Semrush Review: My #1 Choice for SEO Success for 2025

6 Steps to Get AI to Recommend Your Brand

When it comes to SEO tools, most promise the world but fail to deliver. After testing dozens over the years, I’ve found one that stands out: Semrush.

It’s the only tool I’ve consistently relied on to grow traffic, rank higher, and outpace the competition.

In this review, I’ll break down

By the end, you’ll know if Semrush is the right tool to take your SEO strategy to the next level.

I won’t cover every tool Semrush offers — there are simply too many. In this review, I’ll go through each of the main toolkits and cover what I think are the most notable tools in each one.

Let’s start with the SEO Toolkit.

SEO Toolkit

The SEO Toolkit contains some of Semrush’s most powerful tools. This is probably the toolkit most people will subscribe to, since it covers some of the key tasks in any digital marketing strategy.

Competitor Analysis

Semrush has many tools you can use to analyze your competitors’ marketing efforts. The first of these is Domain Overview.

This gives you a big picture overview of any site’s organic search, paid search, and AI visibility.

This report is helpful if you want to quickly see how much traffic a site gets from SEO or Google Ads.

You can also gain useful insights about any website’s backlink profile from this overview. You’ll see details like their top anchors and referring domains.

The Domain Overview is great for getting a high-level look at how your rivals are performing.

But Semrush’s other tools are where you can extract more specific data about a website.

For example, Organic Research tells you how much traffic a site gets from Google and how it has changed over the years.

But the report’s real value is its regularly updated list of keywords that a site ranks for in organic search. You can find it in the Positions tab.

In my experience, reverse engineering your competitor’s keywords is still one of the best [keyword research](/content/tools/keyword "Free Keyword Research Tool by Backlinko"/index.html) strategies.

And Semrush is one of the best SEO tools on the market for this approach.

That’s because Semrush has a HUGE database of more than 25 billion keywords. And they update this list all the time.

So, Organic Research is a great place to start your analysis for finding content to create.

Speaking of keyword research…

Keyword Research

Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool is one of the most powerful keyword research tools on the market.

Like the Organic Research tool, it’s powered by Semrush’s huge keyword database, and it lets you find thousands of relevant keyword ideas in seconds.

You just pop a seed keyword in, and the tool will provide lots of related [search terms](/content/hub/seo/search-terms "Search Terms: What They Are and How to Use Them"/index.html).

You can filter and sort these by metrics like:

This way, you’ll only see keywords related to your business that you can rank for.

Plus, if you add your domain, you’ll get AI-powered, personalized data relevant to your website. Like your own Personal Keyword Difficulty score and an estimate of the traffic you’ll get if you rank for that keyword.

This makes the Keyword Magic Tool a super useful way to find keyword ideas that can drive real results for your business.

And if you click on any of the keywords, the Keyword Overview tool lets you perform a deeper analysis on it.

In this report, you can see a keyword’s search volume, keyword difficulty, CPC estimates, and more.

And you can see the first page competition for that keyword in the search engine results pages ( [SERPs](/content/hub/seo/serps "What Are SERPs & Why Are They Important for SEO?"/index.html)).

What I like about this feature is the massive set of keyword ideas that you get.

Specifically, Semrush generates keyword ideas through variations, questions, and “keyword strategy” (which provides an example [pillar page](/content/pillar-pages "Pillar Pages: How to Create One + Examples"/index.html) and topic clusters).

For example, here are variations that Semrush has for the keyword “social media marketing.”

The final keyword research tool I want to mention is Keyword Gap. It compares your keyword ranking with a handful of competitors.

The idea here is that you can find keywords that many of your competitors rank for in Google, but you don’t.

On-Site SEO & Tracking

Semrush also has a super in-depth SEO site audit tool built into it — aptly named Site Audit.

In my opinion, this is one of the better SEO audit tools on the market (right up there with Ahrefs).

That’s because their “Site Health” percentage score makes it easy to size up your site’s overall [technical SEO](/content/technical-seo-guide "Technical SEO: The Definitive Guide"/index.html) health.

But if you want to get into the weeds, you can.

For example, if you run an ecommerce site with thousands of pages, Semrush will scan them all.

And give you plenty of things you can do to improve your site’s crawlability, indexing, [internal linking](/content/hub/seo/internal-links "Internal Linking for SEO: The Complete Guide"/index.html) and overall performance.

Some of these are definitely nitpicky things that won’t necessarily make a big difference in your rankings individually. But fixing lots of small issues across your site can lead to measurable results.

So if you want to make sure that your site’s technical SEO is 100% on point, Semrush’s Site Audit tool is a great way to do it.

Then, as you make improvements to your site’s SEO, monitor your results with Position Tracking.

This is Semrush’s [rank tracking](/content/best-rank-tracking-tools "5 Amazing Rank Tracking Tools"/index.html) feature. And you can use it for both organic and paid rankings.

Like any good rank tracker, this one shows you how your rankings have shifted over time, your site’s overall [search engine visibility](/content/hub/seo/visibility "What Is Search Engine Visibility? And How to Increase It"/index.html), and your rankings distribution.

Link Building

Semrush offers several useful tools that’ll help you with your link building efforts. First, the Backlink Analytics tool gives you access to useful data about your backlink profile and those of your competitors.

Overall, I think Semrush’s backlink checker is great, mainly thanks to its massive link index (with 43 trillion links). And it finds new pages and backlinks FAST.

While I do prefer the Ahrefs link analysis UI, Semrush’s is still really good.

Specifically, they have dozens of filters that you can use to find the backlinks that actually matter to you, whether on your own site or when you’re looking at a rival’s link profile. Like links that are active and not marked with “nofollow.”

Semrush’s backlink tool even has a few cool features that Ahrefs doesn’t have.

For example, Semrush actually breaks a site’s referring domains down into different categories.

But if I was analyzing our competitors, this kind of data would help me understand if there are markets our competitors are getting links from that we’re not.

Another link building tool worth mentioning is Backlink Audit. This gives you an in-depth report on any site’s link building profile.

Other notable tools you get access to with the Semrush SEO Toolkit include:

AI Visibility Toolkit

Semrush’s newest toolkit tackles a problem every marketer has right now: how to track, compare, and improve visibility inside LLM answers.

AI Analysis

This hub pulls together how often your brand appears in AI answers, which topics and prompts drive those appearances, and — crucially — what sources LLMs cite to build those answers.

Visibility Overview

The Visibility Overview gives you a quick read on how your brand stacks up against industry averages across major LLMs.

Brand Performance

This section of the AI Visibility Toolkit is my favorite.

It gives you a huge amount of data you can use to understand your current AI visibility — and start improving it.

Key Business Drivers

This part shows you what story your brand is telling.

But what interests me most about this section is the introduction of sentiment.

Unless you believe all press is good press, you’re going to care about brand perception, since that’ll have a direct impact on conversion and revenue.

Perception

Perception in general is inherently hard to measure. So I’m glad to see it has its own subsection in this toolkit.

Narrative Drivers

In this report, you can filter for branded vs. non-branded LLM answers and citations.

Questions

This section breaks query intent down by topic cluster, along with the questions your brand is successfully answering for each subtopic.

Boost and Monitor

This final section of the toolkit is where strategy turns into ongoing execution.

Two tools live here: an AI-aware site audit and prompt-level tracking that finally makes LLM performance feel like [SEO analytics](/content/seo-analytics "SEO Analytics: The "/index.html).

Site Audit

While you can access the full Site Audit tool as part of the SEO toolkit, you’ll also get access to an AI search-specific site health widget for up to 100 pages with the AI SEO Toolkit.

Prompt Tracking

LLM analytics are hard to come by, but now Semrush is able to provide metrics like visibility and average position over time.

Traffic & Market Toolkit

Semrush offers several great tools for understanding your target market and audience. [Audience research](/content/audience-research "Audience Research: Stop Guessing What Your Buyers Care About"/index.html) in particular is essential if you want to create content that reaches and resonates with your target customers.

Traffic Analysis

The Traffic Analytics tool shows you details about a website’s traffic. Including where it came from, how users interact with the website, and even what percentage of them make a purchase.

Audience Research

To help you understand your target audience, Semrush has four super useful tools.

Market Analysis

Finally, the Market Overview report shows you the landscape of a given niche.

Content Toolkit

Semrush offers a few helpful tools for planning and creating content that’s optimized for SEO and AI tools.

Finding Topics & Generating Briefs

The Topic Finder works by taking a seed keyword and generating content ideas you can use.

Creating and Optimizing Content

The AI Article Generator will take your brief and use it to create SEO-ready content.

Advertising Toolkit

Semrush doesn’t just offer SEO tools. The platform is also stacked with tools for other areas of your marketing, and the first of these I’ll cover is the Advertising Toolkit.

View Competitor Ad Performance

You can use Semrush to see pretty much every ad that one of your competitors is running. And you can see how much traffic those ads bring in.

Display Ads Research

Semrush isn’t just for PPC ads.

Other Toolkits and Features

Semrush has a few other toolkits and features worth highlighting for specific use cases.

Local Toolkit

If you run a physical business, Semrush’s Local Toolkit can help you optimize your online presence and drive more customers to your store.

Social Toolkit

The Social Toolkit comes with five main tools to help with your social media marketing efforts.

My Reports

My Reports is Semrush’s built-in reporting tool. It’s especially handy for anyone using Semrush to report data to clients or key stakeholders in the business.

Semrush Pricing

Semrush’s pricing varies depending on which toolkit(s) you subscribe to.

Semrush: Things I Like

  1. Reliable data: Data is the backbone of an SEO tool like Semrush.
  2. Unified platform: One of the strengths of Semrush is that everything is connected.
  3. Unique set of SEO and PPC features: This SEO toolkit has so many features that I didn’t have a chance to cover all of them in this review.

Semrush: Things I Don’t Like

  1. Organic traffic estimates can be off: Like any SEO tool, Semrush’s organic traffic estimates aren’t always super accurate.
  2. Missing click data: If you want to really dig into a single keyword, Semrush does the job.
  3. Click-heavy UI: This means that it usually takes 3-5 clicks to get to the specific report that you need.

The Bottom Line: My Semrush Review

Semrush has a set of industry-leading features that are backed by a large index of keywords, backlinks, and advertising data. This is why Semrush has become one of the most popular and trusted marketing tools.