Semrush Review (2026): Inside the AI Visibility Toolkit, Traffic Data and SEO Suite

TL;DR

• Buy Semrush for the research depth, never for its traffic estimates.
• AI Visibility is a real index: 81 out of 100 for HubSpot, no setup.
• Traffic estimates ran 2x to 8x high against our own GA4.
• Automated insight cards misfire, read the tables and skip the advice.
• Verdict: 4 out of 5, research earns it, estimates cost the fifth.

Semrush is the biggest name we have put through this series, and since 28 April 2026 it belongs to Adobe, in a deal Adobe priced at about $1.9 billion. The logo now reads “An Adobe Company”. Most reviews of it were written before that, and almost all of them stop at the SEO toolkit. The AI Visibility toolkit, the Traffic & Market data and the traffic estimates that people quote in pitch decks get a paragraph each, if that.

So we sat down inside a paid account we already run, a Guru plan with the AI Visibility, Traffic & Market and Content toolkits attached, and worked through it the way we work through every tool in this series. Same test brand, HubSpot. Same rule: nothing bought for the review, everything shown from inside the product. And one thing we can do with Semrush that we cannot do with a pure AI tracker: check its estimates against sites we own.

Here is the short version. The research tools are as deep as their reputation. The AI Visibility toolkit is a real index, not a sampled dashboard, and it shows you things about AI answers that no other tool in this series has shown us. And the traffic estimates, which is what most people take from Semrush into meetings, were off by half to eightfold on the site we could measure.

What Semrush is now

Semrush stopped being one product some time ago. The left rail in the account lists eight toolkits: SEO, AI Visibility, Traffic & Market, Content, Local, Advertising, Social and AI PR, plus a Reports layer and an App Center. Each one is priced on its own, and a bundle called Semrush One wraps the SEO and AI toolkits together. On G2 it holds 4.4 out of 5 from 4,029 reviews, and the seller on that profile now reads Adobe.

That structure matters for how you read this review. Nobody buys all of it. We looked at the four toolkits an SEO or growth team is most likely to pay for, and we say which one each screenshot came from.

How we tested it

Every research tool was run on hubspot.com, the same brand we used for Scrunch, Otterly.AI and AthenaHQ, so the AI visibility numbers can sit next to each other. Competitors were Salesforce, Zoho and Pipedrive. Country was the United States wherever the tool had a country filter.

The project tools, Site Audit and Position Tracking, only work on a domain you have set up, so those screenshots come from an existing project in the account with the domain, keywords and URLs redacted. Nothing was added, crawled or bought for this piece.

We have no affiliate or commercial relationship with Semrush or Adobe. The account is one we pay for, and no link in this review earns us anything.

For the accuracy check we pulled Semrush’s estimates for two sites we own, then read the analytics on those sites for the same period. That is the one comparison a hands-on review of Semrush can make that a desk review cannot, and it is further down.

Domain Overview now opens with AI

Type a domain into the top bar and the first thing you see is a two-panel card: AI Search on the left, SEO on the right. The AI panel sits first, the SEO panel second. For hubspot.com in the US that read AI Visibility 81, 66.2K mentions and 17.3K cited pages on the left, and Authority Score 78, 2.7M organic traffic, 640.3K organic keywords and 82.9M backlinks on the right.

That is a statement about where Semrush thinks the product is going, and it is the right one. It also means every Semrush user now sees an AI visibility score for any domain they look up, whether or not they have paid for the AI toolkit. The score is free to look at. What sits behind it is not.

The AI Visibility toolkit is an index, not a sample

Every AI visibility tool we have reviewed so far works the same way. You write prompts, it runs them, it counts who appears. Semrush does that too, in a section called Prompt Tracking, but the part of the toolkit worth paying for is the other half. Semrush has built a standing index of prompts with an estimated AI volume for each, and it lets you query any brand against it without setting anything up.

Visibility Overview for hubspot.com in the US: 81 out of 100, labelled Great, 66.2K mentions and 46.4K citations in the last month, and 31K topics where HubSpot already performs. Worldwide, the same domain scored 47 and Medium. That is a scoring quirk to know about: the country views scored higher than the world.

The engine split is the first thing to read carefully. Mentions were spread across four engines: Gemini 32%, Google AI Overview 24.9%, ChatGPT 22.8%, Google AI Mode 20.3%. The pricing page lists Perplexity among the sources too, but it did not appear in the split for this domain. Claude and Copilot are not in the index at all. Scrunch’s entry plan tracks Copilot and Perplexity but not Gemini or AI Mode. Nobody at this price covers everything, and which four you get should decide the tool.

Below the score sit five tabs. Your Performing Topics is where HubSpot already shows up: 31K topics, all of them branded at the top of the list, from HubSpot Culture and Values to HubSpot GDPR Compliance, each with a visibility score, a mention count, an AI volume and a Monitor all prompts button that pushes the topic into tracking.

Topic Opportunities is the list where competitors are mentioned and HubSpot is not, sorted by AI volume. The top of it read Project Management Education and Tools at 77.4K, Effective Email Introduction and Subject Lines at 72.6K, then Vendor Management, employee management software, Real Estate Investment Software, and a topic in Italian about industrial mobile operators. Some of those are real gaps. Some are just what happens when you sort a 24.7K-row list by volume.

Cited Sources is the tab we would pay for on its own. It lists every domain that AI answers about HubSpot draw on, with the share of HubSpot’s mentions each one carries, how many URLs, how many prompts, and the domain’s organic traffic. hubspot.com itself carried 18.78% of mentions. Then youtube.com at 17.06%, reddit.com at 13.93%, salesforce.com, linkedin.com, zapier.com at 11.75%, g2.com at 11.94%, techradar.com. Seventy thousand source domains in total, and you can filter by any of them.

Put that next to what our own ChatGPT citation study and the Scrunch test found for the same brand: YouTube and Reddit sit near the top of every source list about HubSpot, however you measure it. Three separate methods agreeing is about as close to a fact as this category gets.

Competitor Research, and the Dow Jones problem

Competitor Research takes your domain and up to three rivals and scores them on the same index. HubSpot 81, Salesforce 83, Zoho 75, Pipedrive 71. Below the scores is a table of 44.5K topics split into Missing, Weak, Shared, Strong and Unique, with a mention count per brand on each row.

Now read the insight card. Verbatim: “In the Dow Jones and Stock Market Overview topic, competitor brands are mentioned but yours isn’t. Consider creating or optimizing content around this topic to improve your chances of ranking and potentially grow your audience by 14.8%.”

Salesforce is a stock. Its name turns up in answers about the Dow, so the index counted 122 Salesforce mentions in a topic that has nothing to do with CRM software, then generated advice telling HubSpot to write about the stock market. Sort the topic table by AI volume and the same collision fills the top rows: Dow Jones at 49.9M, Food Delivery and Nearby Restaurants at 42.5M, Online Language Translation Tools, Cooking and Measurement Conversions.

This is the cost of an index. A tracker that runs your own prompts, like Otterly or Scrunch, cannot make this mistake because you chose the questions. Semrush’s index covers questions you never asked, which is its whole value, and it also covers questions in which your competitor’s name means something else. The data underneath is fine. The auto-generated recommendation on top of it is not something to forward to a client without reading it first.

Prompt Research shows the answers themselves

Prompt Research works from a topic instead of a domain. We gave it “best CRM for small business” and it resolved that to a topic called Small Business Contact and CRM Management: 14M related AI volume, 1K topics, 37.7K prompts, 14.1K brands mentioned, 42.2K source domains. Intent split 54% informational, 20% commercial, 13% navigational. Top brands hubspot, salesforce, zoho. Top sources youtube.com, salesforce.com, reddit.com.

Switch to the Prompts tab and each row is a real prompt with the AI answer beside it, the engine that produced it, a brand count and a source count. The first row under the US filter was “crm software for small business uk”, which tells you the country filter is on the audience, not the wording. The answer next to it opened with “The best CRM software for a small business in the UK depends on your budget, industry, and feature needs. Top choices include HubSpot for a free starter tier, Capsule CRM…” and you can open the full response.

Traffic & Market, and the AI referral split

Traffic Analytics is the Semrush number that ends up in slide decks. For hubspot.com in July 2026 it read 56.2M visits, 10M unique visitors, 15.8 pages per visit, an average visit of 28 minutes 48 seconds, and a 27.07% bounce rate. The trend chart runs back six months and an AI-written insight beside it noted visits grew 18.6% between February and July.

New under Traffic Distribution is a report called AI Traffic, and it is the most interesting screen in the toolkit. It estimates referral visits from AI assistants by source. For hubspot.com in July: chatgpt.com 141.2K visits and 70.26% of the AI total, claude.ai 34.2K and 17.01%, gemini.google.com 16.8K, perplexity.ai 6.8K, grok.com 956, chat.deepseek.com 742.

Two things in that split are worth keeping. Claude sends HubSpot more than Gemini, Perplexity and Grok combined, which is the point we made in our piece on Claude as the engine nobody optimises for, now with a Semrush estimate behind it. And the whole AI column adds up to about 201K visits against 56.2M total, or roughly 0.36% of HubSpot’s traffic. AI referrals are real, growing, and still small.

We checked the estimates against a site we own

Semrush’s traffic numbers are estimates built from clickstream panels and search data. Everyone knows that. Almost nobody checks them, because you need the analytics of the site being estimated. We have two.

opsima.com is a small B2B site we run. Semrush Traffic Analytics for July 2026 put it at 1.9K visits, 1.2K unique visitors, 6.4 pages per visit, an average visit of 37 minutes and a 78.49% bounce rate. GA4 for the same month recorded 966 sessions, 669 users, 1.23 pages per session, an average of 4 minutes 41 seconds, and a 49.4% bounce rate.

opsima.com, July 2026	Semrush	GA4	Semrush over by
Visits	1,900	966	2.0x
Unique visitors	1,200	669	1.8x
Pages per visit	6.4	1.23	5.2x
Average visit	37:02	4:41	7.9x
Bounce rate	78.49%	49.4%	+29 points
Organic search visits (SEO toolkit estimate)	1,100	650	1.7x

Visits and visitors were about double. The engagement numbers were not close, and two of them contradict each other inside Semrush’s own card: a site where the average visitor spends 37 minutes and reads 6.4 pages does not also bounce 78% of the time. The SEO toolkit’s separate organic estimate, 1.1K a month, ran 1.7 times GA4’s 650 organic sessions.

Our second site, organikpi.com, went the other way. Semrush put it at 5 organic visits a month and labelled it “Lacks organic traffic”. GA4 counted 43 Google organic sessions from 8 users in the same window, with a consent banner in place that makes GA4 itself an undercount. Small sites sit below the floor of any panel, and Semrush says as much, but the direction of the error is not even consistent across two sites.

None of this makes the numbers useless. Ranking competitors against each other, spotting a trend, sizing a market to the nearest order of magnitude, all of that survives a 2x error. Quoting “1,900 visits” as a fact in a report does not.

Keyword research is still the reason to buy

Keyword Magic Tool for “crm software” in the US returned 68,845 keywords with 3.77M combined volume, grouped into topics on the left: Customer Relationship Management 6.4K, Small Business CRM Software 1.7K, CRM Implementation 2K, Lead Management Software 1.4K. The head term itself showed 673,000 monthly searches, KD 70, CPC $14.26.

One small thing. The default sort is relevance, and after the head term the next five rows were misspellings: crm softwear, crm software with a full stop, crm softare, crm in software, crm softwre. Sort by volume and the list behaves. It is a default worth changing on day one.

Keyword Gap against Salesforce, Zoho and Pipedrive drew the overlap: HubSpot 337.6K keywords, Salesforce 223.5K, Zoho 107.9K, Pipedrive 47.4K, with 3.1K shared, 868 missing, 599 weak and 581 strong for HubSpot. The top missing opportunity by volume was “https://www.examplecompany.com” at 14,800 searches a month, which is a real thing people type and not a keyword anyone should chase. Second was conversational ai assistant at 9,900.

Backlink Analytics for hubspot.com: 430K referring domains, 82.9M backlinks, Authority Score 78, a network graph rated Reputable, and a live counter reading “99+ backlinks found today”. This is the part of Semrush that has not changed much in years, and it does not need to.

Site Audit and Position Tracking, from a live project

These two need a project, so the shots below come from one already running in the account, redacted. Site Audit’s overview now carries an AI Search Health score beside the classic Site Health, and a Blocked from AI Search panel that names the crawlers: ChatGPT-User, Googlebot, Google-Extended, Perplexity-User. On this project Site Health was 62%, AI Search Health 78%, with 193 errors and 2,897 warnings across 746 crawled pages.

The issue list mixes classic and AI checks in one column: duplicate content, missing meta descriptions, incorrect pages in the sitemap, then two tagged AI Search, content not optimized on 70 pages and links with non-descriptive anchor text on 123. The Thematic Reports below score crawlability, HTTPS, Core Web Vitals, internal linking and markup separately. One note: the banner across the top of this project read “Your last audit has failed to complete”, and the data shown was from the previous crawl. It happens. The tool told us plainly, which is what matters.

Position Tracking is Position Tracking: 172 keywords on this project, 20 competitors, daily updates, a landscape view with visibility, estimated traffic and average position, and a rankings table with intent, SERP features, KD, position on two dates, and a potential-traffic column that Semrush now fills in with its own AI. The table is where the account’s keyword budget goes. Guru gives you 1,500 tracked keywords, and this account had used every one of them.

Content tools

Topic Research takes a seed and returns cards of subtopics with volume and headlines. For “ai visibility” it produced Target Audience at 1.8M, Google AI Mode at 90.5K, Content Creation at 14.8K, AI Models and Free Trial at 12.1K each, Answer Engine Optimization and Share of Voice at 4.4K. The first card is a loose match, the rest are usable, and the headlines under each card are real pages you can open. A banner above it pushes the newer SEO Brief Generator, which is where Semrush would rather you spent your Content units.

Pricing

Toolkit or bundle	Plan	Price a month	What the plan is sized by
SEO Classic	Pro	$139.95	5 sites, 500 tracked keywords
SEO Classic	Guru	$249.95	15 sites, 1,500 keywords, historical data
SEO Classic	Business	$499.95	40 sites, 5,000 keywords, API
AI Visibility	Base	$99 per domain	25 tracked prompts, 1 brand profile, 300 reports a day
Traffic & Market	Pro	$289	Traffic Analytics, up to 100 competitors
Semrush One	Starter	$199	5 sites, 500 keywords, 50 prompts
Semrush One	Pro+	$299	15 sites, 1,500 keywords, 100 prompts
Semrush One	Advanced	$549	40 sites, 5,000 keywords, 200 prompts, API
Extra user		$80 (SEO), from $45 (AI)	Per seat

Most toolkits come with a seven-day free trial, and Semrush’s own help centre says so. The AI Visibility toolkit is the exception. The same help centre states it does not offer a free trial, so the index we spent most of this review inside is paid from day one.

Read the AI Visibility line carefully before comparing it to a dedicated tracker. $99 buys 25 tracked prompts a day and one brand profile. Scrunch’s $250 buys 125 prompts and four engines. Otterly’s $29 buys 15 prompts. What the $99 also buys, and what none of the others have, is the index: unlimited lookups of any brand’s AI visibility, competitor research and prompt research, at 300 reports a day. Whether that is worth more than 100 extra tracked prompts depends entirely on whether you want to watch your own questions or explore everyone’s.

Where it wins, where it does not

It wins on breadth and on the index. No other tool in this series lets you look up any brand’s AI visibility, see 70K source domains behind it, and read the actual prompts and answers, without a single setup step. The keyword and backlink data are still the deepest in the category. Site Audit now checks the things AI crawlers care about and names the bots. And putting AI Search on the front card of Domain Overview is the right call.

It loses on the numbers people repeat without checking. Traffic estimates that ran 2x high on visits and 8x high on visit duration for a site we could measure. An AI insight that told a CRM company to write about the Dow Jones because its competitor is a stock. A keyword gap whose top opportunity is a URL people type into Google by mistake. Each of those is a symptom of the same thing: Semrush is a very large index with a thin layer of automation on top, and the automation is where the errors live. Read the tables. Skip the cards that tell you what to do.

It also loses on price transparency, in the sense that “Semrush” is not a price. The account we used costs several toolkits stacked, and the AI toolkit that this review spends most of its time on is a separate $99 line, and the traffic data another $289. If you came for one of those, buy that one. If you came for the classic SEO suite, our AI SEO tools comparison puts it against Ahrefs and the rest, and SE Ranking is the cheaper suite we have tested that covers most of the same ground.

Pros and cons

The bottom line

Semrush is the most complete platform we have logged into, and the AI Visibility index is the most interesting thing it has built in years. Buy the SEO toolkit for the research, buy the AI toolkit if you want to explore rather than track, and treat every traffic estimate as a ranking, not a count. If you need a monthly AI visibility number for one brand on prompts you wrote, a dedicated tracker like Otterly or Scrunch does that job for the same money or less. Whichever you pick, the lesson from every tool in this series still holds: check one number against a source you control before you repeat it. With Semrush, that number is the traffic estimate.

Four out of five. Two things cost it the fifth point: traffic estimates that ran 2x to 8x high against a site we can measure, and an AI toolkit sold as a separate $99 line with no trial.