Search Atlas Pricing 2026: Plans, OTTO SEO Costs and Credits Explained
Search Atlas pricing starts at $99 per month, but the base subscription is only part of the cost. The configuration you actually need depends on how many sites require active OTTO SEO automation, how quickly you consume Universal Credits, how many people need access and whether you need AI visibility or agency features.
This pricing guide models those variables rather than treating Starter, Growth, Pro and Agency as four progressively larger versions of the same product. If you want our assessment of OTTO SEO, reliability, features and overall product quality, see the separate Search Atlas review. This page is specifically about choosing and costing the right configuration.
Pricing checked 4 September 2026. Search Atlas currently advertises monthly list prices of $99, $199, $399 and $999, while its official pricing page shows discounted annual pricing on Starter, Growth and Pro.
| Plan | Monthly billing | Annual billing | Universal Credits | Included projects | Seats | Key reason to upgrade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $99/month | $950/year, about $79/month | 50,000/month | 1 | 1 | Core Search Atlas, OTTO SEO and content execution for one brand |
| Growth | $199/month | $1,910/year, about $159/month | 120,000/month | 2 | 3 | AI Visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Mode, plus Google and Meta ad tools |
| Pro | $399/month | $3,828/year, $319/month | 400,000/month | 4 | 5 | White-label reporting plus wider AI visibility including Copilot and Perplexity |
| Agency / Enterprise | From $999/month | $11,988/year as currently displayed | 1,000,000+/month | 10+ | 10 | Client portals, larger portfolios, branded dashboards and much higher capacity |
What Search Atlas actually costs for 1, 5, 20 and 50 active sites
This is where Search Atlas pricing becomes more interesting. Search Atlas has also published a volume-based OTTO activation ladder: $99 for one additional activation, $85 each for 2-3, $69 each for 4-9, $59 each for 10-24 and $49 each for 25-99, with custom pricing above that.
The current main pricing page does not display that add-on ladder alongside the new Universal Credit plans, so the calculations below should be treated as budgeting models rather than guaranteed checkout quotes. Confirm additional OTTO pricing before signing an annual contract.
| Active OTTO sites | Example configuration | Estimated monthly cost | Cost per active site | What to know |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Starter | $99 | $99 | Fine for one automated site unless AI Visibility or extra seats are required. |
| 5 | Starter + 4 additional activations | About $375 | $75 | Capacity-led configuration using the published 4-9 activation rate. No Growth AI Visibility features. |
| 5 | Growth + 3 additional activations | About $454 | $90.80 | More sensible where the five-site team also needs AI Visibility and three user seats. |
| 5 | Pro + 1 additional activation | About $498 | $99.60 | Costs slightly more but adds white-label reporting, five seats and broader AI visibility. |
| 20 | Agency + 10 additional activations | About $1,589 | $79.45 | Reference cost if all 20 sites genuinely require OTTO to remain active at once. |
| 50 | Agency + 40 additional activations | About $2,959 | $59.18 | At this scale, compare the public arithmetic with a negotiated Enterprise quote before buying. |
Those figures use monthly plan pricing. We have not assumed that the annual discount applies to additional OTTO activations because Search Atlas does not currently publish an annual add-on discount in its main pricing matrix.
Buying shortcut: five websites do not automatically mean you need a five-site configuration. If only two sites are actively being optimised through OTTO this month, price two active projects, not five domains sitting in your portfolio.
Check the current Search Atlas plans and 7-day trial.
Do not price Search Atlas by total client count
An agency with 20 clients can have a lower Search Atlas requirement than a publisher with six sites. The difference is workload. If the agency is actively automating four accounts while the publisher runs OTTO continuously across all six properties, total client count tells you very little about the software bill.
I would model Search Atlas around five numbers.
| Cost driver | Question to answer | Why it changes the plan |
|---|---|---|
| Concurrent projects | How many sites need to be worked on at the same time? | The included project allowance rises from 1 to 2, 4 and 10+. |
| Automated sites | How many properties actually need OTTO active? | Additional OTTO activations can become a major part of the monthly bill. |
| Credit consumption | How much content, analysis and agentic execution will you run? | Universal Credits rise from 50,000 to more than one million a month. |
| People needing access | Is this one operator or a team of account managers, editors and strategists? | Seat limits move from 1 to 3, 5 and 10. |
| AI visibility requirements | Do you actually need ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode, Copilot and Perplexity monitoring? | Starter does not include the same AI visibility package. Growth and Pro add progressively wider coverage. |
This also exposes a common buying mistake: choosing Agency because you have an agency. Plan names are not a requirements document. A small agency with three staff and four clients may be better served by Growth or Pro, while an in-house publisher with a large portfolio may legitimately need Agency capacity.
Which Search Atlas configuration do you actually need?
Solo site: Starter unless AI Visibility is part of the brief
Starter is the logical entry point for a single website operated by one person. You get one project, one seat, 50,000 Universal Credits and the core Search Atlas execution environment, including OTTO SEO and Content Genius.
The reason to pay $199 for Growth on a one-site operation is not that the website has become more complicated. It is that you specifically want features sitting above Starter, particularly AI Visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Mode, or you need more than one user.
Publisher with several sites: calculate the active queue
A publisher with five sites should decide whether all five need continuous automation. Often they do not. One site may be in a major refresh cycle, two may need ongoing technical work and another two may only need monitoring.
If two properties need active OTTO work and AI visibility is useful, Growth can be enough at $199 per month. If all five require simultaneous automation, the additional activation calculation becomes relevant. This is also where making durable changes in the CMS rather than depending indefinitely on an automation layer can improve the economics, provided the implementation method preserves what you need when a project is deactivated.
Small agency: Growth and Pro solve different problems
Growth is the better starting point for a small agency whose staff work inside Search Atlas but clients do not. It includes three seats, two projects and AI visibility, so it covers the point where Search Atlas becomes more than a core SEO execution tool.
Pro becomes easier to justify when white-label delivery is part of what clients are paying for. Five seats, wider AI-platform coverage and white-label dashboards are commercial features, not merely higher usage limits. Paying for Pro makes little sense if your clients never see a Search Atlas report and the team has no use for the additional AI visibility coverage.
20-client agency: separate the client roster from the automation roster
A 20-client agency does not necessarily need 20 active OTTO sites. Suppose five clients buy a high-touch automated SEO service, another five receive reporting and research, and ten are on maintenance retainers. Pricing all 20 as active automation projects would overstate the required capacity.
If all 20 genuinely need OTTO running simultaneously, the public activation model puts the reference cost around $1,589 per month using Agency plus ten additional activations. If only ten need active automation, the $999 Agency allowance may already cover them.
This is a more useful agency metric than software cost per client:
Search Atlas cost per automated client = total Search Atlas monthly spend / clients receiving active automation.
Do not dilute the denominator with clients who only receive a PDF or occasional keyword research. That can make the platform look artificially cheap while hiding what the automated service actually costs to deliver.
Agency using OTTO selectively: this can change the economics completely
Selective OTTO use is probably the most efficient agency configuration. Put new clients, declining sites and major refresh projects into the active automation queue. Stable accounts do not necessarily need permanent OTTO capacity simply because they remain on retainer.
The operational catch is change ownership. Before rotating a site out, establish which optimisations live in the CMS, which depend on the Search Atlas implementation layer and which need to be made permanent. Saving $59 or $69 per month is not a win if an account manager later has to reconstruct a site’s configuration manually.
Team wanting AI visibility but little automation: Growth is the important threshold
Growth is currently the minimum plan I would price for a team buying Search Atlas primarily for AI visibility. It adds monitoring across ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Mode along with three seats and 120,000 Universal Credits.
Pro adds Copilot and Perplexity for five AI platforms in total, but do not upgrade simply to collect more dashboards. Ask whether those extra engines influence reporting or client decisions. If nobody acts on the additional data, the extra $200 per month on monthly billing is difficult to justify.
Universal Credits are the part most pricing comparisons underspecify
Search Atlas now describes Universal Credits as a monthly execution budget. Starter includes 50,000, Growth 120,000, Pro 400,000 and Agency more than one million.
The mistake is treating 120,000 credits as though it automatically means a fixed number of articles, audits or OTTO changes. The useful unit is not credits purchased. It is credits consumed by the work your team accepts.
Use the trial to build your own consumption model. Pick four or five repeatable jobs, record the credits before and after each one, and note whether the result was actually usable.
| Trial job | What to record | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Technical OTTO cycle | Credits consumed and approved fixes | Cost of recurring technical execution |
| Existing content refresh | Credits consumed and editor time | Whether automation reduces the full refresh cost |
| New content workflow | Credits consumed from research through usable draft | How much of the credit budget content production will absorb |
| AI visibility monitoring | Credit movement across the prompt set you intend to track | Whether Growth or Pro capacity fits ongoing monitoring |
| Agent workflow | Credits consumed and percentage of output accepted | Whether agentic execution is cheaper than the manual process it replaces |
Then forecast by task rather than guessing:
Expected monthly credits = sum of average credits per task × expected monthly frequency, plus sensible headroom.
I would leave roughly 20% headroom during the first few months rather than buying a plan that fits the test workload exactly. New automation usually expands once the team starts finding workflows worth repeating.
The annual pricing saves 20% on three plans, but not Agency as currently displayed
Search Atlas advertises a 20% annual saving. The maths works closely on Starter, Growth and Pro.
| Plan | 12 months paid monthly | Current annual bill | Annual saving |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $1,188 | $950 | $238 |
| Growth | $2,388 | $1,910 | $478 |
| Pro | $4,788 | $3,828 | $960 |
| Agency | $11,988 | $11,988 as currently displayed | $0 |
The Agency figure is worth checking before purchase. The current annual pricing view displays $999 with a $11,988 annual bill, which is exactly 12 monthly payments. Do not assume the headline 20% annual saving automatically applies to Agency or Enterprise.
I would also avoid choosing annual billing until the team has completed a real production cycle. A $960 Pro saving is attractive only if Pro is still the correct configuration six months later.
See more of our reporting in Google Top Stories, AI Overviews and AI Mode.
The 7-day free trial is short enough that you need a test plan
Search Atlas currently offers a 7-day trial and free onboarding. Its own site also states that the trial converts into a paid subscription unless cancelled, so this is not a trial I would start on a Friday afternoon and return to the following week.
There is some inconsistent wording across Search Atlas pages about exactly which selected plan a trial renews into. Check the checkout summary, take a screenshot of the renewal tier and record the cancellation deadline before connecting anything.
The refund policy is also fairly strict. Search Atlas currently says most subscription refund requests need to be made quickly after billing and are subject to low quota usage, while annual subscriptions have separate conditions and add-ons or upgrades are excluded. That makes the trial the correct time to test production workflows, not just explore the interface.
The hidden Search Atlas cost is QA, not another subscription line
A recurring practitioner concern around OTTO is not lack of features. It is how much trust teams should place in automated changes, integrations and reporting before reviewing the work themselves.
This changes the real cost calculation. If Search Atlas saves four hours of implementation but creates three hours of review, reconciliation and clean-up, the subscription has not created the labour saving suggested by the demo.
For the first month, I would keep a named reviewer on anything that can materially affect crawling, indexing, templates or high-value pages. Metadata and straightforward low-risk fixes can move faster. Canonicals, redirects, schema, important internal links, navigation and commercial-page copy deserve stricter approval.
Measure three things alongside credits: accepted changes, review time and rollback work. They reveal more about the real cost of OTTO than the number of recommendations produced.
Search Atlas is only cheaper if it actually replaces part of your stack
A $399 Pro subscription is not automatically expensive or cheap. The answer depends on what disappears after you adopt it.
If Search Atlas replaces separate tools for content optimisation, rank tracking, AI visibility, reporting and parts of technical implementation, the consolidated cost can be attractive. If your team continues paying for its existing research suite, content platform and reporting tools because nobody completely trusts the replacement workflow, Search Atlas becomes an additional expense rather than a consolidation play.
This is particularly important for teams comparing it with established research software. Our Search Atlas vs Semrush comparison looks at those workflow differences rather than assuming overlapping feature lists make the products interchangeable.
Before approving the annual bill, list every subscription you expect to cancel. Recheck the list after 30 days. If none of them have actually gone, include them in the Search Atlas total cost rather than continuing to call the platform a replacement.
Which Search Atlas plan is best value?
| Situation | Best starting point | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| One site, one operator, core SEO automation | Starter | Lowest sensible entry point with one project and 50,000 credits. |
| One or two sites that need AI visibility | Growth | AI Visibility is the important feature boundary, not the number of websites. |
| Small team with several sites | Growth | Three seats, 120,000 credits and two included projects provide useful room without agency packaging. |
| Agency selling branded reporting | Pro | White-label capability and five seats make the higher tier commercially useful. |
| Agency wanting five-platform AI visibility | Pro | Copilot and Perplexity are added to the Growth AI coverage. |
| Agency with 10+ simultaneously automated sites | Agency / Enterprise | Ten-plus projects, client portals, ten seats and much larger credit capacity. |
| Large portfolio with only a few sites automated at once | Price the active queue first | Total domain count can push you into an unnecessarily expensive configuration. |
For most teams buying Search Atlas because of its newer AI and acquisition capabilities, Growth is the meaningful starting point. Starter is substantially cheaper, but buying Starter and then discovering that AI visibility was one of the main reasons you wanted Search Atlas defeats the saving.
Search Atlas pricing FAQs
How much does Search Atlas cost?
Search Atlas currently costs $99 per month for Starter, $199 for Growth, $399 for Pro and from $999 for Agency / Enterprise on monthly billing. Annual pricing reduces Starter to about $79 per month, Growth to about $159 and Pro to $319 when paid upfront for the year.
How much does OTTO SEO cost?
OTTO SEO projects are included in the main Search Atlas plans, with current allowances of one project on Starter, two on Growth, four on Pro and 10+ on Agency. Search Atlas has also published volume pricing for additional OTTO activations ranging from $99 per site down to $49 per site at higher volumes. Confirm the current add-on quote because the new main pricing page does not presently show the full activation ladder.
What are Search Atlas Universal Credits?
Universal Credits are Search Atlas’s shared monthly execution budget. Current allowances run from 50,000 credits on Starter to 1,000,000+ on Agency. Instead of assuming a credit total equals a fixed amount of output, measure the credit cost of the tasks your team actually performs during the trial.
What is the cheapest Search Atlas plan with AI visibility?
Growth is currently the relevant entry plan for AI Visibility. It includes ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Mode monitoring. Pro expands coverage with Copilot and Perplexity.
Does Search Atlas have a free trial?
Yes. Search Atlas currently advertises a 7-day trial plus free onboarding. Its site says the trial converts into a paid subscription unless cancelled, so verify the renewal plan and cancellation deadline at checkout.
Is Search Atlas cheaper if paid annually?
Yes for Starter, Growth and Pro at the prices currently displayed. The annual savings are approximately $238, $478 and $960 respectively compared with paying the monthly rate for 12 months. Agency is currently displayed at $11,988 annually, the same as 12 payments of $999, so confirm the annual Agency quote separately.
How much would Search Atlas cost for a 20-client agency?
It depends on how many of the 20 clients need active OTTO automation. Ten simultaneously active sites can fit the current Agency project allowance. Using Search Atlas’s published add-on ladder as a reference, automating all 20 at once would put the estimated monthly cost around $1,589 before any negotiated Enterprise arrangement.
Our pricing recommendation
Do not choose a Search Atlas plan by counting every domain or client in your business. Build the price around simultaneous projects, sites receiving active automation, Universal Credit consumption, seats and the AI visibility coverage you will genuinely use.
Starter makes sense for one operator running core SEO on one property. Growth is the real threshold for teams buying Search Atlas partly for AI visibility. Pro is easier to justify when Search Atlas becomes part of the client-facing agency product, while Agency should be purchased for genuine portfolio capacity rather than because your company happens to call itself an agency.
The best cost-control strategy is selective automation. Keep OTTO active where work is happening, measure credits against accepted output, make important changes durable and only expand capacity when the active queue proves you need it. That produces a much more reliable Search Atlas budget than multiplying the number of clients by an advertised per-site figure.
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