Semrush is an online visibility platform from Semrush Holdings, Inc. that combines SEO, AI-search visibility, content, advertising, and market-research toolkits on top of one of the largest keyword and backlink databases in the industry, on a freemium pricing model starting at $117.33/month. It's built for marketers, agencies, and businesses that want one platform covering search performance end-to-end, from keyword research through to tracking brand presence in AI answers.
Who builds it
Semrush is developed by Semrush Holdings, Inc. The platform positions itself as a broad online-visibility suite rather than a narrow SEO point tool, bundling SEO with advertising, content, and market-research toolkits, and backing all of it with a keyword and backlink database that the company reports spans 142 geographic databases.
Core features
- Keyword research on a database of 27.9 billion keywords across 142 geographic databases and 808 million domains.
- Backlink analysis on an index of 43 trillion backlinks, built by a crawler that combs roughly 10 billion web pages daily.
- Site Audit, with the Pro SEO Toolkit covering 100,000 pages crawled per month.
- Daily rank tracking, with entry plans monitoring 500 keywords tracked daily across 5 websites.
- AI-search visibility tracking, monitoring performance and sentiment across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, SearchGPT, Google AI Mode, and Google AI Overviews.
- API access, included from the Advanced plan alongside SEO share-of-voice reporting.
Pricing
- SEO (from $117.33/month billed annually, $139/month billed monthly): for beginners and individual projects, including 5 websites to monitor and 500 keywords tracked daily.
- Advanced tier: adds 40 websites to monitor, 5,000 keywords tracked daily, SEO share of voice, and API data integration.
- Semrush is freemium: you can use it for free, though a free account has significantly reduced limits and tool access, and after cancelling a paid subscription you retain a free-level account rather than losing access entirely.
Who it's for
Semrush suits teams that want a single platform spanning the full SEO and online-visibility workflow, keyword research, backlinks, site audits, and now AI-search tracking, rather than stitching together several specialist tools. The entry SEO plan at $117.33/month is scoped for individual projects and beginners, while the Advanced tier's API access and higher keyword-tracking volume target agencies and larger in-house teams. Because a genuine free-level account exists alongside the paid tiers, it's also a low-commitment way to explore Semrush's database before subscribing, and the scale of its keyword and backlink data makes it a common default for teams that need one system of record across SEO, content, and paid research. As AI answer engines take a growing share of search traffic, Semrush's built-in visibility tracking across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, SearchGPT, and Google's AI surfaces means teams can monitor that shift inside the same dashboard they already use for rankings, rather than adopting a separate GEO-specific tool.