Semrush is a well-known name in the content marketing world. While its primary offering is search engine optimization (SEO), the company has also recently launched its AI visibility toolkit.
I tested the tool for one of my client’s websites (hi there, Buffer) to see how effective it is for improving AI visibility & performance, and how it fares compared to other GEO tools on the market—especially specialized ones like Profound.
The TL;DR: Semrush is best for companies needing basic AI monitoring alongside SEO tools
Semrush’s AI visibility toolkit is perfect for someone already using Semrush. The add-on tool will help you integrate your SEO and other marketing data into a single tool.
You can also use Semrush’s AI visibility tool if you want basic AI monitoring, but you might find it hard to justify the cost of the software—especially as you scale. It’s good if you’re just experimenting with AI visibility and it’s not an essential or priority channel for you yet.
Here’s the pros and cons list before we dive deeper into each advantage and area of improvement:
Semrush’s AI visibility tool is affordable, but might not be scalable
Semrush’s standalone AI visibility tool costs $99/month. On the surface, this sounds like friendly entry-level pricing. But if you scratch beneath the surface, the cost adds up, fast:
Semrush’s SEO tools cost extra.
The best part about using Semrush is it can act as your all-in-one marketing platform, especially if you have a comprehensive SEO strategy. But Semrush’s classic SEO plans begin at $139.95/month—which you’ll have to pay in addition to the AI tool add-on.
The standalone AI visibility toolkit is limiting.
Even if you use another tool for your SEO efforts, Semrush’s AI visibility toolkit alone might require you to purchase add-ons to make it worthwhile for you. The $99/month plan includes only one domain and 25 custom prompts.
- To add another domain, you need to pay an additional $99/month
- To use this tool with your team, each additional user costs $99/month
- To extend your prompt-tracking limit, you need to pay an extra $60/month for 50 more prompts
What about Semrush One?
Even their new offering, Semrush One, which includes both SEO and AI features, starts at $199/month. It includes 50 prompts.
- This is the introductory pricing, so you can expect it to climb in the future
- Adding more custom prompts requires you to upgrade your plan
- Adding an additional user costs $45/month/teammate
Semrush’s AI visibility toolkit is affordable at first, but scaling with it is challenging. Just having one other teammate on your account with 50 additional prompts will cost you $258/month.
If you run an agency managing multiple accounts, the standalone tool might cost too much to have any justifiable ROI, given that each new client domain costs $99/month.
What I also don’t like about this payment structure is its painful to track. You could get a surprise on the bill every month based on how many prompts you used or how many teammates you added. I’d much rather prefer a simpler tier of plans that clearly spells out the cost, without layering additional prices for add-ons.
For instance, it’s simple to understand Profound’s pricing:
- Agency plans have their own payment structures because their needs differ
- The lowest tier ($99/month) gets you ChatGPT tracking, 50 prompts, and one user
- The Grow plan adds Perplexity, Google AI overviews into the mix with seats for three
- The Enterprise plan is for when you have 3+ team members and need to track more answer engines
This payment model is much clearer to understand and make sense of. Instead of focusing on add-ons, I can just focus on making the best of the plan I have and upgrading if I need to.
Key takeaway: Semrush’s pricing is affordable in the beginning. But as you scale your efforts, be mindful of the additional costs of various add-ons—including domains, teammates, and prompts. Before you commit to a plan, calculate whether you can justify the tool's ROI based on your current and future usage.
Semrush’s AI visibility toolkit: What I like
Before I start giving details on what I liked about Semrush’s AI visibility toolkit, I want to point out that its best value for money would be for those who also have use for Semrush's SEO functions.
Yes, you can purchase the AI visibility tool alone. But I wouldn’t recommend it—at least, not yet. The features are great, but they aren’t enough to justify the spend unless you integrate them with SEO data (more on this in the next section).
Pairs perfectly with Semrush’s SEO suite
Semrush’s AI visibility toolkit is perfect for those who already live inside Semrush. You can see your SEO performance and AI visibility under one roof. This makes it really easy to understand where your traffic is coming from, what you should focus on to improve your strategy, and to consolidate reporting.
The platform’s interface will also be familiar if you’re already using Semrush, meaning less learning curve. Semrush also offers several other tools, including running ad campaigns, managing your Google Business Profile, and social media management.
Key takeaway: Semrush AI visibility toolkit is perfect for businesses that need a single subscription to host all their marketing efforts.
Prompt research is easy to understand, especially for SEO pros
Semrush treats prompt research the same way it treats keyword research. You can search for a prompt in your industry and Semrush will show you its AI volume, topic difficulty, search intent, competing brand mentions, and related topics.
This is similar to how Semrush approaches keyword research: find high-volume, low-competition prompts/keywords and write about them to rank higher in search engines and answer engines.
It’s a simple, easy-to-use feature that can help you create more content that would improve your AI visibility. You can also click on “View full response” to quickly peruse a summary of the brands AI search engines mentioned and the sources referenced.
Semrush can generate the content for these prompts for you, too, but at an additional $60/month.
Something I would’ve loved to have in addition to prompt research is prompt suggestions. It’s tricky to figure out all the prompts your target audience might be using. Profound, for instance, suggests relevant keywords automatically—a helpful head start.
Profound also supersedes with the depth it provides for each keyword. You can not only see the search intent and various related prompts, but also keyword hierarchy, demographics breakdown, and filter results for a custom timeline.
Something little that I also liked is how easy it was to store the relevant prompts in Profound. I could add them to my list so I can find them easily when creating content for AI visibility. The workflow in Semrush isn’t as slick and smooth.
Key takeaway: Semrush treats prompt research similarly to keyword research, showing the difficulty and volume of an AI prompt. You can use it to find topics to create content on to improve your AI visibility.
The brand performance report is really insightful to understand your brand’s strengths (but might not be actionable)
My favorite feature set of Semrush’s AI visibility toolkit is Brand Performance. Here, you can compare your share of voice vs. sentiment in answer search engines, compared to your competitors. The Perception insights are really easy to work on.
You can dive deeper into each brand perception and narrative drivers to understand which prompts are influencing your results. This helps pinpoint how you can close the gap with your competitors and come out on top.
What’s even more exciting is the Key Business Drivers metrics. Semrush identifies the key metrics where your brand excels in AI mentions and citations, so you can understand your strengths compared to competitors.
The above insight can help you understand what you can double down on and what weaknesses you could improve. If you want to dive deeper, Semrush also provides a breakdown of the Key Business Drivers for each individual competitor.
Lastly, come the AI strategic opportunities. These are Semrush’s suggestions to improve your AI visibility and brand perception.
While these were definitely useful, I found some of them unrealistic. For example, the suggestion to “offer partner bundles” means well, but it isn’t possible within an “urgent timeframe.”
I also didn’t understand how the tool decoded which opportunities are urgent and which can wait. The recommendations here, in general, were helpful, but not things you can quickly act on to improve your AI visibility.
In contrast, I really liked Profound’s Opportunity feature for how detailed and quick to implement it was. The tool explained why the opportunity makes sense at this time and how to take action on it, step by step.
Granted, Profound provided fewer opportunity recommendations than Semrush, but they were of higher quality: quickly actionable, with a clear ‘why’ behind each recommendation, and step-by-step guidelines for implementation.
Key takeaway: Semrush provides excellent insights into your business' brand perception and sentiment. You can also compare these findings with competitors. The AI strategic opportunities, however, might not be things you can implement fast to get some quick wins in your pocket.
Semrush’s AI visibility toolkit: What could improve
Semrush has a lot of great things going for its AI visibility tool: it’s easy to use, integrates well with their SEO toolkit, and provides excellent brand perception insights. But the tool is still newly launched, so it’s not as mature as specialized GEO tools. Here are some things Semrush’s AI visibility toolkit can improve.
Limited LLM, language, and regional coverage
Right now, Semrush only provides AI visibility for three answer engines: ChatGPT, AI overview, and AI mode. Gemini is set to come soon.
While ChatGPT might be the most popular among consumers right now, it will probably lose some of the pie in the future. New AI engines will arrive on the block, and existing ones (such as Claude and Perplexity) will continue to grow.
GEO tools like Profound provide insights for up to 10 search engines in its highest-tier plans and are quicker to add new AI engines. This makes it a more scalable tool compared to Semrush.
Similarly, Semrush currently covers only six regional databases: the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, India, and Spain. This significantly shrinks the data size available for AI visibility analysis and recommendations.
If you’re a global brand (or an agency that works with brands across the world), it makes more sense to invest in AI visibility tools that have global coverage (like Profound).
Lastly, Semrush is also limited in the language department—providing only data for US English. Again, if you’re a global brand, you’ll have leads asking AI queries in various languages. You want to use a tool that has multilingual tracking features. Profound’s Enterprise plan already includes a database of over 100 languages (and growing!).
Key takeaway: Semrush doesn’t offer comprehensive coverage across regions, languages, and LLMs. The company will likely add more tools, locations, and languages in the future, but GEO tools like Profound already have extensive databases today.
Lack of in-depth actionable insights and data
Semrush’s AI visibility toolkit is excellent for basic AI monitoring. But if you need an in-depth analysis and actionable insights, the tool might not be able to come through. At least not yet.
Part of the problem is Semrush’s lack of CDN integration (unlike specialized tools like Profound) for accurate monitoring. This means you can’t detect bot blocks or unintended firewall rules that might be hampering your brand’s AI visibility. The prompt database is also 100 million, which sounds like a lot, but then you see tools like Profound that have a database of over 500 million prompts.
In Semrush, you also can’t access persona-level insights to ensure you’re understanding your target audience’s relevant needs. For instance, in Buffer’s best-performing topics, the top one was “Buffer Remote Jobs and Careers” which is useful, but unrelated to Buffer’s customers.
Here, it would’ve been helpful if Semrush had a feature like Profound's to add audience segments. You can define personas and assign them specific prompts to get an audience-level analysis of your AI visibility.
Lastly, I also found Semrush’s competitor research somewhat inaccurate and unhelpful. For Buffer, for example, Semrush provided a bunch of “missing” (aka high-opportunity) topics that were simply irrelevant—like scheduling text messages, food quotes, and Marc Maron.
Even when I dug deep into these inaccurate and irrelevant opportunities, I didn’t get any insight. For example, Semrush confuses the mention of “Later” the social media management tool (a competitor of Buffer) with “later” the word in the Marc Maron opportunity.
Tools like Profound not only offer a deeper and precise insight into competitor visibility, ranking, and citations, but also provide much more data to work with. For instance, I can see a clear table of visibility rankings by topic and identify where Buffer’s AI ranking can improve.
It’s also possible to dig deep into each topic and analyze the competition of specific prompts in Profound.
Key takeaway: Semrush’s database is limited and might often require you to sift through its insights to find accurate and reliable info.
Lack of support
AI visibility is a reality, but it’s also an ever-evolving field. You need guidance to help you weather the changes—especially if you’re investing in an expensive tool. Semrush’s standalone AI visibility toolkit, or the more expensive Semrush One plan, doesn’t offer priority support or help navigating the AI search landscape. The tool is largely self-serve once you buy it.
Semrush’s knowledge base is extensive and detailed. Their blog is also an excellent resource to learn more about AEO. But it would’ve been great to have someone from the Semrush team available to assist you 1:1 or even via email.
In Profound, on the contrary, you get dedicated AI strategists and consultative support in the Enterprise plan. The other two lower-tier plans also get dedicated email support.
I also wanted to highlight that Semrush has a kind of roundabout way to cancel your subscription. You must fill out a form to discontinue your plan, rather than click a simple “cancel subscription” button. The Semrush team will get back to you within 1-3 business days to process your cancellation. The reason is to ensure there’s no data loss.
But Trustpilot is filled with negative reviews about Semrush’s cancellation and refund policy. Users complain about three primary things:
- No refunds if you opt for a monthly plan, even if you didn’t use the tool at all and requested the refund promptly
- Add-on tools piling up the monthly subscription cost without users being able to keep track of it
- The added human approval to request cancelling your plan and a lack of response from Semrush’s team
I wanted to highlight this because it was a common complaint, even for longtime Semrush users. But I didn’t have an unpleasant experience—my cancellation request was approved within a few hours. I would’ve wanted an easier and quicker way to cancel my plan, but it’s not much of a dealbreaker as long as there’s no unfair charges.
Key takeaway: Semrush doesn’t offer dedicated support with its AI visibility toolkit. Users have also complained about difficulty cancelling their subscriptions and trials, so be careful to read the fine print before signing up for a plan.
Is Semrush the right choice for you?
I’d recommend going with Semrush’s AI visibility toolkit if:
- You’re already a Semrush power user and need to track your brand’s AI visibility
- You’re a small business or solo marketer with a limited budget and don’t need enterprise security
- You need basic AI monitoring alongside SEO tools, and don’t mind as the product matures over the next few months/years
Unfortunately, there’s no free trial of the AI visibility toolkit, but you can explore a free demo report to get a feel for the tool.
If you need more than just basic AI monitoring and need in-depth data and actionable insights, a tool like Profound will be a better fit. You can start experimenting with Profound’s Starter plan (costs the same as Semrush) to understand how it compares and whether it fits your needs better. Sign up today.