Semrush

What it is

Semrush is the large, established competitive-intelligence platform for the demand side of a market: what competitors rank for, what they pay for ads, where their traffic comes from, and how big the search demand around a category actually is. Its newer AI Visibility toolkit is what makes it relevant beyond marketing — it tracks how often and how favourably AI assistants mention your brand versus competitors’ when someone asks a buying question. For a PM, that’s a market-sizing and positioning instrument, not an SEO one.

Our verdict

Useful for a specific, increasingly important question — is this market real, and who owns the demand in it? — and now for a second one nobody had a tool for two years ago: what an LLM says about you when a prospect asks. Keyword-gap analysis is a blunt but honest read on which problems competitors are actively courting; ad-copy history shows what messaging they kept paying for, which is the closest thing to a public record of what converted.

Where it falls short: it’s expensive and priced for a marketing team, not a PM — the useful tier starts near $200/month, the modular toolkit structure means the thing you want is frequently a separate line item on top, and the free account’s 10 queries a day runs out during a single competitor review. The data is also estimated, not measured: traffic and keyword volumes can be off substantially for smaller sites, and for B2B products where buying happens through sales conversations rather than search, the whole dataset can be close to noise. If your PM question is “what features do they ship,” this is the wrong tool — it sees demand, not product.

Get value in 10 minutes

1. Create the free account (no card) and open Domain Overview. Enter your closest competitor’s domain and note two things only: estimated organic traffic trend over 12 months, and paid vs organic split.
2. Open the Keyword Gap tool. Put your domain in the first slot and two competitors in the others, then filter to “Missing” — keywords they both rank for and you don’t. Read them as problem statements, not as SEO tasks; that list is a decent proxy for the jobs your competitors are claiming.
3. In Advertising Research, look at the ad copy a competitor has run longest. Long-lived ad copy is tested copy — it’s their best guess at what makes a buyer act.
4. If you’re evaluating the AI Visibility toolkit on trial, add five prompts a real buyer would type into an assistant (“best tool for X for a small team”) and see whose product gets named. That gap is a positioning brief you can act on this quarter.
5. Stop at the 10-query free cap and decide honestly whether the answers changed anything before you spend $200/month on them.