Keysearch Starter costs $24 a month and gives you 200 keyword searches a day, 80 tracked keywords, and 2,000 audited pages.
Pro doubles the price to $48 and lifts three of those numbers. Five hundred searches a day, 200 tracked keywords, 5,000 audited pages, plus a bigger pot of AI credits. Annual billing hands back two months, which works out to nearly $20 and $40.
Those numbers are why the budget end of the keyword tool market functions at all for a one-person site. The useful question is not which figure is larger. It is which one you hit first, because they run out in a very particular order.
Bulk checking is the exception. It eats the allowance quickly enough that Keysearch built a guardrail called Bulk Check Credit Saver, switched on by default, which skips cached scores during bulk difficulty runs specifically to conserve your searches.
That setting tells you two useful things at once. Bulk work is expensive enough to need protecting against, and the protection is exactly why some numbers in a bulk export come back from the cache rather than from a live check.
The allowance also resets every morning rather than every month. Nothing you skip on Tuesday turns up on Wednesday, which quietly penalizes one working style and rewards another.
Sit down for a single enormous research day each quarter, and you will bump the ceiling repeatedly while leaving hundreds of unused searches stranded across the other eighty-nine days. Check a dozen terms most mornings, and you will never notice the limit exists.
So the number of searches you actually burn in a session depends far more on your habits than on which plan you bought. Most bloggers on Starter never come close.
Paying annually changes none of this. The two free months are a discount on identical ceilings, not a bigger allowance, so the decision between plans stays exactly where it was.
Publish weekly with one target term per post, and you are full in about eighteen months. Publish twice a week, and you get nine months before something has to come out.
Most reviews quote the daily search figure prominently and never mention this one, which is odd, because it is the limit that changes how you work.
What happens next is predictable. You start choosing between tracking your new posts and keeping watch on the old ones, and almost everybody quietly drops the old ones.
That is the wrong trade. An established post that slid from position four to position eleven is the cheapest traffic on your site to win back, and you will not spot the slide if nothing is watching it.
Audited pages sit somewhere in the middle. Two thousand a month on Starter against 5,000 on Pro means a 400-page site can be crawled five times in a month, which is generous for one project and tight across three.
The AI credits follow the same split. Five thousand a month on Starter, 15,000 on Pro, which covers the writing assistant rather than the research side.
That matters if a demo video is what brought you here. The cheap plan is not the plan you watched, and no amount of daily search headroom substitutes for a feature that is switched off.
Everything else is shared. Keyword research, live results page analysis, competitor analysis, backlink analysis, YouTube research, the site auditor, the writing assistant and rank tracking all appear on both plans, which is why the cheap tier feels complete until you meet one of the numbers.
Set against each other, the gap between the two plans costs $288 a year and mostly buys 120 extra tracked keywords and the AI tier. The extra 300 daily searches are the least valuable thing in that box, because almost nobody was running out of them in the first place.
Pro doubles the price to $48 and lifts three of those numbers. Five hundred searches a day, 200 tracked keywords, 5,000 audited pages, plus a bigger pot of AI credits. Annual billing hands back two months, which works out to nearly $20 and $40.
Those numbers are why the budget end of the keyword tool market functions at all for a one-person site. The useful question is not which figure is larger. It is which one you hit first, because they run out in a very particular order.
The daily allowance is easier to live with than it sounds
Two hundred searches a day is roughly 6,000 a month if you spent every one, and nobody does. Individual difficulty checks, competitor lookups, and results page analysis all draw from the same pot, and a normal planning session might use twenty.Bulk checking is the exception. It eats the allowance quickly enough that Keysearch built a guardrail called Bulk Check Credit Saver, switched on by default, which skips cached scores during bulk difficulty runs specifically to conserve your searches.
That setting tells you two useful things at once. Bulk work is expensive enough to need protecting against, and the protection is exactly why some numbers in a bulk export come back from the cache rather than from a live check.
The allowance also resets every morning rather than every month. Nothing you skip on Tuesday turns up on Wednesday, which quietly penalizes one working style and rewards another.
Sit down for a single enormous research day each quarter, and you will bump the ceiling repeatedly while leaving hundreds of unused searches stranded across the other eighty-nine days. Check a dozen terms most mornings, and you will never notice the limit exists.
So the number of searches you actually burn in a session depends far more on your habits than on which plan you bought. Most bloggers on Starter never come close.
Paying annually changes none of this. The two free months are a discount on identical ceilings, not a bigger allowance, so the decision between plans stays exactly where it was.
Eighty tracked keywords is the real ceiling
Rank tracking works on a different clock. Searches refresh every morning, but tracked keywords are a fixed allowance rather than something that tops itself up, and 80 slots on Starter fill faster than you would think.Publish weekly with one target term per post, and you are full in about eighteen months. Publish twice a week, and you get nine months before something has to come out.
Most reviews quote the daily search figure prominently and never mention this one, which is odd, because it is the limit that changes how you work.
What happens next is predictable. You start choosing between tracking your new posts and keeping watch on the old ones, and almost everybody quietly drops the old ones.
That is the wrong trade. An established post that slid from position four to position eleven is the cheapest traffic on your site to win back, and you will not spot the slide if nothing is watching it.
Audited pages sit somewhere in the middle. Two thousand a month on Starter against 5,000 on Pro means a 400-page site can be crawled five times in a month, which is generous for one project and tight across three.
The AI layer only exists on the expensive plan
Foresight AI is the feature Keysearch has been demonstrated with most often, and it does not appear on Starter at all. The plan comparison says so bluntly, listing Starter as not including Foresight.The AI credits follow the same split. Five thousand a month on Starter, 15,000 on Pro, which covers the writing assistant rather than the research side.
That matters if a demo video is what brought you here. The cheap plan is not the plan you watched, and no amount of daily search headroom substitutes for a feature that is switched off.
Everything else is shared. Keyword research, live results page analysis, competitor analysis, backlink analysis, YouTube research, the site auditor, the writing assistant and rank tracking all appear on both plans, which is why the cheap tier feels complete until you meet one of the numbers.
Set against each other, the gap between the two plans costs $288 a year and mostly buys 120 extra tracked keywords and the AI tier. The extra 300 daily searches are the least valuable thing in that box, because almost nobody was running out of them in the first place.
