A credit is how you pay for data we buy from someone else on your behalf.
Your plan includes a monthly allowance of them. Every action that spends credits tells you roughly what it will cost before you run it, and cached results cost nothing.
What spends credits
- Keyword research — volumes, difficulty, related keywords
- Rank tracking — one check, per keyword, per device
- Backlinks — pulling a link profile
- Domain overview and competitor data
- AI visibility — asking an AI engine a question and reading the answer
- Content monitor — checking a page for changes
What does not spend credits
- Opening, filtering, sorting or exporting anything already on screen
- Re-opening a result you already ran
- Site audits and Search Console — those use monthly caps instead (why)
- Inviting teammates, sharing a client portal, changing settings
What a credit costs
Every plan includes roughly double its price in credits, so the rate is about the same wherever you start:
| Plan | Per month | Credits | Cost per credit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $99 | 200 | $0.50 |
| Agency | $199 | 400 | $0.50 |
| Growth | $399 | 800 | $0.50 |
| Scale | $799 | 1,600 | $0.50 |
| Top-up | $10–$99, any time | 1 per $1 | $1.00 |
A top-up is twice the plan rate. That is deliberate — it is the price of not committing — and it means a month where you routinely top up is a month where the next plan up would have been cheaper.
What a credit buys
| Work | Cost |
|---|---|
| Market Map / competitor lookup | 1 credit |
| Backlink lookup | 2 credits |
| Keyword research, one seed | 5 credits |
| AI Research, one platform | 0.75 credits |
| AI prompt check, one engine | 2 per credit |
| Content monitor, 50 pages | 5 per credit |
| Xavier task | 5 per credit |
| Rank tracking, 100 keywords daily for a month | 84 credits |
So a $20 top-up covers any one of: 20 competitor lookups, 10 backlink lookups, 4 keyword searches, 40 AI prompt checks, 100 content-monitor batches, or about 111 Xavier tasks.
Rank tracking is the line that decides your plan. Everything else is something you run when you need it; rank tracking runs every day whether you open the app or not. 100 keywords checked daily is roughly 84 credits a month — most of a Starter plan on its own. Check weekly instead and the same 100 keywords cost about 11 credits — roughly a seventh — and monthly costs under 3.
Site audits are not in this table because they do not spend credits. A crawl draws on your plan's monthly crawl-page cap instead (why). The only credit spend inside an audit is rendering a page with JavaScript, which is metered like any other data call — and most pages do not need it.
Two kinds of credits
Monthly credits come with your plan and reset each billing month. Unused ones do not carry over.
Top-up credits are bought separately, never expire, and are only used once your monthly credits are gone. So buying a top-up during a busy month is not wasted if you do not use it all.
Where to see what you have left
The credit counter sits at the bottom of the left sidebar on every screen. Billing shows the detail: what is left, what was spent, and which feature spent it.