Semrush Review: This Tool Found an SEO Gap I Missed

Do you spend hours digging through SEO reports, only to end up with more data and no idea what to actually do next? That’s the part of SEO that gets exhausting: the tools can tell you what is happening, but turning all those numbers into an actual plan is another story.

Semrush has built its reputation around solving that problem by bringing keyword research, competitor analysis, site audits, rank tracking, and now AI search visibility into one platform. But does all that data actually help you make better SEO decisions?

I put Semrush through five tests to see how well it actually performs, from checking rank accuracy and building a keyword plan to comparing competitors, auditing a site, and tracking how often AI assistants mention Unite.ai.

In this Semrush review, I’ll break down what worked, what didn’t, how accurate the data actually was, and whether the platform is worth the price. I’ll also compare Semrush with Ahrefs, Moz, and Writesonic so you can see which type of SEO workflow each tool is built for.

Verdict

Semrush is a powerful SEO toolkit with strong keyword research, competitor analysis, site audits, and AI visibility tools. My testing found the data was generally accurate and often useful, but it can easily become expensive and overwhelming. Semrush doesn’t go into too much detail on what the data means, so you also need SEO knowledge to filter the data and decide what matters. The free plan is useful for basic research, but many of the best tools require a paid plan.

What is Semrush?

Semrush is an online visibility platform. What started in 2008 as a keyword and competitor research tool for SEO professionals grew into a full marketing suite. It was even acquired by Adobe in a deal that closed on April 28, 2026.

In practice, Semrush answers two questions.

1. What is happening in search for my site and my competitors?
2. What should I do about it?

What You Get Out of Semrush

Semrush doesn’t create your website or rank it for you. What it produces is data and recommendations:

• Reports on any domain: estimated traffic, the keywords it ranks for, its top pages, and who links to it.
• Keyword lists built from a seed term, with volume, difficulty, intent, and CPC for each keyword.
• Gap analyses that show which keywords or backlinks your competitors have and you don’t.
• Audits that crawl your site and flag technical issues, ranked by how serious they are.
• Rank tracking that updates daily, for Google and now for AI answers.
• Content briefs and drafts through the content tools, based on what’s already ranking.

From SEO Tool to SEO + AI search

The biggest change since the original version of Semrush is how it’s packaged.

The old payment tiers haven’t been replaced entirely. Semrush now offers traditional SEO plans alongside plans that combine SEO with AI visibility. Semrush calls this Semrush One.

The AI Visibility tools show whether your brand appears in answers from ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Gemini. It’s the same idea as rank tracking, applied to AI search engines instead of the classic search engine results page.

Semrush Inside Your AI assistant

Semrush ships an MCP server and an official ChatGPT app that launched in December 2025.

You can ask an assistant something like “Which keywords does competitor X rank for that we don’t?” and get live Semrush data back without opening the dashboard. For people who already work inside AI assistants, this may end up being how they use Semrush most.

Who is Semrush Best For?

Here’s who Semrush is best for:

• SEO managers can track rankings for up to 1,500 keywords on the Pro+ plan and audit the site weekly along with AI visibility reporting in the same place.
• Marketing agencies can run competitor research, manage up to 40 client sites on the Advanced plan, and send clients scheduled white-label reports.
• Content marketers and bloggers can use Keyword Magic and the Keyword Gap to find topics competitors already get traffic from. They can then build a brief based on what currently ranks.
• Brand and PR teams can see how ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity describe their company, which sources those answers cite, and whether a competitor is recommended first.
• Marketing teams that work in AI assistants can pull Semrush data into ChatGPT or Claude through the app and MCP server to build briefs and reports faster.
• E-commerce teams can find commercial-intent product keywords and catch technical issues across thousands of product URLs.
• Local businesses can add the Local toolkit to manage Google Business Profile listings and track rankings by neighborhood.
• PPC marketers can research competitor ads and keyword CPCs before spending money on a campaign.

Semrush Key Features

Here are the Semrush key features that stood out to me:

• Domain Overview: A snapshot of any site’s estimated organic and paid traffic, Authority Score, top keywords, top pages and backlinks. It’s the fastest way to size up a competitor.
• Keyword Magic Tool: Takes a seed keyword and returns related terms from a database of ~27 billion keywords. You can filter by intent, difficulty, volume and question format.
• Keyword Overview & Strategy Builder: Shows the key metrics for a single keyword and groups related terms into topic clusters you can build content around.
• Keyword Gap: Compares up to five domains and splits keywords into missing, weak, strong and untapped, giving you a prioritized list of opportunities.
• Backlink Analytics & Backlink Gap: Show who links to any domain and which sites link to your competitors but not to you. This basically hands you an outreach list.
• Position Tracking: Daily rank tracking by device and location, with SERP features like featured snippets, tracked alongside your blue-link position.
• Site Audit: Crawls your site for 140+ technical and on-page issues, ranks them by severity. It now includes checks on whether AI crawlers can access and read your pages.
• AI Visibility Overview: Measures how often your brand shows up in AI answers across platforms, topics and regions.
• Brand Performance & Sentiment: Shows how AI assistants describe your brand and products, and whether that description is positive, neutral or negative.
• Prompt Research & Tracking: Suggests the prompts people are likely asking AI assistants in your niche, then tracks your presence in those answers daily.
• Content tools: The SEO Writing Assistant and Content toolkit generate briefs and drafts based on top-ranking pages. The Pro+ plan adds content optimization. But if writing guidance is all you need, a dedicated tool like Surfer SEO goes deeper.
• Semrush MCP & ChatGPT app: Live Semrush data inside AI assistants for briefs, competitor checks and recurring reports.
• My Reports: PDF reports built from any Semrush data, which you can schedule and white-label for clients.
• Specialist toolkits: Local, Traffic & Market, Content, Social, Advertising and AI PR, each priced separately so you only add what you need.

Hands-On Testing: What Semrush Actually Produced

Here are the five tests I ran with Semrush on Unite.ai:

1. Checking the accuracy of Semrush’s traffic estimates
2. Building a keyword plan for a new article
3. Finding content gaps compared with a competitor
4. Running a site audit
5. Checking whether Unite.ai appears in AI generated answers

Test 1: How Accurate is Semrush’s Traffic Estimate for Unite.ai?

For my first test, I ran a Domain Overview on Unite.ai and picked four keywords Semrush says we rank for on Google:

1. Jotform (Position: 11)
2. Turbolearn (Position: 9)
3. Prezi (Position: 15)
4. Artistly (Position: 7)

Then I searched each one myself in an incognito window to see where Unite.ai actually showed up:

1. Jotform (Page 3; Position 16)
2. Turbolearn (Page 2; Position: 10)
3. Prezi (Page 3; Position: 15)
4. Artistly (Page 1; Position: 6)

Semrush was honestly closer than I expected. Three of the four keywords were within one position of what I saw on Google. Prezi was a direct match, and Artistly and Turbolearn were each only one spot off.

However, Jotform was the outlier. Semrush had Unite.ai at position 11, but I found it at 16.

Semrush put Turbolearn at 9 (page one), but when I checked, it was at 10 on page two. That’s the difference between getting clicks and being ignored.

Some of that gap isn’t really Semrush’s fault. Its ranking data is refreshed on a schedule rather than live, and Google results shift by the day, location, and device.

Semrush is reliable for the big picture: which keywords a site ranks for and roughly where. But I wouldn’t treat any single position as exact, especially for keywords sitting near the bottom of page one.

Test 2: Building a Keyword Plan for a New Article

Test 1 showed our Turbolearn review sitting at position 10, just off page one. So I put “Turbolearn” into the Keyword Magic Tool to see whether it could give me a list of 10 keywords worth targeting to help that page climb:

• turbolearn (Volume: 6,600; KD%: 64; Intent: Navigational)
• turbolearn ai (Volume: 5,400; KD%: 50; Intent: Navigational)
• turbolearnai (Volume: 390; KD%: 50; Intent: Navigational)
• turbolearn.ai (Volume: 320; KD%: 56; Intent: Informational)
• turbolearn alternative (Volume: 210; KD%: 13; Intent: Informational)
• turbolearn ai free (Volume: 170; KD%: 42; Intent: Commercial)
• is turbolearn ai free (Volume: 140; KD%: 49; Intent: Informational)
• turbolearn ai login (Volume: 110; KD%: 51; Intent: Transactional & Navigational)
• turbolearn free alternative (Volume: 90; KD%: 21; Intent: Informational)
• turbolearn login (Volume: 90; KD%: n/a; Intent: n/a)

At first glance, the list looks promising, with over 13,000 monthly searches. But once I filtered it for what a review page could realistically rank for, it shrank fast.

Six of the 10 keywords are people trying to reach Turbolearn itself: the brand name, three spelling variations of it, and two login searches. Those make up about 12,900 of the searches, and a review on Unite.ai was never going to win them. Turbolearn’s own website will always own that traffic.

That left four keywords I’d actually use:

1. turbolearn alternative
2. turbolearn free alternative
3. turbolearn ai free
4. is turbolearn ai free

Together, they only add up to about 600 searches a month. But they’re a good fit for a review, and the two alternative keywords have the lowest difficulty on the list (13 and 21).

That gave me a clear to-do list: add a section answering common free plan questions and a stronger alternatives section to the Turbolearn review.

However, the labels needed a second look:

• “turbolearn.ai” is a web address, yet Semrush marked it “Informational.”
• “turbolearn ai free” and “is turbolearn ai free” are basically the same question, but got two different intents.
• “turbolearn login” came back with no difficulty or intent at all.

So the data was useful, but it took my own judgment to turn 10 suggestions into 4 opportunities. Semrush gave me the raw material, but it didn’t tell me which of those keywords a review page could realistically rank for.

To see whether the difficulty scores held up, I searched “turbolearn alternative” myself. Semrush gave it a KD of 13, and Google’s page one backed that up.

Apart from a Reddit thread in first place, the other nine results all came from small AI tools like AI Tutor, Taskade, and ExamTeX, each publishing its own “alternatives” page to promote itself. There wasn’t a major publication or review site in sight, and Unite.ai didn’t appear on page one or any page after it.

That’s exactly the kind of opportunity you want to find with a low KD score. Almost every result is written by a competitor with something to sell, so an independent review comparing the options would have a real chance to stand out.

Test 3: Finding Content Gaps Against a Competitor

For the third test, I ran Keyword Gap for Unite.ai against FahimAI, a site that also publishes AI tool reviews and “best of” lists. I wanted to see which keywords FahimAI ranks for that Unite.ai is missing, and where FahimAI outranks Unite on topics already covered.

The Weak tab was more useful than the Missing tab, which mostly returned VPNs. Almost every keyword there is a tool Unite.ai has already written about: Prezi, Copyleaks, Fathom, Murf, SlidesAI, Play.ht and VEED.

That gives you a list of existing reviews that FahimAI is already beating Unite with. Refreshing a page you already have is much quicker than writing a new one, so this is the list I’d actually act on first.

The most useful thing Keyword Gap surfaced wasn’t something I was looking for.

“turbo ai” appeared in the Missing tab with 18.1K searches, and variations like “turbo.ai,” “is turbo ai free” and “turbolearnai” showed up in the Weak tab. That’s because Turbolearn has rebranded as Turbo AI. It explains why our Turbolearn review from Tests 1 and 2 is slipping: people are now searching for a name that page barely uses.

There was also some clutter to filter through. For example, Keyword Gap counts misspellings like “iielevenlabs,” “prezy” and “turb ai” as separate keywords. Grouping those together is left to you.

So does Keyword Gap still deserve its reputation? I think so, but mainly for the Weak tab.

Within a few minutes, it gave me a prioritized list of reviews to update and caught a product rebrand I’d missed. It’s also worth knowing that Keyword Gap isn’t available on the free account, so you’ll need a paid plan or the trial to use it.

Test 4: Running a Site Audit on Unite.ai

Next, I ran a Site Audit on Unite.ai, including Semrush’s newer AI Search Health checks, to see what it would flag and whether the fixes were worth doing. The audit crawled 100 pages.

The headline numbers are less scary than they look.

A 91% Site Health score puts Unite.ai one point behind the top 10% of sites. And the 1,180 warnings mostly come from one issue: 928 of them are unminified code files. That’s a job for a developer, and it has a small impact compared with the other problems on this list.

The most reassuring result was the AI crawler check.

ChatGPT’s crawlers, Googlebot and Google-Extended can all access the site. If you’re worried that your site is invisible to AI search because of a blocked crawler, this answers it in one glance. It’s the most useful addition to Site Audit.

The rest of the AI Search Health score was harder to act on. The 76% is mostly driven by “content not optimized” notices on 55 pages. The other flag, a missing llms.txt file, is an unofficial proposed standard that the major AI search engines haven’t said they rely on. So I’d treat that 76% as a rough indicator.

Of the 14 issue types, I’d only really act on these four:

• The 25 structured data errors. This is the only real error, and broken schema can cost you rich results in Google.
• The 76 missing meta descriptions and 33 long titles. Both are quick for a writer or editor to fix without a developer.
• The 32 pages with only one internal link. Adding links to them is an easy win.
• The 66 nofollow internal links. These are worth checking, although I suspect many are Unite.ai’s affiliate links, which are nofollow on purpose.

Everything else is either low impact or needs a developer.

The “How to fix” explanations were clear enough for a non-developer to understand what’s wrong. But Semrush doesn’t separate what needs urgent fixing from what’s not as important. At first glance, it’s easy to panic at the 1,180 warnings when a handful of fixes would matter most.

Test 5: Is Unite.ai Showing Up in AI Answers?

For this test, I opened Semrush’s AI Visibility Overview for Unite.ai. It pulls from Semrush’s own database of AI answers to see what it could tell me about how often AI assistants mention us without any setup.

The most useful thing in this report was the gap between two numbers. AI assistants cited Unite.ai pages about 2,800 times, but mentioned Unite.ai by name only 46 times. So AI tools are using the content as a source, but they rarely credit the brand in the answer itself. So Unite isn’t invisible. AI crawlers can reach the site without any trouble.

Semrush does suggest what to do next, but mostly by pointing you to other reports.

Its “What’s Next?” list includes finding hot topics, exploring competitor strategies, and optimizing your domain for AI. Each one links to another report rather than giving you a specific fix.

For a quick snapshot with no setup, this report is useful, especially for spotting that AI tools cite Unite.ai far more often than they name it.

Results & Output Quality

Across five tests, the pattern was consistent: Semrush’s data was mostly accurate, but it rarely told me what to do with it. The useful insights usually came after I filtered the results myself.

• Accuracy: Semrush got three of four rankings within one position. The outlier was Jotform, which Semrush ranked at 11 while I found it at 16. Small errors matter near the page-one cutoff, too. Semrush had Turbolearn at 9 when it was actually at 10. I’d trust it for the general ranking picture, but not exact positions.
• Research outputs: The raw data was solid but needed filtering. Only 4 of 10 keyword suggestions were realistic targets; the rest were brand or login searches. Keyword Gap had the same issue. The Missing tab mostly returned VPN brand names, while the Weak tab gave me a useful list of existing reviews to refresh. The KD score also held up in my one check: “turbolearn alternative” scored 13, with page one dominated by Reddit and small tool sites.
• Site Audit: The audit was accurate but didn’t prioritize well. It gave Unite.ai a 91% health score, but 928 of 1,180 warnings came from one low-impact issue. Only four of the 14 issue types were worth my time. The fixes were easy enough to understand, but deciding what mattered was still up to me.
• AI visibility: This was one of the more interesting findings. AI assistants cited Unite.ai about 2,800 times but named Unite.ai only 46 times. That’s an issue a standard SEO report wouldn’t show.
• Ease of use: The reports themselves were easy to understand. Finding the right report was harder. Some tools had been renamed, moved, or locked behind different plans. Beginners should expect some trial and error.

The biggest surprise for me was that Keyword Gap surfaced “turbo ai” as a missing keyword with 18.1K searches. That led me to discover Turbolearn had rebranded as Turbo AI, which could explain why the Unite review is slipping.

But where Semrush falls short is that it gives you plenty of data, but not always direction. You still need enough SEO knowledge to filter out irrelevant keywords and low-priority issues. Access is also confusing, with important features spread across different plans.

How to Use Semrush

Here’s the Semrush workflow that produces the most useful result:

1. Add your website by entering your domain. Everything else (audits, tracking, AI visibility) hangs off of this.
2. Run Domain Overview on each competitor to see who’s winning and on which pages.
3. Run Keyword Gap and Backlink Gap against those competitors. Export the “Missing” and “Weak” keywords, and the domains linking to them but not to you.
4. Validate the keywords. Drop the best gap keywords into Keyword Magic Tool to check intent and difficulty, then group them into topics.
5. Run Site Audit and work through the errors marked as highest priority before you publish anything new.
6. Add your target keywords to Position Tracking so you can see whether the work moved anything.

Top 3 Semrush Alternatives

Here are the best Semrush alternatives I’ve tried that I’d recommend.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is Semrush’s closest rival, and the choice mostly comes down to which data you trust more and how you like to work.

On the 0ne hand, Ahrefs built its reputation on backlink data, so many SEOs still reach for it first for link research. Meanwhile, Semrush offers a broader set of marketing features, like PPC research, local listings, social, and content tools.

In terms of price, they’re almost identical. Ahrefs also has a $29/month Starter plan for light competitor research and a free Webmaster Tools account for your website, which give you a cheaper way in than anything Semrush offers.

For AI search, Ahrefs sells Brand Radar separately from $199/month. Semrush bundles prompt tracking into its Starter plan at the same price.

Choose Ahrefs if backlinks are your priority. Otherwise, choose Semrush if you want SEO, AI visibility and wider marketing tools under one login.

Moz

Moz is the friendlier, cheaper option among the tools mentioned in this article.

Moz’s core SEO plans cost well under Semrush’s entry point. The interface is easier to learn, and Moz’s free learning resources are some of the best in the industry for beginners.

The trade-off is depth and limits.

Moz Standard tracks 300 keywords against Semrush’s 500 on the SEO plan, and rankings update weekly rather than daily.

Its keyword database is smaller than Semrush’s, and it does not offer dedicated toolkits for PPC advertising, social media management, or local listings management like Semrush (though it does offer a separate product called Moz Local). However, Moz’s backlink index is broadly comparable in published size.

Choose Moz if you run one or two sites and are just learning SEO. Otherwise, choose Semrush if you manage multiple sites or clients and need in-depth data that updates daily.

Writesonic

Writesonic comes at the same AI search problem from the opposite direction. Semrush is a research platform that added AI visibility, while Writesonic is a content platform that added it too. Its Action Center turns visibility gaps into specific tasks, and its Article Writer produces the content to fill them.

Writesonic’s Starter plan tracks 50 prompts, which is cheaper than Semrush’s Starter. However, you give up most of the traditional SEO data: deep keyword databases, backlink analysis, and competitor traffic.

That difference showed up in my fifth test with Semrush. It found that AI assistants cited Unite.ai pages about 2,800 times but mentioned the brand only 46 times. The data was useful, but its next steps mostly pointed me to other reports instead of giving me specific fixes. Writesonic takes a more direct approach by turning visibility gaps into tasks and content.

Choose Writesonic if you want AI visibility and the content to fix it in one tool. Otherwise, choose Semrush if you need the full SEO research toolkit behind your decisions.

Read my Writesonic review or visit Writesonic!

Semrush Review: The Right Tool For You?

After putting Semrush through these tests, what surprised me most was how often it surfaced something genuinely useful that I wasn’t specifically looking for. The best example was Keyword Gap finding “turbo ai” with 18.1K searches, which led me to discover that Turbolearn had rebranded as Turbo AI and helped explain why the existing review was slipping.

Where Semrush performed particularly well was SEO research and competitive analysis. The ranking data was close to what I found in Google, Keyword Gap gave me a useful list of pages to refresh, and Site Audit quickly showed me which technical issues were present.

However, where it disappointed me was prioritization. Whether I was filtering keyword suggestions, sorting through 1,180 audit warnings, or looking at AI visibility recommendations, Semrush gave me plenty of data but often left me to decide what actually mattered and what to do next.

Whether the output quality justifies the price depends on how much of Semrush’s toolkit you need.

For a serious SEO team, the combination of keyword research, competitor analysis, technical auditing, backlinks, and AI visibility can justify the cost. However, for a solo blogger who mainly needs basic SEO data, the price is harder to justify.

And if Semrush isn’t the right fit, consider these alternatives:

• Ahrefs is best for backlink research with a focus on SEO who want a more affordable entry point.
• Moz is best for beginners and smaller sites that want an easier, more affordable SEO tool.
• Writesonic is best for AI visibility tracking combined with content creation and optimization.

Thanks for reading my Semrush review! I hope you found it helpful. If you want to try Semrush for yourself, sign up for free and see what it can build for you.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Semrush free?

Semrush has a free account with a limit of 10 reports a day and one demo project, which is enough for occasional keyword or competitor lookups. Paid plans come with a 7-day free trial.

Does Semrush track AI search results?

Yes, the Semrush tracks a set of prompts you choose across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity and more. They show whether you’re mentioned, which sources are cited, how your brand is described, and how you compare with competitors.

How accurate is Semrush’s traffic data?

Semrush’s traffic and keyword volumes are estimates, not your real analytics. In my test, three of the four rankings I checked were within one position of what I found on Google. However, one was off by five positions. They’re most useful for comparing websites and spotting trends, not for exact numbers.

Is Semrush worth it for beginners or small businesses?

Whether or not Semrush is worth it for beginners or small businesses depends on how much of your growth comes from search. The free account and the SEO plan cover the basics, but most of Semrush’s value is in the higher tiers. Beginners on a tight budget may get more from Moz, or from free tools like Google Search Console and Ahrefs Webmaster Tools.

Semrush vs. Ahrefs: which is better?

Between Semrush and Ahrefs, they’re priced almost the same. Ahrefs is often preferred for backlink research. Semrush covers more of the marketing workflow (PPC, local, content, social) and bundles AI visibility tracking into its Starter plan, while Ahrefs sells Brand Radar separately.

What happened to Semrush after the Adobe acquisition?

Adobe completed its acquisition of Semrush on April 28, 2026. Semrush is still sold as its own product, and Adobe says it will connect Semrush with Adobe Experience Manager, LLM Optimizer and its wider customer experience platform over time.

Can I use Semrush data inside ChatGPT or Claude?

Yes, Semrush has an official ChatGPT app and an MCP server that let AI assistants pull live Semrush data for competitor research, briefs and reports. Availability depends on your plan.

Can I cancel Semrush anytime?

Monthly plans can be cancelled at any time, and Semrush offers a 7-day money-back guarantee on new subscriptions. Annual plans give you the lowest price but lock you in for the year.