Best Semrush PPC tools by the question each one answers, and the plan detail its own pricing page leaves blank

Semrush is bought by advertisers for one thing more than any other: seeing what a competitor is doing in paid search without asking them. The tooling for that is real, it is documented, and it is grouped under a name that does not appear anywhere on the pricing page. So the criterion on this page, applied to everything below and to us: does the vendor publish, before you pay, which plan carries the tool you are buying it for? On the SEO side of this product the answer is yes. On the advertising side, read on 21 October 2026, it was not.

What the advertising tooling actually contains

Read from Semrush's own documentation on 21 October 2026, Advertising Research is described as the tool that reveals how your competitors are using paid search, and it is stated to be part of what Semrush calls the Advertising Toolkit. Its reports are listed as separate tabs, and each one answers a different question:

Report	The question it answers
Positions	Which keywords is this domain bidding on, and where do its ads appear
Position Changes	What has it started and stopped bidding on, with new and lost keywords over time
Competitors	Who else is bidding on the same paid keywords, with keyword counts and estimates
Ad Copies	What its headlines, descriptions, display URLs and calls to action say, and where they land
Ads History	How its ad positioning changed month by month
Pages	Which landing pages it pushes hardest with paid traffic
Subdomains	How the advertising splits across its subdomains

The documentation names one figure about coverage and only one: historical ad trend data reaching back as far as 2012. It publishes no database size, no keyword count and no country coverage for this toolkit. Its own navigation lists the rest of the toolkit alongside Advertising Research as Ads Launch Assistant, an Ads AI Agent, AdClarity, PLA Research for shopping ads, and a pricing and plans page of its own.

Which of them to open first, by what you are trying to decide

If you are deciding whether to enter an auction at all, open Competitors and then Positions. You are answering one question: is this auction contested by three serious advertisers or by thirty, because that sets your cost before any of your own decisions do.

If your ads are live and underperforming, open Ad Copies and Pages. Reading twenty rival headlines against yours is the fastest honest hour in paid search, and the landing page a competitor pushes hardest is usually the offer that is working rather than the page that is prettiest.

If you are planning a season, open Ads History and Position Changes. Twelve months of a rival starting and stopping tells you when they fund the category, which is when your clicks get expensive.

If you sell products, PLA Research is the shopping equivalent and a separate tool. A search keyword report will not describe a shopping campaign.

The limit worth understanding before you rely on any of it

Every figure in these reports is modelled. The tool does not read your competitor's account. It crawls results at scale, observes which ads appeared for which queries, and estimates spend and traffic from that. Used as a ranked list of good hypotheses about where a rival puts money, it is one of the most productive reports in the category. Used as a ledger of what they actually spent, it produces a plan nobody can reconcile.

One class of figure in paid search is exact rather than modelled, and it is free: the Auction Insights report inside your own Google Ads account, which reports the real outcome of the contest between you and named competitors. If you have not read yours, do that before buying anything, because it answers most of the question people buy a third party tool for. We set out exactly what Google will and will not show you there, and the six metrics that replace the number people usually want, on our page about competitor ad rank and what Auction Insights reports instead.

The plan question, and what the pricing page showed

This is where the purchase gets harder than it should. Fetched on 21 October 2026, semrush.com/pricing published four paid tiers plus a free one, named SEO, Starter, Pro plus and Advanced, with the first three carrying a figure in dollars and Advanced routed to a demo request. It also published a set of priced add ons, among them additional users, lead generation and two report products, each with its own monthly figure. We record that the add ons are priced rather than restating the figures, which is a standing position on this site.

Three things were absent from that page on the day, and all three matter to an advertiser:

• The words Advertising Toolkit, AdClarity and PLA Research did not appear on it at all.
• The page carried an Advertising tab, and that tab showed no plan detail.
• The prices used a dollar symbol with no currency code stated anywhere on the page. This fetch left from an Indian IP address, and several vendors in this market serve a different currency by location, so treat any figure you read as possibly local to your own connection and check the symbol against your own invoice.

So the practical advice is boring and it saves money. Before you pay, ask Semrush in writing which plan includes the Advertising Toolkit, whether AdClarity is inside that plan or a separate purchase, and what the limits are on rows returned. Get it in an email. A toolkit you can read about in the documentation and cannot find on the pricing page is a toolkit whose tier you are guessing at.

The plan names themselves have moved, which is worth knowing if you are comparing against an older quote or an older article. We tracked what one of the previous plans was and what the pricing page shows now on our page about the Semrush Guru plan and what replaced it.

Where this toolkit beats the alternatives, and where it stops

It beats a free stack on one thing: breadth of competitor history in one place. Nothing free gives you twelve months of a rival's ad copy and landing pages without manual collection.

It stops at three places. It cannot see your own account's exact contest data, which is free and more accurate. It does not price your clicks, which the ad platform does. And it is a research product rather than an account management product, so it will not make a bulk change for you. If the hour you are losing each day is bulk editing or bid management rather than research, a research suite is the wrong purchase and the four jobs in that category are set out on our page about PPC and Google Ads optimisation software and what sets each tier.

For the SEO half of the same subscription, which is priced and documented much more plainly, our page on the Semrush SEO tools by job sorts the product lines, and the free account's real allowance is compared against the paid one on our page about what a free Semrush account actually allows.

The competitor report no advertising toolkit produces

Every report above describes an auction. There is a second place your competitors are being named now and it has no auction in it: the answer an assistant gives when a buyer asks who to use. Nothing in an advertising toolkit observes that, because there is no ad, no bid and no impression share to measure. AI Knows Us reads those answers across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews and records which businesses get named in them. It is not a PPC tool and we do not run ad accounts, so it sits beside this toolkit rather than replacing any part of it.

And on this page's own criterion, which is what a vendor publishes before you pay, we fail a test Semrush passes. Our pricing page, fetched on 21 October 2026, returns zero matches on word boundaries for SSO, SAML, SOC 2, ISO and DPA across the whole 119,203 byte document. Its own comparison table also carries two rows that disagree: a row headed Businesses covered reads 10 for the Agency plan, while a row headed More than one business reads No for all eight plans including Agency. Semrush publishes a user add on price and we publish neither a seat model nor a security document. Ask us about both.

What advertisers ask about the Semrush advertising tools

Can Semrush show me exactly what a competitor spends?

No, and no third party tool can. What it shows is an estimate built from observed ad appearances. The exact figures about the contest between you and them are in your own Auction Insights report, free, and they are about impression share rather than money.

Is Advertising Research included in the plan I already have?

Check in writing rather than assuming. The toolkit is documented in the help centre and was not named on the pricing page on 21 October 2026, so the tier it belongs to is not something a prospective buyer could establish from the public page that day.

How far back does the ad history go?

The documentation states data as far back as 2012. Coverage of any individual small advertiser in an individual country is a separate question, and the page publishes no figure for it, so test it on your own competitors inside a trial before you commit.

Is AdClarity the same as Advertising Research?

They are listed as separate items in the toolkit's own navigation, so treat them as separate purchases until Semrush tells you otherwise. AdClarity is named alongside PLA Research and the Ads Launch Assistant rather than inside Advertising Research.

Do I need this if I only run shopping campaigns?

Then PLA Research is the relevant tool rather than Advertising Research, because a paid search keyword report does not describe a shopping auction. Say so when you ask which plan you need, or you will be quoted for the wrong half.

What should I do before buying any of this?

Open your own Auction Insights report and your own search terms report. Both are free, both are exact, and between them they answer the questions most advertisers buy a research suite to answer. Buy the suite when you need twelve months of somebody else's ad copy, which is a real need and a narrower one.