Best Semrush SEO tools by job, and the one check that sits outside the suite
Semrush publishes eleven product lines. Five of them do the SEO work, the rest are adjacent, and one job the suite names is not the same job as measuring whether an assistant names you.
Published by AI Knows Us · Updated 21 October 2026
Semrush sells one subscription and about eleven product lines, and a new buyer uses two of them. Read on 21 October 2026, its own product navigation lists keyword research, competitor analysis, AI visibility, prompt research, local SEO, market analysis, content creation, technical site health, digital PR, rank tracking and marketing reports. This page sorts that list into the ones that do the SEO job, the ones that do a neighbouring job, and the one that is named like our category but is not measured the same way.
The criterion used throughout: what Semrush publishes on its own site, which a buyer can confirm before paying. Same rule applied to every other vendor named below, including us. No price table is copied here, because a vendor's prices are theirs to publish and they change; what is worth writing down is the limit that sets a tier.
The five that do the actual SEO work
| Tool line | The job it does | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Keyword research | Finds the queries, the volumes and the difficulty bands | You are deciding what to write next. This is the module that justifies the subscription for most buyers. |
| Technical site health | Scheduled crawl with issues tracked over time | You want a crawl that runs itself and diffs against last week. A free desktop crawler covers a one off audit; this covers the process. |
| Competitor analysis | Somebody else's keywords, traffic estimates and links | You need a number about a rival. No tool you point at your own server can produce this. |
| Rank tracking | Positions over time by location and device | You report to somebody who asks about positions. |
| Content creation | Briefs and on page scoring against the ranking pages | You publish weekly and want the brief written before the writer starts. |
The adjacent lines, and the honest reason they are in the bundle
Local SEO, market analysis, digital PR and marketing reports are real products and they are also the reason a suite costs what it costs. If you run one site and one person does the SEO, you are paying for them and not opening them. Semrush also publishes a free tool set, which its own site lists as an AI Visibility Checker, an SEO Checker, a Website Traffic Checker, a Keyword Tool, a Backlink Checker and a top websites list. For an occasional question those answer it without a plan at all.
Two facts from the news block on the same page belong in any multi year decision. Semrush states that Adobe has completed its acquisition of the company. It also introduces Adobe Brand Visibility, described there as the first unified GEO solution, bringing Semrush data together with Adobe's agentic tools. If you are choosing a suite to live in for three years, the owner of the suite is a bigger fact than the eleventh feature.
The line that is named like our category, and what it actually measures
Semrush lists AI visibility and prompt research among its product lines, and it publishes an AI Visibility Index covering 22 industries. That is a real product and a buyer should read it. It is also worth knowing exactly what family of measurement it belongs to, because two different things are sold under the same words across this whole market.
One family measures a brand's presence inside an index of prompts the vendor has assembled. Ahrefs is the clearest publisher of this approach: its Brand Radar page describes an index of 493 million or more monthly prompts, modelled from its own keyword database and expanded into natural questions, with per surface counts and a stated cost of 8 checks per update for Claude against one for the other platforms. The other family asks the specific purchase question you nominate, in each app, and records who was named in the reply.
Both are legitimate and they answer different questions. The index approach tells you how a category behaves. The nominated question approach tells you what happens when your own best customer asks who to buy from.
Where this suite beats us, and where it stops
On everything in the first table, Semrush beats us outright, and it is not close: we sell no keyword index, no crawler, no backlink data and no rank tracker, and we never will. Our rendered pricing page lists no SSO, no white label and no SOC 2 line, and covers one business per plan outside the agency tier, so an enterprise procurement team will find more of what it needs in a suite than with us.
AI Knows Us does one thing. It takes a question your buyer would actually type, puts it to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews, and writes down every business the reply named. What a check costs is published rather than quoted on request: a credit stands for one question, one app, one occasion, most checks spend one, Claude spends three because it costs more to run, and a Visibility API sits on the larger plans. If you want one supplier for everything, buy the suite. If the question is whether an assistant says your name when somebody is choosing, that is the measurement we sell and it sits beside a suite rather than replacing any part of it.
If what you actually need is the crawl half of the suite, the fastest way to judge whether the scheduled version is worth it is to read what the audit checks and what order to fix things in: Semrush Site Audit, what it checks and what to fix first. We counted durable inbound links across 1,655 tracked pages on this site on 21 October 2026 and 696 of them had none; that page was one, which is why it is linked here rather than left to the recent posts block.
Questions buyers ask about the Semrush toolkit
Which Semrush tool should a beginner open first?
Site Audit, then Keyword Magic. The audit gives you a finite list of fixes you can start this week, and the keyword tool gives you the next ten pages to write. Everything else in the suite becomes useful once those two have produced work.
Is the free Semrush account enough?
For one question a week, yes. Its published free tools include an SEO checker, a keyword tool and a backlink checker, which between them answer most one off questions. The paid plan buys scheduling, history, project limits and the comparative data.
Does the Adobe acquisition change what I am buying?
It changes who owns the roadmap, which is the thing to watch rather than the thing to fear. Semrush's own news block announces both the completed acquisition and Adobe Brand Visibility as a unified GEO product built on Semrush data, so the direction is published rather than rumoured.
Does Semrush track whether ChatGPT mentions my brand?
It publishes an AI visibility line and a free AI Visibility Checker, so there is a product to try. Read what it measures before you compare it with anything: a presence score inside a prompt index answers a different question from asking your own buyer's question in each app and recording the names in the reply.
Can I replace Semrush with free tools?
You can replace the crawl and the indexing reports with Search Console plus a free desktop crawler. You cannot replace the competitor data, because that requires somebody else's crawl of the whole web, and that is the part of the subscription that is genuinely hard to substitute.