Semrush
Marketing · Subscription
Overview
An online marketing platform used mainly for search research. It shows which search terms bring traffic to a site, what competitors rank for, where their links come from, and how their ads look. The company was founded in 2008, later listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and in April 2026 was acquired by Adobe in a deal worth about 1.9 billion dollars. It is built around a very large store of search data that Semrush collects itself. Marketers use it to plan content, track their rankings over time, study rivals, and check a site for technical search problems.
What people use it for
Keyword planning is the core use. Marketers look up what their customers actually type into search, see how hard each term is to rank for, and pick the ones worth writing about. Competitor research is next. You enter a rival's website and see the terms they rank for, the pages that pull their traffic, and the sites linking to them, which points to gaps you can go after. Rank tracking is a daily habit. Teams follow their positions for a set list of terms, broken down by country, city, and device, and watch the trend line. Site audits are run on a schedule. Semrush crawls a site and lists technical faults that hurt search visibility, with fixes ranked by importance. Newer work includes AI visibility: checking whether a brand shows up in answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's AI overviews, and how those tools describe it.
Key capabilities
Semrush is built on data it gathers itself. Its keyword store holds more than 28 billion terms across 142 regional databases. Its backlink index lists over 43 trillion links across roughly 808 million domain profiles, with about 10 billion pages crawled every day. Keyword research shows search volume, difficulty, and intent for each term. Competitor analysis reveals the keywords, top pages, and ad campaigns behind a rival's traffic. Position tracking follows your rankings by country, city, and device on a daily basis. The Site Audit crawls a site for technical, on-page, and performance faults and ranks the fixes. Backlink tools audit a link profile and find link gaps against competitors. Content tools draft search-optimized articles from a brief, and digital PR features help find journalists and build links. Branded reports can be scheduled and sent automatically. The AI visibility tools track whether a brand appears in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Google's AI overviews, and compare how those tools describe the brand against rivals. Local tools manage business listings and track local rankings. Semrush Academy publishes more than 90 free training courses. Some plans include MCP access so AI assistants can query the data directly.
Limitations
Cost is the top complaint in public reviews. Roughly 1,900 of about 4,000 Semrush reviews on G2 mention pricing, and the platform is seen as steep for freelancers and small agencies. Extra users and some report features cost more on top of the base plan. Ease of use is the lowest rated part of the product on both G2 and Capterra. With more than 50 tools inside, the learning curve is long even with training. The traffic and keyword numbers are estimates and can differ from reality, so they work better as direction than as exact figures. Lower plans cap how many keywords you can track and how many rows a report returns. Adobe now owns Semrush, so the roadmap and packaging may change.
Insight
Semrush earns its place as a planning and competitor tool, not a reporting one. The single most useful move is to point it at three or four competitor domains and read the list of terms and pages driving their traffic. That surfaces content gaps faster than any keyword brainstorm. Treat every traffic and volume number as a rough signal. Semrush cannot see a competitor's analytics, so it is modeling, and for smaller sites it can be off by a wide margin. Use it to rank opportunities against each other, then confirm your own numbers in Search Console and your analytics. Watch the plan limits before you buy, because the keyword tracking caps and report row limits on the lower tiers catch teams out. And with Adobe now in charge, expect pricing and bundling to shift over the next year or two.
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Last checked 2026-08-30