What Is Semrush and How to Use It: A 2026 Guide From Seven Years of Daily Use

What Semrush does, what it really costs in 2026 and how we use it daily since 2019: pricing, Site Audit, rank tracking and AI visibility.

Disclosure: Some Semrush links in this guide are affiliate links. If you sign up through them, Stradiji may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Our opinions are our own.

The short answer: Semrush is a paid platform for measuring how visible a website is in Google and in AI answers, analyzing competitors and finding technical SEO problems. The free plan gives you 10 reports a day. As of October 2026, paid plans start at $139.95 a month. Whether it’s worth that depends on one question we answer at the end: how many sites you manage, and whether you need the data outside the dashboard.

Grab a coffee. We’ve used Semrush every working day since November 17, 2019, when we set up the project for our own site. Today our account runs 21 active projects for clients in the US, the UK, Australia and Turkey. Every new client gets a Semrush project first, and their team gets read-only access to it.

Every example below comes from our own Semrush project for stradiji.com. The errors, the rankings and the decisions are ours.

What does Semrush do?

Semrush isn’t one tool. It’s a set of toolkits. Here’s how it’s organized in 2026 and how much we actually use each part:

Toolkit	What it does	How we use it
SEO Toolkit	Keyword research, rank tracking, site audits, backlink and competitor analysis. More than 20 tools.	Daily
AI Visibility Toolkit	Shows whether your brand appears in answers from ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Mode.	We don’t. We track AI visibility with GeoGenie.ai
Traffic & Market	Estimated competitor traffic, channel mix and market benchmarks.	Before every proposal
Content Toolkit	Content ideas, SEO briefs and draft optimization.	Occasionally
Local	Google Business Profile and local listings management.	For local business clients
Advertising	Competitors’ Google Ads copy and keywords.	For paid search work
Social Media	Social post scheduling and tracking.	We don’t

If you’re new, start with three tools: Site Audit, Position Tracking and Keyword Magic Tool. Open the rest once these feel familiar.

Semrush pricing in 2026: Which plan fits you?

“Semrush pricing” gets about 12,100 searches a month in the US, six times more than “what is semrush.” So let’s start where most readers do.

The first thing to know: Semrush now sells two separate plan families. Semrush One bundles the SEO tools with AI Search visibility tracking. SEO Classic is the Pro, Guru and Business lineup longtime users know. The pricing page opens on Semrush One, so it’s easy to think Guru is gone. It isn’t. Monthly prices as of October 5, 2026:

Semrush One	Monthly	Highlights
Starter	$199	SEO tools + 50 tracked AI prompts, MCP access
Pro+	$299	SEO tools + 100 prompts, historical data, content optimization
Advanced	$549	SEO tools + 200 prompts, API, share of voice

SEO Classic	Monthly	Highlights
Pro	$139.95	One site or a small team, one rank tracking target per site
Guru	$249.95	Growing teams, 10 tracking targets per site, content tools
Business	$499.95	Agencies and in-house teams, unlimited targets, API access

The free plan is still there: one demo project and 10 reports a day. Annual billing saves up to 17% on both families.

Our recommendation: If you run one site and do your own SEO, SEO Classic Pro is enough. If your site is bilingual or you need rankings by city, look at Guru, because Pro gives you a single tracking target per site. If you want to see how AI answers mention your brand without leaving Semrush, Semrush One Starter. We pay for SEO Classic Business: it allows up to 40 projects, we run 21 from one account, and the API lets us pipe the data into Claude.

Free trial: Semrush’s public trial is 7 days. Our partner link opens a 14-day Pro trial. Two weeks is enough to audit a site end to end and see the results.

Start your 14-day Semrush trial →

Step 1: Set up your first project

Everything in Semrush starts with a domain. In the 2026 interface, projects live under Folders. Setup takes about five minutes:

1. On the Semrush home screen, click Create Folder and enter your domain.
2. Inside the folder, set up Site Audit and Position Tracking. Both are covered below.
3. Connect Google Search Console and Google Analytics. You want Semrush’s estimates side by side with your real data.

How we work: Each client gets its own folder. We share it from Folders → Share with the client team’s email addresses and the Viewer role. Clients see their site’s status without waiting for a report, but they can’t change settings.

Step 2: Find technical problems with Site Audit

Site Audit crawls your site the way a search engine bot would and sorts problems into errors, warnings and notices. It ends with a Site Health score from 0 to 100.

Seven years of audits. Site Audit first ran on our project on November 17, 2019. It has run 1,115 times since, roughly every other day. In that time our site went bilingual, changed themes and added hundreds of pages. That’s the real value of regular crawls: when a big change breaks something, the next crawl shows it before problems pile up.

A lesson from our own site. On October 3, 2026, Semrush crawled 1,306 pages, gave us a score of 83 and flagged two pages with 5xx server errors. We crawled the same pages with Screaming Frog. Both loaded fine. The “errors” came from the server rate-limiting the crawler during the audit. Don’t treat every line in Site Audit as fact. Verify critical errors with a second tool.

Turn on JS rendering for JavaScript-heavy sites. By default, Site Audit reads a page’s raw HTML. That’s fast and easy on your server, but it misleads on sites that load content with JavaScript. If the menu, internal links, headings or product lists aren’t in the HTML the bot sees, Semrush reports them as missing. The JS rendering option makes the bot execute JavaScript and crawl the page as a visitor sees it. Semrush’s own help documentation recommends it for JavaScript-dependent sites and notes it’s available on higher plans. You’ll find it under the gear icon in Site Audit, in Audit settings, on the JS rendering line. Our WordPress site renders on the server, so we leave it off. The same panel shows we crawl daily with the mobile bot (SiteAuditBot Mobile) and a 5,000-page limit. For clients on React, Vue or similar frameworks, we run the first crawl with JS rendering on.

Quick check: Copy a sentence you see on the page and search for it in the page source (Ctrl+U or Cmd+Option+U). If it isn’t there, JavaScript loads it, and a crawl without JS rendering won’t see it.

Where to start? Errors first, then warnings. Most notices aren’t urgent. One example: on October 4, 2026, Semrush said 33 of our page titles were too long. We widened the list with Screaming Frog and shortened 55 titles to under 60 characters the same day. The next day’s crawl showed the result: Site Health went from 83 to 90, and errors dropped from 12 to 5.

New tab: AI Search Health. Site Audit now scores how accessible your site is to AI search crawlers. Ours is 85. The same screen shows whether robots.txt blocks bots like ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, Googlebot and Google-Extended. We block none. The simplest reason a site never shows up in AI answers is blocking these bots without realizing it. Check this first.

Step 3: Track your rankings with Position Tracking

Position Tracking checks your Google rankings for a chosen keyword list every day. You can set location (country, state, city or ZIP code), language and device. Our own project tracks two markets, and we watched our title fixes land here: for “seo araçları” (Turkish for “SEO tools”), our Turkish SEO tools guide went from position 55 on September 29 to 14 in organic results on October 4. On October 5, Google cited the same page in an AI Overview, and Semrush logged it as position 1. That’s one day of data, but it shows Position Tracking now counts AI Overview citations, not just blue links.

One project, several targets: language and location

You can create multiple tracking targets for the same domain. Each one has its own country, language, device and keyword list. For a bilingual site, that’s not optional: your Turkish pages compete in Turkey, your English pages compete in the US.

Target	Location and language	Keywords	What we measure
Stradiji TR	Turkey, Google Turkish	64	SEO and GEO consulting, corporate SEO training, conversion optimization, Semrush and SEO tool guides
Stradiji US	United States, Google English	42	Generative engine optimization, AI search visibility, B2B SEO consulting, GEO audits

Competitors are set per target. In Turkey we benchmark against Turkish SEO agencies. In the US, against well-known US SEO and GEO agencies. You’re measured against the rivals in each market, not a global average.

We set up client targets the same way. A few examples, without names:

• A self-storage company based in Istanbul: Turkey overall plus three cities. In the first week of October 2026, it ranked No. 1 nationally for its main query, but 20th in Ankara and 23rd in Izmir. A single country-level target would have said everything was fine. City targets showed in one glance why city-specific pages were needed. The same logic applies to a US business tracking New York, Chicago and Dallas separately.
• A multi-campus education group: 13 separate city and district targets, one per campus area.
• Software companies selling into the US: US desktop plus a separate mobile target.

Clean up your keyword list

Keyword lists get set up once and forgotten. Ours had been. Our 2019 list included navigational queries for Google’s own products, each searched tens of thousands of times a month in Turkey. Even if we ranked, nobody searching them wanted an SEO consultant. High volume inflated our visibility chart and brought zero business. In October 2026 we reviewed all 85 keywords, removed 44 and added 23 that match what we sell now, like “geo nedir” (“what is GEO”) and “seo danışmanlığı” (“SEO consulting”).

The rule: For every keyword, ask: “Could someone who finds us with this query become a client?” If the answer is no, don’t track it.

Rankings alone don’t tell the story anymore

Let’s be honest: “What position are we in?” says less in 2026 than it used to. Ranking third can still put you well below the fold if an AI Overview, an ad block, a People Also Ask box and a video carousel sit above you. SERPs keep changing, and so does the space each result gets.

And most searches end without a click. According to a SparkToro study by Rand Fishkin using Datos data, published in July 2024, 58.5% of Google searches in the US and 59.7% in the EU end with zero clicks. For every 1,000 US Google searches, only 360 clicks go to a site outside Google. We’ve written more about this in our zero-click search glossary entry.

So next to rankings, we watch three things in Position Tracking:

• SERP features: Does the keyword trigger an AI Overview, a featured snippet or video results, and do you appear there?
• Visibility and share of voice: How much of the keyword group you own compared with competitors, instead of single positions.
• Impressions and clicks in Search Console: If rankings rise and clicks don’t, the problem is probably the SERP layout, not your page.

An example from our own site. For “pwa nedir” (“what is a PWA”), one of our Turkish pages averaged position 2.9 from March to August 2025. Same period in 2026: position 3.5, practically unchanged. Impressions more than tripled, from 1,237 to 4,061. Clicks fell from 57 to 18, and click-through rate dropped from 4.61% to 0.44%. Looking at rankings alone, we’d have said all is well. Search Console shows people now get the answer without visiting our page.

Two setup tips:

• Tag your keywords. Tags like product, service and brand show at a glance which group is moving.
• Add three to five competitors. A ranking on its own means little. Your visibility against competitors means a lot.

Step 4: Do keyword research with Keyword Magic Tool

Type a seed keyword into Keyword Magic Tool and it lists thousands of related searches with volume, keyword difficulty (KD) and search intent. Always check the database first. It decides which country’s data you see.

We used it to plan this guide. US database, October 2026:

Query	Monthly searches (US)	Keyword difficulty
semrush	110,000	66
semrush pricing	12,100	55
semrush review	2,900	43
semrush free trial	2,900	45
what is semrush	1,900	56
how to use semrush	320	63

The decision: people search for Semrush pricing six times more than they ask what Semrush is, yet most beginner guides bury pricing or quote old plan names. So this guide leads with a full pricing section. That’s what keyword research is for: deciding what to write with data, not guesses.

The screenshot below is the same search run in the Turkey database for our Turkish guide: 808 related keywords. Switch the database and the whole picture changes.

Step 5: Analyze competitors and backlinks

Three reports do most of the work:

• Domain Overview: Any domain’s estimated organic traffic, keyword count and backlink profile. The first screen we open before writing a proposal.
• Backlink Analytics: Which domains link to a site, plus new and lost links.
• Keyword Gap: Keywords your competitors rank for and you don’t. The most productive report for content planning.

One warning: Semrush traffic numbers are estimates. Your real data lives in Google Search Console. Estimates work for comparing competitors. For your own performance, trust Search Console.

New in Domain Overview: AI Search. The report now lists which of a site’s pages get cited in AI answers. On October 5, 2026, it showed seven pages for stradiji.com: three citations in ChatGPT, four in Google AI Overviews and one in AI Mode. Same screen: Authority Score 23, estimated organic traffic 362 a month. For competitor research, this block is the fastest way to see which content gets a rival cited by AI.

New: Measure AI visibility with the AI Visibility Toolkit

The question our US clients ask has changed. It’s no longer just “Where do we rank on Google?” It’s also “Does ChatGPT recommend us?” Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit tries to answer that: whether your brand shows up in AI platform answers, which prompts recommend a competitor instead, and which sources get cited. Semrush One plans track 50 to 200 prompts daily.

One thing up front: AI answers vary by person and by moment. There is no such thing as “ranking No. 1 in AI.” The honest metric is your visibility share across many prompts.

Our choice: Position Tracking now lets you pick ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Mode as engines for a new target. But according to Semrush’s help docs, prompt tracking is sold separately: 25 prompts with the AI Visibility Toolkit (from $99 a month as of October 2026), or 50 to 200 prompts with Semrush One. US prompt volume and topic data are available, which isn’t the case for every market. We still didn’t buy it. We track our clients’ AI visibility with GeoGenie.ai, which fits how we already run GEO projects across several countries.

Measuring AI visibility is the start. Finding out why you don’t show up, and what to fix in what order, is a different job. That’s what our GEO consulting covers. If you want the background first, see how we track AI Overviews with Semrush.

Bonus: Connect Semrush to your AI assistant

From Semrush One Starter up, Semrush offers MCP (Model Context Protocol) access. In plain terms, you can connect Semrush data directly to an AI assistant like Claude. That’s how we pulled the keyword volumes in this guide, our audit history since 2019 and our site’s error list. Instead of exporting CSVs and merging spreadsheets, we ask the question and get an answer backed by data. This guide was drafted in Claude Cowork with Semrush and Search Console data pulled in directly. That connection is the main reason we stay on Semrush, as the note below explains. We share our rules for this in Use Claude for SEO, don’t let it do your SEO.

Semrush vs. Ahrefs vs. Ubersuggest

	Semrush	Ahrefs	Ubersuggest
Starting price (Oct. 2026)	$139.95/mo	$129/mo (Lite), $29/mo (Starter)	$29/mo
Strength	SEO, ads, content and AI visibility in one place	Backlink data	Price, simplicity
Weakness	Expensive for one site, crowded menus	Add-ons cost extra	Tight data limits
Best for	Agencies, in-house teams	Link-focused SEOs	Small businesses, solo users

We stay on Semrush because we run several clients from one account, give clients dashboard access and, most of all, connect the data to Claude through MCP. If you don’t need that, Google Search Console plus Ubersuggest is often enough for a single-site business. Our full comparison is in the best paid and free SEO tools.

Mert’s Note

I’ve been doing SEO since 2009, and there’s something I owe you at the end of this guide: Semrush has raised its prices a lot recently. Our monthly bill is now over $1,000.

That sent us looking. We tested cheaper SEO tools like Ubersuggest. For AI visibility, we moved to newer tools like GeoGenie.ai. Today we track how our brands appear in ChatGPT and Gemini with GeoGenie, not Semrush.

So here’s my honest take: unless you’re an enterprise team or an agency managing several clients, think twice before you commit. Paying hundreds of dollars a month for one site usually isn’t necessary. Google Search Console and a lighter tool will cover most of what you need.

Why are we still here? One reason: connecting Semrush to Claude. Our Business plan and the Semrush API let us bring the data into Claude Cowork through Semrush MCP and run analysis by asking questions. The audit history since 2019, the cleanup of our 85-keyword list and the setup of our Turkey and US targets in this guide all came out of that workflow. It turns days of CSV work into hours. Without that connection, we’d have left Semrush already.

My yardstick now: a tool’s value isn’t in its dashboard. It’s in how well its data talks to your AI assistant. If you sign up through our link, we may earn a commission. That’s exactly why I wrote this note: if it doesn’t fit you, don’t buy it.

Frequently asked questions

The one thing to do this week

Start a free trial, run Site Audit on your site and list only the red errors. Most first-crawl errors take a few hours to fix, and you’ll see your score move on the next crawl.

Start your 14-day Semrush trial →

Want your team to learn Semrush and AI visibility hands-on? See our corporate SEO training.

Mert Erkal is the founder of Stradiji. He has worked in SEO since 2009 and founded Stradiji in 2010. Updated October 2026.