If you’re looking for a Semrush alternative, you probably fall into one of two groups:
- You want a straight SEO tool replacement for keyword research, backlinks, rank tracking, site audits, etc.
- You want an AEO tool that can help you track, measure, and improve your AI search visibility in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, etc.
The second group is more common than you might think. Most SEO teams run on Semrush or Ahrefs and aren't planning to leave. For them, the real question isn't what to replace Semrush with. It's whether to upgrade to Semrush's built-in AI visibility, which starts at $199/month on the Starter plan (or $99/month per domain as a standalone toolkit), or keep Semrush for SEO and add a dedicated AEO tool alongside it.
This guide covers both decisions. We'll compare 13 alternatives side by side, organized by what each does best across SEO and AEO, plus a way to pick the right setup for your team. Let's dive in.
Quick answer:
Keeping Semrush and adding AI search visibility: Writesonic. It's built for AI search first, with prompt-level data showing exactly which prompts you're winning or losing in, plus prioritized fixes.
Replacing Semrush:
- All-in-one: Ahrefs or SE Ranking
- Budget: Ubersuggest ($29/month)
- Content optimization: Surfer SEO
Why teams look for Semrush alternatives
It’s too expensive
Semrush's entry-level SEO plan starts at $139/month, and pricing climbs fast once a team adds users, needs historical data, or wants AI visibility tracking alongside the core plan.
The pricing itself is also hard to untangle. Semrush's pricing page doesn't show one set of plans. It shows a dropdown of nine separately priced product lines: SEO + AI Search, AI Visibility, Traffic & Market, Local, Content, Social, Advertising, AI PR, and Enterprise, plus an App Center of add-on apps sold on top.
Most have their own tiers and limits, so a team that wants keyword research, AI visibility tracking, and competitor traffic data can end up comparing three plan grids and paying for three subscriptions.
Real-world Semrush cost scenarios
Here's what that looks like once a team adds seats, AI visibility, or other toolkits:
A few things stand out about Semrush’s pricing tiers:
- Seat pricing rises with the plan: An extra user costs $45 on Starter, $80 on Pro+, and $100 on Advanced, so a growing team pays more per head as it upgrades.
- AI visibility is priced per domain: This adds up quickly for agencies and multi-brand companies.
- The toolkits stack fast: Content, paid search, and market data are each a separate subscription, so a team that wants the full platform can end up paying over seven times the price of the entry SEO plan.
- The cheapest path to AI tracking isn't clear: the $139 SEO plan plus the $99 standalone AI Visibility Toolkit comes to $238/month, more than the $199 Starter plan that bundles both.
These figures use Semrush's monthly list prices and assume one license per toolkit, so treat them as illustrative lower bounds rather than exact quotes.
Several tools on this list beat Semrush's $139 entry price for the same core SEO workflow, and a few include AI visibility tracking at no extra cost, something Semrush doesn't do across the board.
Complex suite of tools
Semrush's SEO Toolkit alone has more than 20 tools and reports, and the full platform spans eight named toolkits: SEO, AI Visibility, Traffic & Market, Content, Local, Social, Advertising, and AI PR. A team that only needs keyword research, site audits, and rank tracking is still paying for breadth across social, advertising, and PR tools it never uses.
AI search visibility
Semrush's entry-level SEO plan ($139/month) doesn't include AI visibility at all: no AI search performance tracking, no sentiment monitoring, and no custom prompts. AI tracking starts on the SEO + AI Search plans. Starter ($199/month) includes 50 prompts tracked daily and AI brand performance for one domain, Pro+ ($299/month) raises that to 100 prompts, and Advanced ($549/month) to 200.
Semrush also still sells a standalone AI Visibility Toolkit at $99/month. But, there is no free trial available.
A few things worth keeping in mind before comparing options:
- Pricing can climb quickly once a team needs more users, more keywords, longer historical data, or the AI visibility add-on.
- Switching tools is also a workflow decision. It’s not just about budget. A specialist can outperform a suite's built-in version of the same feature, and that's as true for AI visibility tracking as it is for backlinks or technical audits.
Comparing the top Semrush alternatives at a glance
Use this table to shortlist two or three tools before reading the full entries below. The AEO column tells you whether AI answer tracking is core and included, a separate add-on, limited to a narrower scope, or missing entirely.
13 Semrush alternatives worth considering
The list covers both all-in-one SEO suites and specialist tools, with each entry's standout feature, AI search visibility support, limitations, and pricing.
1. Writesonic
Category: AI search visibility platform (AEO/GEO)
Writesonic was built for AI search visibility from the start, not bolted onto an SEO suite. It runs prompts on AI platforms the way a buyer would, rather than checking them through each platform's API, which gives a more accurate picture of how a brand actually shows up in AI answers.
Its real strength is how far a team can drill into that data: prompt by prompt, it shows the full answer, which brands were named, which sources were cited, and the sub-queries the model ran along the way. The Action Center then turns those gaps into a ranked list of content, citation, and technical fixes, each scored by impact, confidence, and effort.
Best for: Marketing teams that treat AI search as its own channel and need to see, prompt by prompt, where competitors are getting recommended instead of them.
Standout feature: Prompt-level data. Each tracked prompt shows the full AI answer with brand mentions highlighted, the sources cited, and the query fan-outs the model ran to build it, so a team knows exactly which questions it's losing and why.
AEO approach: AI visibility is the core product, included on every plan and tracked daily. Self-serve plans cover ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, with sentiment analysis from the Growth plan up. Enterprise extends tracking to all 10 platforms, including Perplexity, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, and Google AI Mode.
Limitation: The deepest capabilities sit on Enterprise: all 10 platforms, the full Action Center, full agentic workflows, and ongoing AI Search Volume and Brand Explorer access. Self-serve plans get limited trial runs of the agents. Teams whose main need is keyword, backlink, and rank-tracking data will find deeper SEO toolsets elsewhere on this list.
Pricing: Starts at $79/month, billed annually (Starter). Growth, the first tier with sentiment analysis and Action Center access, is $399/month billed annually.
2. Ahrefs
Category: All-in-one SEO + AI marketing platform
Ahrefs built its reputation on Site Explorer, a proprietary web index used for backlink and competitor research, and has extended that same data foundation into keyword research, technical audits, rank tracking, and now AI visibility through Brand Radar. It's a data-led product, better suited to teams that want to dig into the numbers themselves than to teams that want a guided workflow.
Best for: SEO consultants and agencies that need deep backlink and competitor data as the foundation for everything else they do.
Standout feature: Site Explorer's web index, still one of the category's largest backlink datasets, now paired with Brand Radar's split between AI mentions and clickable citations.
AEO approach: Paid plans include limited Brand Radar tracking, 5 to 20 tracked prompts depending on tier, across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Grok, Claude, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode. Full Brand Radar coverage is a separate purchase starting at $199/month.
Limitation: The $29 Starter plan is built for light usage, with a fixed 200-credit quota and no add-ons, so full AEO coverage costs extra on top of it.
Pricing: Starts at $29/month (Starter).
3. SE Ranking
Category: All-in-one SEO platform
SE Ranking covers rank tracking, keyword research, backlink checking, site audits, and on-page analysis inside one project-based workspace, with API and MCP access on every plan. It's built with agencies in mind, from white-label reporting to client seat management.
Best for: Agencies and mid-market teams running SEO across multiple sites or clients that want reporting and API access without an enterprise contract.
Standout feature: The Core plan bundles unlimited keyword, competitor, and backlink research with API and MCP access at a single mid-market price.
AEO approach: Core includes 100 daily AI prompts, five LLMs, and unlimited AI source tracking as part of the base plan. The fuller AI Search add-on, $89/month, adds unlimited AI-answer competitor research across AI Overviews, AI Mode, Perplexity, and ChatGPT, plus the SE Visible dashboard for mentions, citations, and sentiment across those platforms and Gemini.
Limitation: The GEO quotas built into Core aren't the full picture. Teams that want the complete AI visibility workflow need the AI Search add-on or the SE Visible sister product.
Pricing: Starts at $129/month, or $103.20/month billed annually.
4. Moz Pro
Category: All-in-one SEO toolkit
Moz Pro wraps keyword research, link data, site crawling, rank tracking, and campaign reporting around Moz's own authority metrics, built on an index the company says covers more than 40 trillion links. It's aimed at teams that want an established SEO workflow without a steep learning curve.
Best for: Small businesses and growing marketing teams that want a familiar SEO workflow with clear plan tiers.
Standout feature: Link Explorer, paired with Moz's proprietary authority scoring, one of the category's longer-running backlink indexes.
AEO approach: Standard includes AI Overviews keyword data, meaning it flags whether a keyword triggers an AI Overview, but that's not full AI visibility tracking. The fuller AI Visibility Dashboard and prompt tracking across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Mode start on the Medium plan (starting at $143/month).
Limitation: Moz's own pages aren't fully consistent about which tier includes the full AI Visibility Dashboard, so budget for Medium or higher if AEO tracking is the priority, not Standard.
Pricing: Starts at $99/month, or $79/month billed annually (Standard).
5. SpyFu
Category: Competitor PPC and SEO research
SpyFu is built around reverse-engineering competitors: their organic keywords, ad history, and ranking changes going back years. Its Kombat feature lines domains up side by side for a direct competitive read.
Best for: Marketers and agencies whose main job is competitor research across both paid and organic search.
Standout feature: Historical competitor keyword and ad data, paired with the Kombat domain comparison tool.
AEO approach: SpyGPT searches ChatGPT answers for brand mentions and competitor comparisons, but SpyFu's documentation doesn't cover Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Claude, or AI Mode. Treat this as ChatGPT-only AEO tracking.
Limitation: Teams that need a cross-platform AI visibility view will outgrow SpyFu's ChatGPT-centered monitoring quickly.
Pricing: Starts at $39/month, or $29/month billed annually (Basic).
6. Similarweb
Category: Digital intelligence and AEO platform
Similarweb pairs web traffic and market intelligence with core SEO features, keywords, rank tracking, backlinks, competitive analysis, and a dedicated AI Search Intelligence product. It reads less like an SEO tool with AI bolted on and more like a market intelligence platform that happens to include SEO.
Best for: Marketing and research teams that want competitor traffic benchmarking alongside SEO and AI visibility data in one place.
Standout feature: AI Brand Visibility, which shows the prompts and topics behind mentions and names the exact domains and URLs influencing AI answers, including a top-30 brand view per tracked topic.
AEO approach: Sold as a separate AEO Intelligence package, covering ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, and Perplexity. It can be bought alone or bundled with SEO and Competitive Intelligence.
Limitation: The standalone AEO tier is capped at one user, 150 tracked prompts, and three months of history. The bundle with full SEO and competitive intelligence starts much higher, and enterprise Web Intelligence tiers aren't publicly priced.
Pricing: AEO Intelligence starts at $99/month billed annually, or $129/month monthly. The bundled SEO and Competitive Intelligence package starts at $333/month billed annually.
7. Ubersuggest
Category: Budget all-in-one SEO
Ubersuggest bundles keyword research, competitor analysis, content gap research, rank tracking, site audits, and backlink analysis at a price aimed squarely at solo operators and small teams. AI keyword research and an AI Search Visibility workflow now sit on the same base product.
Best for: Solo consultants and budget-conscious in-house marketers who need the core SEO workflows without an agency-sized price tag.
Standout feature: AI Search Visibility is built into paid plans rather than priced separately, with prompt counts and update cadence spelled out by tier.
AEO approach: Included in paid plans, tracking ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overview mentions. Lower tiers update monthly or biweekly; the top listed tier updates weekly.
Limitation: Prompt allowances are thin on cheaper tiers (10 prompts per brand per month on Individual), and Ubersuggest has no API access at any tier.
Pricing: Starts at $29/month (Individual).
8. Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Category: Technical crawler
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a desktop crawler that audits more than 300 SEO and UX issues: broken links, redirects, titles, hreflang, duplicate content, structured data, and JavaScript rendering. It connects to Google Analytics, Search Console, and PageSpeed Insights for URL-level diagnostics.
Best for: Technical SEOs and developers who want deep, exportable crawl data rather than a keyword or content suite.
Standout feature: Crawl comparison and custom extraction, which let a team track how a site's technical health changes between audits.
AEO approach: No built-in AI answer visibility tracking of any kind. Its AI integration lets a user connect a model and run custom prompts against crawl data locally, which is an analysis feature, not tracking of brand mentions or citations in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or AI Overviews. Screaming Frog separately sells an agency service for AI search work, but that isn't a Spider product feature.
Limitation: It's a locally installed, per-user desktop application with no API, and the free version caps each crawl at 500 URLs.
Pricing: Free for up to 500 URLs; the paid license is $279 per user per year.
9. Majestic
Category: Backlink specialist
Majestic focuses entirely on link intelligence, built around its Trust Flow and Citation Flow metrics and one of the industry's longer-running historic link indexes. It doesn't try to be a full SEO suite, just the deepest backlink dataset.
Best for: Link builders and SEOs who need a dedicated, high-depth backlink index rather than a bundled feature inside a broader suite.
Standout feature: Trust Flow and Citation Flow scoring, plus a Historic Index that tracks link data over time.
AEO approach: None. Majestic has no AI visibility tracking of any kind. Its content on AI search is educational commentary on the company blog, not a product feature.
Limitation: No keyword research, rank tracking, or AI visibility tracking. Teams need a second tool for anything outside of backlinks.
Pricing: Starts at $49.99/month, or $41.67/month billed annually (Lite).
10. Mangools
Category: All-in-one SEO suite
Mangools bundles KWFinder, SERPWatcher, SERPChecker, LinkMiner, and SiteProfiler into one beginner-friendly interface, built for teams that find larger suites overwhelming. Its AI Search Watcher extends that same simple approach to AI visibility.
Best for: Solo marketers and small teams that want an approachable SEO suite without a steep learning curve, plus AI visibility tracking out of the box.
Standout feature: AI Search Watcher, which monitors brand visibility across eight AI platforms, more than any other tool on this list.
AEO approach: Included as a core workflow. AI Search Watcher covers ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, Grok, Mistral, and Llama.
Limitation: The current Basic AEO+SEO bundle covers 500 monitored prompts with two checks per prompt, thinner than some dedicated AEO tools once a team scales past a handful of brand terms.
Pricing: Starts at roughly $37.70/month, billed annually.
11. Clearscope
Category: Content optimization
Clearscope grades content against top-ranking pages for a target keyword, scoring term usage and structure inside a real-time editor that plugs into Google Docs and WordPress. It has extended that same content-quality lens to AI citations.
Best for: Content teams that need to optimize drafts against what's already ranking, and now against what's already getting cited by AI engines.
Standout feature: Prompt Tracking, which shows whether a team's content gets cited in AI answers across three major models.
AEO approach: AI visibility tracking is a core workflow, not an afterthought. Prompt Tracking covers ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, and AI Cited Pages links specific citations back to the content that earned them.
Limitation: Clearscope is a content-optimization tool first. It doesn't do backlink analysis, technical audits, or rank tracking, so most teams pair it with another tool for those workflows.
Pricing: Starts at $129/month.
11. SurferSEO
Category: Content optimization and AI visibility
Surfer scores drafts against the pages already ranking for a target keyword inside its Content Editor, then layers AI writing, content audits, and topical maps on top. Over the past year it has repositioned around AI search, bundling its AI Tracker into paid plans so a content team can see whether its pages get cited in AI answers.
Best for: Content teams publishing at volume that want drafting, on-page optimization, and AI visibility tracking inside one editorial workflow.
Standout feature: The Content Editor, which grades a draft in real time against the pages already ranking for its target keyword, now paired with AI Tracker's mention and citation monitoring.
AEO approach: AI Tracker is bundled into paid plans from Standard up, but coverage depends on the tier. Standard tracks 25 prompts in ChatGPT only, refreshed weekly. Pro raises that to 50 prompts refreshed daily across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode. The entry Discovery plan has no AI tracking, and Claude isn't covered on any tier.
Limitation: Surfer isn't a full SEO suite. It doesn't do backlink analysis or technical site audits, and full AI engine coverage only starts at Pro ($182/month billed annually).
Pricing: Starts at $59/month, or $49/month billed annually (Discovery). Standard, the first tier with AI tracking, is $119/month, or $99/month billed annually.
13. Sistrix
Category: All-in-one SEO and visibility tracking
Sistrix is best known for its Visibility Index, a long-running metric that tracks how a domain's search presence moves over time across markets. Keyword research, backlink data, and technical monitoring sit around that core.
Best for: SEOs and teams that track visibility trends across multiple markets and want a single index to explain performance shifts.
Standout feature: The Sistrix Visibility Index, widely cited across the SEO industry as shorthand for domain search performance.
AEO approach: Prompt Monitoring, currently in beta, tracks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode. Gemini isn't part of Prompt Monitoring; it's only covered by Sistrix's separate AI Research tool.
Limitation: A high entry price for solo users, a beta-stage AI feature, and narrower AI platform coverage than Writesonic or Semrush.
Pricing: Starts at ~$136/month (€119/month), plus tax.
How to choose the right Semrush alternative
Start with three questions:
- What's your budget and team size (i.e., how many people actually need access)?
- What's your priority focus (keyword research, backlinks, content, AI visibility, or technical audits)?
- Do you want one platform or is it fine running two or three specialists together?
A five-person in-house team rarely needs the same setup as a solo consultant or a 40-client agency.
A few scenarios:
Where Writesonic fits in
Most tools on this list are SEO platforms that added AI visibility later. Ahrefs sells full Brand Radar coverage as an add-on to its core plans (starting at $199/month). Similarweb sells AEO Intelligence as its own plan. Semrush has moved AI visibility into its core plans starting on its Starter plan (which starts at $165/month) but still sells a standalone AI Visibility Toolkit at $99/month for 25 prompts.
Even when tracking is included, it’s usually quite limited. Maybe you get a visibility score, a list of mentions, and a Share of Voice chart.
These platforms weren’t built for AI search visibility. Writesonic was.
AI search visibility is the product, not a bolted-on feature. Writesonic runs prompts on AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini that exact way a buyer would (rather than some AEO platforms than check prompts through the AI platform’s respective AI). This gives brands the most accurate representation of how they will appear in an AI-generated answer.
But what really separates Writesonic from the pack is its ability to slice and dice the data, and really drill down into what exactly is driving your AI search visibility. Brands can break down visibility, prompt by prompt and see the full answer, which brands were named, which sources were cited, and the sub-queries the model ran along the way.
That level of detail changes the question a team can answer, from "how visible are we?" to "which specific questions are we losing, and to whom?"
Writesonic also doesn't just stop at diagnosis. Writesonic's agents rewrite pages with the structure AI engines tend to cite, surface the Reddit threads, YouTube videos, and listicles that cite competitors, and draft the outreach to earn a place in them. Each fix is then measured at Day 14 and Day 28 against citation share, AI traffic, and pipeline, so the team can see what actually moved.
Writesonic also doesn't stop at diagnosis. Its Action Center turns each visibility run into a ranked list of fixes across three levers: content, citations, and technical actions. Every opportunity gets an ICE score (Impact, Confidence, Effort), so a team starts with the high-impact, low-effort work first.
For content, it surfaces the topics competitors are getting cited for and flags existing pages that need AEO updates like FAQs, comparison tables, and fresher data. For citations, it finds the third-party sites, Reddit threads, LinkedIn posts, YouTube videos, and Wikipedia pages citing competitors where your brand is not mentioned. For technical issues, it catches AI crawlers blocked in robots.txt and the 404s and 500s served only to AI bots. The lift from every action is tracked, so the team can see what actually moved.
Plans start at $79/month billed annually, with tracking across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. Enterprise extends coverage to all 10 AI platforms, with the full Action Center and agentic workflows. For teams that already have an SEO tool they like and need a dedicated way to see and improve how AI search recommends them, that's the gap Writesonic is built to fill. Give Writesonic a try for free here.
FAQ
Is Semrush worth its price for smaller teams?
It depends on how much of the platform you use. Semrush's $139/month SEO plan is competitive if your team needs full keyword and competitor research depth. But smaller teams that only need two or three core workflows can usually cover them for $29 to $129/month, depending on the job:
- AI search visibility: Writesonic (from $79/month billed annually)
- Keyword research, rank tracking, and site audits: Ubersuggest ($29/month) or Mangools (about $37.70/month billed annually)
- Backlink research: Ahrefs Starter ($29/month) or Majestic ($49.99/month)
- Competitor and PPC research: SpyFu ($39/month)
- Content optimization: Surfer SEO (from $59/month) or Clearscope ($129/month)
- A broader all-in-one suite: Moz Pro ($99/month) or SE Ranking ($129/month)
Is there a free alternative worth using?
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is free for crawls up to 500 URLs, which covers a technical audit for a small site. It's a good free option for technical SEO, but Screaming Frog does not have keyword research, rank tracking, or AI visibility tracking. So it's not a full Semrush replacement.
Does a team actually need an SEO tool or an AEO tool?
Teams today need both (either wrapped into one-suite or two separate tools). Writesonic, Mangools, Ubersuggest, and Clearscope all build AI visibility into their core workflow. SE Ranking and Ahrefs include a limited version of AI tracking with a fuller add-on for teams that need more.
How does Semrush's own AI Toolkit compare to alternatives that include AEO tracking by default?
Semrush's entry-level SEO plan ($139/month) doesn't include AI visibility. Teams have two ways to get it: upgrade to an SEO + AI Search plan, starting with Starter at $165/month for 50 prompts tracked daily on one domain, or add the standalone AI Visibility Toolkit at $99/month.
That's a different setup than Writesonic, Mangools, or Clearscope, where AI visibility tracking is part of every plan rather than something a team unlocks by upgrading or buying an add-on.
Should a team replace Semrush entirely, or run it alongside a specialist?
Both are legitimate. Some teams fully migrate to a single alternative that covers their core workflow at a lower price. Others keep Semrush for one specific strength, competitor research or historical data, and add a specialist like Clearscope for content or Screaming Frog for technical audits.
The decision comes down to whether the team wants one platform or is fine coordinating two or three.
How does pricing compare across the cheapest and most expensive options on this list?
Screaming Frog is the cheapest, with a free tier for up to 500 URLs. The lowest paid entry points are Ahrefs Starter and Ubersuggest at $29/month, with SpyFu at $29/month billed annually. At the other end, the real cost usually comes from stacking SEO and AI visibility rather than any single entry price: Semrush's SEO plan plus its AI Visibility Toolkit runs $238/month, and Similarweb's SEO and Competitive Intelligence bundle starts at $333/month billed annually. Sistrix is priced in euros (€119/month plus tax), so check its final cost in your own currency.
Director of Growth Marketing
Cody Slingerland is the Director of Growth Marketing at Writesonic. He leads SEO and AI search (AEO) strategy. He has over 12 years of search experience, helping companies like Zapier, Instapage, Nutshell, CloudZero, and others improve their visibility and position in organic search.
