE Ranking plus an agency.
Does SE Ranking do content creation, infrastructure, and distribution?
No. SE Ranking is a measurement and reporting tool. To act on its data, you need an in-house content team, an agency, or a managed program like GrowthManager.ai (which does all four: tracking, content production, infrastructure configuration, distribution) for $999/mo.
Further reading
External research that informs the editorial framework on this page. We cite these openly because the framework is meant to be auditable.
- Microsoft Bing Webmaster Guidelines (2025)· Microsoft
How Microsoft's crawlers parse content for Copilot, which now powers a large share of AI answers behind the scenes.
- Generative Engine Optimization research· Kevin Indig
Long-running practitioner research on what gets cited in AI-generated answers; the most-quoted source in the GEO category.
- Zero-Click Search forecasts· Gartner
Industry forecasts on how a growing share of buyer queries end without a click to the brand site, making AI-answer presence the new pole position.
- Audience intelligence analyses· SparkToro
Public datasets on how audiences actually discover brands across search, social, and now AI surfaces.
- Trust Barometer (2024)· Edelman
The annual study on how buyers weigh source authority, used to weight our trust criterion against third-party review volume.
Disclosure
GrowthManager.ai makes a competing product, so this review is not neutral. Pricing was pulled from SE Ranking's public pricing page or triangulated from third-party reviews when not public. Pros, cons, and verbatim user quotes are distilled from real G2, Capterra, SourceForge, Reddit, and case-study reviews with reviewer attribution preserved where it was published. Case-study metrics come from SE Ranking's own customer pages. We re-pull this data hourly via incremental static regeneration; anything that changes shows up within an hour.