Semrush: What It Is and What It Is Used For

Semrush is a website you subscribe to for search engine optimization, or SEO. SEO is the work of helping your pages show up higher in the free results on Google and other search engines. You log in to Semrush in a browser and type in either a keyword or a website address. In return it shows you how many people search for that term, which pages rank for it, and where your own site stands.

Picture a research desk for the open web. Google does not hand out its numbers, so Semrush collects search results itself, at a scale no person could match, and organizes what it finds into reports. A marketer opens those reports to answer everyday questions. What should we write about next? Why does a rival page outrank ours? Which technical problems hold the site back? The platform sells the answers as a subscription, and the company behind it now belongs to Adobe.

What Semrush is used for

Semrush groups its reports into toolkits, and the SEO toolkit is the heart of the product. Most subscribers spend their time on five jobs, summed up in the table below with the tool names you will see inside the platform.

Keyword research is the job most people meet first. Type a broad topic into the Keyword Magic Tool and you get back hundreds of related searches. Each one carries an estimated monthly volume, a difficulty score that rates how hard the term looks to rank for, and the intent behind it, meaning whether the searcher wants to learn, to compare or to buy. The craft still matters inside a paid tool. A marketer who knows their search operators can check a live results page by hand before trusting any score.

Site Audit looks inward instead. Its crawler visits your pages the way a search engine does and reports what it finds: broken links, slow pages, missing titles, duplicate content and files that block crawlers by mistake. The findings come grouped as errors, warnings and notices, each with a plain explanation and a suggested fix, and the crawl adds up to one health score. Run the audit again after the repairs and the new score shows whether they worked.

The content tools sit on top of the same data. Topic Research turns one subject into clusters of questions and headlines that real searches support, and the SEO Writing Assistant scores a draft against the pages already ranking. Visual pages get their own homework: strong image search techniques help a team find what searchers expect to see and name files the way search engines read them.

Position Tracking checks the keywords you choose once a day and charts where your pages sit on desktop and mobile, in the cities you pick. Organic Research turns the camera around. Enter a competitor’s domain and Semrush lists the searches that bring that site its visitors, the pages that earn the most traffic and the links pointing at them. None of this is inside information. It is the public results page, gathered and sorted so you can read it in minutes instead of weeks.

The SEO toolkit is only the oldest part of the building. The same subscription family now includes a content toolkit for planning and scoring articles, a local toolkit that keeps business listings and reviews in order, social media scheduling, advertising research that shows the ads competitors run, and PR tools. The newest arrival is AI visibility tracking, sold inside the Semrush One plans. It records how often AI assistants and AI search features mention a brand, and compares that share with rivals. For most small sites the SEO tools still do the heavy lifting, but the wider menu explains why big teams treat Semrush as a general marketing desk rather than a single purpose gadget.

How Semrush gets its data

Everything above rests on data Semrush builds itself. Its crawlers scan the web to record which pages link to which, and it stores the results pages for billions of keywords across 142 country databases. The company publishes the size of those databases on its homepage: 29 billion keywords, 43 trillion backlinks and 808 million domain profiles, plus more than 317 million AI prompts tracked for brand visibility reports.

Read the numbers with one distinction in mind. Rankings are observations. When Semrush says a page ranks third for a term, it saw the page there. Volumes and traffic are estimates built on top of those observations. A traffic estimate, for example, multiplies the rankings a site holds by the share of clicks each position usually earns. That makes the figures strong for comparing two sites or spotting a trend, and wrong to quote as exact visitor counts. Every SEO tool works this way, because only Google holds the true numbers, and Google shares them only for your own verified site.

Geography matters too. Search results differ by country and language, so Semrush keeps separate databases for 142 countries and lets you check, say, the United States and the United Kingdom side by side. Rankings inside a country still shift by city, which is why Position Tracking asks for locations as well as keywords. The company refreshes this data constantly as its crawlers revisit pages and results, so a report you open today rests on recent collecting rather than a frozen snapshot.

Who uses Semrush

The smallest users run one site of their own: a blogger checking why traffic dipped, or a shop owner choosing which product pages to write next. Freelancers and agencies run Semrush across many client sites, where the audits, scheduled reports and side by side comparisons save hours of manual checking. In-house teams at larger companies track bigger keyword sets, watch several markets at once and dig into historical data before planning a season.

Inside a team, the reports feed decisions that get measured later. A content lead may treat rankings and organic visits as two of the numbers the team lives by, the same way our guide to KPI examples suggests picking a few measures that matter and reviewing them on a rhythm. Brand teams have added a newer job as AI answers spread: watching how often assistants mention their products, which connects this platform to the wider world of generative AI for marketing.

Local businesses form one more group. A dentist, a plumber or a small chain cares less about global keyword data and more about showing up correctly on maps and directories. For them Semrush sells a local toolkit built around the Google Business Profile, listing accuracy and reviews. It is a reminder that the platform’s center of gravity is visibility in every form, not only the blue links on a results page.

Semrush or free tools?

Google gives away two serious tools. Search Console reports your own site’s real clicks, impressions and average positions, straight from Google itself. Analytics reports what visitors do once they arrive. If you run a single small site and care only about your own pages, those two, plus a free keyword planner, may cover everything you need.

What the free tools cannot show is the market around your site: the searches you do not rank for yet, the pages that win traffic for a competitor, and the links those rivals have earned. That outside view is the thing Semrush sells. So choose by the question you are asking. Exact numbers for your own site live in Google’s free tools. Estimated numbers for everyone else live in Semrush.

What Semrush costs

The official pricing page lists a free account at $0. It needs no credit card and allows 10 reports a day across the main tools, enough for a first honest look at a small site. The SEO plan is aimed at freelancers and small businesses. It costs $139 a month, or $117.33 a month when you pay for a year, and it covers 5 websites with 500 keywords tracked daily.

Above that, Semrush One bundles the SEO toolkit with AI search tracking and starts at $199 a month, with higher tiers for bigger teams. Separate toolkits for content, local listings, social media and advertising are sold on their own, so most users pay only for the parts they open. Prices move over time, so treat the pricing page as the final word before you budget.

A sensible way to judge the paid tiers is to spend a week on the free account first. Audit your own site, pull the keyword report for your main topic and look up one competitor. If those three reports change what you plan to do next month, the subscription has a case. If they only confirm what Search Console already told you, stay on the free tools and save the money.

The company behind the tool

Oleg Shchegolev and Dmitri Melnikov founded Semrush in 2008. The name comes from SEM, short for search engine marketing, the trade the first version served. The company settled in Boston, Massachusetts, grew from a keyword tool into a full marketing platform, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in March 2021 under the ticker SEMR. It now employs more than 1,000 people across offices in Europe and the United States.

On April 28, 2026, Adobe completed its purchase of Semrush, and the platform now presents itself as an Adobe company. The company says more than 28 million people use it, from solo site owners to Fortune 500 marketing teams. The product still lives at the same address with the same login, which is why most users felt the takeover as a new logo line rather than a new tool.

Conclusion

Semrush is a research platform for search. It watches results pages at enormous scale, turns them into databases, and sells marketers a clear view of keywords, rankings, sites and links, including the sites of their competitors. Its ranking data is observed and solid; its volumes and traffic figures are estimates to compare with, not counts to quote. If your income depends on search traffic and you need to see the whole market, it earns its subscription. If you only need your own site’s true numbers, Google’s free tools already give you those.