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Semrush competitor analysis compared with the alternatives, and what its own page says about the data

Semrush is the default choice for competitor research and it is now an Adobe company. Here is what it publishes about its own numbers, what it does well, and the one comparison it does not make.

Published by AI Knows Us · Updated 22 October 2026

Semrush is the most widely used competitor research tool in this market, and two facts about it on 21 October 2026 belong in any brief. It is now an Adobe company. And its own page describes its traffic numbers as a model built from a panel, which is the single most useful thing to know before you quote one.

What Semrush publishes about its own data

Its competitor analysis page, semrush.com/features/competitor-analysis, read 21 October 2026, publishes the scale and the method together. The scale: "1B+ daily global clickstream events", "808M+ domain profiles", "36M+ unique brands for AI visibility analysis", and a dedicated AI traffic channel. The method: traffic data "comes from real clickstream data, anonymized records of over 200M internet users' online journeys", "sourced from a large panel of third-party providers updated every one to two days", then "cleaned with a proprietary machine learning model that filters anomalies".

Read that twice, because it tells you how to use the output. A panel of that size compares two sites against each other reliably. It is not an audited count of anybody's visitors, and Semrush does not present it as one.

The ownership change is on its own news page, semrush.com/news, which carries "Adobe Completes Semrush Acquisition, Strengthening CX Enterprise with Enhanced Brand Visibility Capabilities" and names Adobe as Nasdaq ADBE. The same block dates two other things worth knowing: a release on 11 August 2026 headed "Semrush, an Adobe Company, Named in Gartner Market Guide for Answer Engine Visibility Tools", and a 7 July 2026 study, "Semrush Releases Expanded 2026 AI Visibility Index, Analyzing 126 Million AI Search Prompts", described as scaled "from an initial 2,500 prompts to 126 million U.S. AI search prompts".

What the competitor analysis toolkit actually contains

From the feature list at semrush.com/features, read the same day: a Traffic and Market Toolkit for channels and audiences, Domain Overview for an instant organic, paid and backlink snapshot, Organic Rankings for the keywords and pages driving a competitor's traffic, backlink analysis that now also covers "the citations LLMs use when they mention your brand", prompt research covering "the prompts your audience uses in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI tools", AI visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and AI Overviews, and AI brand sentiment. There is also Semrush MCP and a Semrush API.

No price is rendered on those feature pages. That is a fact about the pages rather than a criticism, and it is the reason this page states limits and capabilities instead of reproducing anybody's price table.

The alternatives, by the job you are hiring the tool for

If the job is link data. Moz publishes its index sizes openly at moz.com/products, "over 40 trillion links" in Link Explorer and a "1.25 billion+ keyword index", with tiers from "$45/month". Published index size is a checkable number in a market with few of them.

If the job is market and traffic share. Similarweb is the direct comparison, and its pricing page rendered no price at all in its first response on 21 October 2026, only "Contact sales" and "Start free trial", alongside AI Citation Analysis, AI Prompt Analysis, AI Sentiment Analysis and traffic trackers for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Grok, Gemini and Deepseek.

If the job is agency reporting. SE Ranking publishes an Agency Pack with white label reporting, an SEO report generator and a lead generator at seranking.com/features.html, plus an API and MCP.

If the job is answer engine visibility specifically. Ahrefs Brand Radar is the closest priced comparison and publishes its unit costs, including "Claude consumes 8 checks per update" and an overage of $0.020 a check, at ahrefs.com/brand-radar.

The one competitor comparison Semrush does not make

Semrush will tell you which domains are cited when an assistant answers, and its index of prompts is enormous. What a prompt index cannot tell you is what happens on your own buyer's question, asked the way your own buyer asks it, on the five apps your own buyers use, today. That is a measurement rather than an index, and the two are complements rather than substitutes.

AI Knows Us is not a competitor research suite and we sell no traffic estimates, keyword data or link index. We run your buyer's questions, which never name your business, against ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews, and report whether you were named, who was named instead, and which sources produced the answer. A credit is one buyer question put to one app once. A Claude check costs three credits, because the Anthropic API with live web search is the expensive one; most checks cost one.

Two rules sit behind every rate we publish. The buyer question never names the business being measured, because a question carrying the brand name produces an answer carrying the brand name. And every rate comes with a 95 percent Wilson interval, so a move that is inside the noise is reported as noise.

Our own ladder is published in full at aiknowsus.com/llms.txt as plain text, so it is readable without running JavaScript. Read on 21 October 2026: SEO Start $149 a month with no buyer questions watched and a monthly demand harvest, Growth $299 with 100 buyer questions watched, 1,200 scheduled answers a month and five engines, SEO Scale $699, Scale $599 with 300 questions and 3,500 scheduled answers, Inbound $1,099 with 200 questions, Outbound $1,299 with 30 questions and four engines, Agency $1,299 with 80 questions and 12,300 credits, Everything $1,799 with 300 questions and 3,600 scheduled answers. A 1,000 credit top up is $49, and $149 is the published United States floor. Managed GEO is listed at Rs 88,499 to Rs 2,35,999 a month with a three month minimum, published in rupees only, so we quote it in rupees rather than converting it.

Our own pricing page carried a warning here that turned out to be wrong, so this is the correction, dated 21 October 2026. Fetched as a crawler that day, it served 24 dollar figures and 31 rupee figures together in the first response, and said on its own face that it is rendered on the server for every visitor and every crawler. The plain text file is the server rendered source for a dollar figure.

Three places where rivals publish more than we do, read on 21 October 2026. Ahrefs Brand Radar names seven surfaces to our five at ahrefs.com/brand-radar: ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Claude, and it publishes its per engine cost in words, "Claude consumes 8 checks per update", plus an overage rate of $0.020 a check. Rankscale names eight engines at rankscale.ai/pricing, including DeepSeek, Mistral and Copilot. Profound publishes "Up to 9 Answer Engines tracked" and "SSO/SAML + SOC 2 compliance" on its enterprise tier at tryprofound.com/pricing. Our rendered pricing text carries no single sign on, no white label, no SOC 2, no ISO and no data processing agreement, and every plan is one login with full access covering one business, except Agency.

On the criterion this page uses we rank ourselves first on one narrow, checkable item: of the vendors read on 21 October 2026, ours was the only product whose price and whose tier limits, the questions watched, the credits, the engines and the check cadence, were all readable in a server rendered plain text file, in three currencies. Peec AI publishes limits such as "50 prompts" and "Choose 3 models" at peec.ai/pricing with no price rendered in the first response. Profound and Similarweb publish no self serve price at all. Rankscale renders every numeric cell of its comparison matrix as 0, so a scrape of that table reports a product with no limits. Semrush publishes no price on its feature pages. That is a disclosure claim and nothing more.

There is a separate page comparing the two large suites on this specific capability, Semrush against Ahrefs on AI visibility, and a page on which Semrush tools do which job at best Semrush SEO tools by job. No other page on this site links to that second one, measured across the 2,017 of 2,082 live pages whose text we can read, on 21 October 2026.

What buyers ask about Semrush competitor analysis

How accurate is the traffic number? It is a panel model and Semrush describes it as such. Use it to rank competitors against each other inside the tool, not as an absolute.

Does the Adobe acquisition change the product? The news page names enhanced brand visibility capabilities for Adobe's enterprise customers. For a self serve buyer today the toolkit list is what the feature page says it is.

Do I need Semrush and an AI visibility tool? If the assistants matter to your buyers, yes, because one gives you an index and the other gives you your own readings. If they do not, the suite alone is enough.

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