Alternatives to the Semrush AI Visibility toolkit, and the tier where its published price stops

Semrush sells its AI visibility work as modules inside the SEO and AI Search ladder, not as a product you can buy on its own. Read on 20 October 2026, that ladder publishes a daily prompt allowance on every paid tier, and the allowance only rises when the website and keyword allowances rise with it. The entry tier names the AI features without a number beside them. The next tier up publishes 50 prompts to track daily, one domain for AI brand performance and 300 AI visibility reports a day. The tier above that doubles the prompt line to 100. The top tier publishes unlimited daily prompts and no price at all: it reads Custom, with a Request demo button where the figure used to be. So the useful question is not whether Semrush is any good at this. It is where your own prompt volume lands relative to the point where the price list ends.

What the ladder publishes, and the one line that moved

Everything below was read from semrush.com/pricing on 20 October 2026 under a Chrome on Windows agent, HTTP 200, with the body saved. Two addresses that older write ups send you to are gone: semrush.com/ai-toolkit and semrush.com/ai-visibility both returned 404 to the same agent on the same day. The live product pages are semrush.com/features/ai-visibility and semrush.com/solutions/ai-visibility, and the pricing page carries a separate AI Visibility tab beside the SEO and AI Search one.

Tier, read 20 Oct 2026	What it publishes on the AI side	What it publishes on the SEO side
Free	Nothing named for AI tracking	One demo project, 10 reports a day across the main tools
Entry	Track performance in AI search, monitor AI sentiment, AI visibility reports for any domain, monitor custom prompts. No figure on any of the four	5 websites, 500 keywords tracked daily
Second	50 prompts to track daily, 1 domain for AI brand performance, 300 AI visibility reports a day, an AI ready site audit	5 websites, 500 keywords tracked daily
Third	100 prompts to track daily	15 websites, 1,500 keywords tracked daily
Fourth	Unlimited prompts to track daily	40 or more websites, 5,000 or more keywords tracked daily
Enterprise	Custom large scale AI prompt tracking, daily or weekly tracking frequency, SSO, team governance and audit logs	Unlimited projects, custom limits, multi million page crawling

Read the fourth row twice. Unlimited daily prompt tracking is a real offer and it sits on the first tier that stopped printing a number. Our own pages from earlier this month recorded a figure there, and the tier now reads Custom instead, which is the kind of change worth re-reading a vendor page for rather than quoting from memory.

Why the prompt line is the one to read first

A daily prompt allowance is not a feature tick. It is the number that decides whether your own question file fits, and it multiplies with every engine and every market you add. Twenty questions on four surfaces checked daily is already most of a 100 prompt allowance before anybody adds a second market. The arithmetic behind that, with each vendor's own published definition of what counts as one check, is set out in the unit arithmetic that decides which prompt tracker you can actually use. That page had no durable inbound link from any of the 1,660 stored bodies we counted on 20 October 2026, in which 916 of 1,942 live pages, 47.2 per cent, carry none, so this is a link worth having in a sentence that needed it anyway.

The second line to read is brand performance. On the tier where the AI numbers first appear it covers one domain, and that is the module reporting how the engines describe you against rivals, so one domain sets how much comparison you can run before you climb.

Where Semrush is plainly ahead of us, on criteria we can both be checked on

We sell a tracker in this category, so the ordering here is a stated criterion rather than an opinion, and we lose several of these rows.

• Published dataset size. Its own newsroom dates an expanded 2026 AI Visibility Index at 26 June 2026, analysing 126 million United States AI search prompts, and a further release on 13 October 2026 adding a first United Kingdom benchmark. Our largest published reading is 1,260 readings. Those are different orders of magnitude and the difference is not close.
• Analyst recognition. Its newsroom dates a Gartner Market Guide for Answer Engine Visibility Tools at 7 July 2026, with Semrush named among the representative vendors. We appear in no analyst guide.
• Refresh cadence. The ladder publishes daily prompt tracking from the second tier upwards, and Enterprise publishes daily or weekly. Our own cadence is weekly, which puts us behind on this row.
• Enterprise controls. SSO, team governance, audit logs, a dedicated account manager and a 24 by 7 support commitment are all published. We publish no SSO, no audit log and one login.
• Corporate standing. Adobe completed its acquisition of Semrush Holdings on 28 April 2026, dated in the same newsroom, and the company now describes itself as an Adobe company. Procurement departments weigh that, and it is a fair thing for them to weigh.

One finding from its own Index release deserves repeating because it supports a habit we argue for everywhere: the 13 October 2026 entry states that the brands and sources AI surfaces vary significantly between the United Kingdom and the United States, and that visibility on one AI platform does not guarantee visibility on another. A vendor with 126 million prompts behind it reporting per platform and per market is the strongest available argument against a single blended score, including a blended score from us.

What a review of this toolkit can and cannot tell you

You will not find a clean review of the AI visibility modules alone, and the reason is structural rather than suspicious: they are not sold alone. The ratings on its own AI visibility features page, read 20 October 2026, are three figures carrying no review count beside them, and they were earned by a platform most buyers use for keyword research, site audits and backlinks. Beside them sit 28 million marketing professionals, 35 per cent of the Fortune 500 and 21 international awards, which are platform facts.

So treat a star rating here as evidence about the suite, and read the module on its own published limits instead: the prompt allowance, the brand performance domain count, the report ceiling, and whether the refresh frequency you need is on the tier you would buy. The modules are named individually on that page and worth knowing before a demo: Visibility Overview, Brand Performance, Competitor Research, Prompt Tracking, AI Cited Media, and an AI search health audit for crawler access.

The shortlist, grouped by where your prompt volume lands

Your situation	Worth shortlisting	Settle this before you sign
Already paying for the platform, AI answers are a second question	The tier you are on, plus the free AI Visibility Checker to get a baseline before you upgrade	Which tier your account is actually on, and what the prompt line reads on it today
You want the AI half and none of the SEO half	A dedicated AI visibility product, where the meter is prompts and engines rather than websites and keywords	Whether seats, projects and competitors are billed, because several in that group never bill them
Your question set is large and you want it daily	Vendors publishing a rate or a formula rather than a tier, so you can compute the bill before the call	What happens to your history when you edit a prompt, which almost nobody publishes
You operate many locations or branches	A local platform with per location scoring, which is a different shape of answer to a brand average	How the location reaches the engine: written into the question, or sent as a setting you cannot see

Questions buyers ask about the Semrush AI visibility modules

Can I buy the AI visibility part on its own? Not from the ladder we read. The AI lines sit inside the SEO and AI Search tiers, and the pricing page carries a separate AI Visibility tab beside that one, so ask which of the two your quote is drawn from and get the prompt allowance written into it.

Why does the top tier not show a price? It reads Custom with a Request demo button, read on 20 October 2026, and that is the tier holding unlimited daily prompt tracking. The volume most likely to push you there is the AI volume rather than the keyword volume.

Does it track Claude? The surfaces named across its AI pages are ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode, with Perplexity named in its prompt data coverage. Claude is not among them, and if your buyers use Claude that is the row where we are ahead.

How many prompts does a normal business need? Twenty questions, frozen for a quarter, is enough to see a pattern and small enough that one person reads every answer. The allowance is rarely the binding limit. Cadence and engine count usually are, because each one multiplies the whole set.

What should I ask for in the demo? The prompt allowance on the tier you would buy, the brand performance domain count on that tier, the refresh frequency, and whether editing a tracked prompt resets its history. Those four decide whether month four is comparable with month one.

The number that decides this, and it is yours not theirs

Write your question file first, count it, multiply it by the surfaces your buyers actually use and by the frequency the decision needs, and carry that single number into every conversation. A ladder cannot tell you whether a tier fits until you have it, and with it the whole comparison takes about ten minutes on published pages. Semrush publishes the limits clearly up to the point where its price list ends, which is more than most of this category manages, and the point where it ends is the thing a buyer should find today rather than on the invoice.