I spent a week testing Semrush on Geekflare API, a B2B product with approx 100 pages. I ran keyword research for a developer-tool topic, a Site Audit, and 25 prompts tracked daily in ChatGPT and Google AI Mode.
My verdict: Semrush still has the deepest SEO data I can get in one account, and the Site Audit found real problems on our pages. The AI visibility tracking works, but the cheaper plans cap it hard. Each named Geekflare on 4 of 25 prompts, and 3 of those 4 already had our name in them. For a SaaS or API team that wants SEO and AI search in one place, Semrush One Starter is the plan I’d buy.
Semrush
Deep keyword data and Site Audit, now bundled with AI search tracking in Semrush One. Starter is good for a single B2B product site, but one tracking target per project and noisy long-tail data are real limits.
Solo developers who need a few keyword lookups a month, or teams that must track Claude or Copilot answers.
How I tested Semrush
I tested Semrush One Starter on the Geekflare API pages from October 31 to November 8, 2026. Site Audit built from the sitemap, keyword research for web scraping APIs on the US database, and 25 AI prompts tracked daily.
Who Should Buy Semrush
Semrush makes the most sense for a company whose buyers search for technical terms on Google and now also ask ChatGPT which tool to use. Our API business is a good example. Our pages compete with funded scraping and search API vendors, and buyers often ask an AI assistant for a shortlist before they visit a site.
- B2B SaaS and API teams. One project covers rankings, technical health, and AI answers for your product site, so you aren’t stitching three tools together.
- Small marketing teams. Starter’s limits of 5 sites, 500 tracked keywords, and 50 prompts fit one product with a blog and a docs section.
- Teams already working with AI agents. MCP access comes with Starter and SEO Classic Pro, so Claude Code can read your Semrush data directly. I used it in a separate test to turn a Site Audit into a fix plan for 1,700 API units.
I’d skip it if you only need occasional keyword checks. The free plan gives you 10 Analytics requests a day, which is enough to size up a topic now and then. I’d also look elsewhere if your buyers mainly use Claude or Microsoft Copilot, because I couldn’t track either one.
What Semrush SEO and AI Visibility Include
Semrush sells its features as toolkits. After you login, you will notice a menu with SEO Classic, AI Visibility, Traffic & Market, Local, Content, and more, each with its own plans. Semrush One bundles the first two. For this review, those were the only ones I scoped.
| Toolkit | What’s in it | What I used |
|---|---|---|
| SEO Classic | Keyword research, competitor analysis, backlinks, Position Tracking, Site Audit, MCP access | Keyword Overview, Keyword Magic Tool, Site Audit |
| AI Visibility | AI visibility reports for any domain, prompt tracking, Brand Performance, AI competitor and prompt research, AI readiness checks in Site Audit | Prompt tracking for 25 prompts |
| Semrush One | Both toolkits under one plan, with more prompts than AI Visibility alone | Starter, the plan on our account |
SEO Classic Pro costs $139.95 a month and the AI Visibility toolkit costs $99 a month per domain, so buying both separately comes to $238.95. Semrush One Starter costs $199 and doubles the daily prompts from 25 to 50. If you want both, the bundle is the better deal.
Test 1: Keyword Research for a Developer Tool Topic
I picked web scraping APIs because it’s our biggest product line and a crowded market. All numbers below come from the US database.
The head term is out of reach
Keyword Overview put “web scraping api” at 1,300 searches a month in the US and 3,300 worldwide. Keyword difficulty was 77%, and Semrush estimated a page would need about 539 referring domains to rank. The CPC of $6.37 tells you advertisers think these clicks turn into revenue.
The SERP view backed that up. ScraperAPI, Firecrawl, ScrapingBee, Apify, and other specialist vendors hold the top 10, along with a Reddit thread and a YouTube video. An AI Overview sits above all of them.
One row in the related keywords made me stop. Semrush listed “data pipeline web scraping api aggregation dashboard” at 590 searches with a difficulty of 5. A seven-word phrase with more volume than most of the buying terms in this niche looks like a data error to me.
Keyword Magic Tool found the openings
I ran “scraping api” through the Keyword Magic Tool with broad match. It returned 66,357 keywords with 3.57 million combined searches. That’s too many to use, so I set difficulty to 0 to 49% and intent to commercial and transactional. The list dropped to 548 keywords, 88,580 searches, and an average difficulty of 26%.
A few of those were worth a page or an update:
| Keyword | US volume | KD | Why it matters to us |
|---|---|---|---|
| scraping tool | 2,900 | 8 | High volume with very low difficulty |
| web scraping tool | 5,400 | 36 | The main commercial term below the head keyword |
| price scraper sheets | 590 | 30 | We already have a Google Sheets price monitor template |
| ecommerce product scraper | 320 | 28 | Matches our product data extraction endpoint |
| web scraping vs api | 260 | 19 | An easy explainer that can link to the product |
The Topics panel on the left was the most useful part. It grouped the 548 keywords into clusters such as web scraping tools (148 keywords), amazon data scraping (26), and web scraping price monitoring (18).
Broad match also pulled in junk. “scratch.mit.edu login” showed up at 1,000 searches, along with “scratch edu mit” and “starch game”, which have nothing to do with scraping. “scraping vs scrapping”, a spelling question, also showed 1,000 searches.
The Exclude keywords filter cleans this up in a minute, but on niche developer topics I trust the direction of Semrush’s data more than the exact long-tail numbers.
Test 2: Site Audit of the API Site
Geekflare’s API pages share a domain with thousands of editorial pages, so a normal crawl would have mixed them up. Semrush lets you set Pages to crawl to a sitemap URL, so I pointed it at our root sitemap, which lists only the API pages, and set a 500-page limit.
Under the crawler settings, Semrush lets you switch the user agent, and I used OpenAI-Search.
The audit covered 104 pages. Site Health came in at 93%, just above the 92% Semrush shows for the top 10% of sites, and AI Search Health was 99% with no pages blocked to AI crawlers.
All 17 errors were invalid structured data items, which require fixes from our end. The 103 warnings were mostly low text-to-HTML ratio (98 pages). On API pages full of code samples and pricing widgets, I treat that as low priority. The rest were worth a ticket:
- 1 page with a missing H1 and 2 pages with a low word count.
- 2 broken external links.
- 5 pages with only one internal link, flagged with an AI Search tag.
- 77 external links returning 403. Many of those sites block crawlers, just as ours blocked Semrush, so I’d check a sample before editing anything.
No internal page was broken. For a 104-page product site, that’s a useful list.
Test 3: 25 AI Visibility Prompts
Prompt tracking sits inside Position Tracking, under an AI Search mode. I added 25 prompts in seven groups, tracked for the United States in English, with “Geekflare” and “Geekflare API” as brand names. Semrush’s brand suggestion was “geekflare germany”, which isn’t a name we use, so I removed it.
| Group | Prompts | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Web scraping | 6 | What is the best web scraping API for developers? |
| Search and SERP | 4 | What is the best web search API for AI agents? |
| Screenshots and PDF | 3 | Which API can convert a URL to PDF? |
| Extraction | 3 | Which API extracts meta tags and Open Graph data from a URL? |
| Website checks | 4 | Which API can scan a website’s TLS/SSL configuration? |
| MCP | 2 | Which MCP server gives AI agents live web search? |
| Branded | 3 | Geekflare vs Firecrawl: which is better? |
I picked ChatGPT and Google AI Mode and hit the first plan limit right away. Starter allows one tracking target per project, so the second engine needed a second project. Each project used 25 prompts, which used up all 50 on the plan. Tracking ran from November 1 to November 8, 2026 😊.
Geekflare showed up on 4 of the 25 prompts in both engines on November 8. Without our own name in the question, that fell to 1 of 22.
| Result, November 1 to 8 | ChatGPT | Google AI Mode |
|---|---|---|
| Prompts naming Geekflare on Nov 8 | 4 of 25 | 4 of 25 |
| Branded prompts | 3 of 3 | 3 of 3 |
| Non-branded prompts | 1 of 22 | 1 of 22 |
| Daily mentions, lowest to highest | 0 to 4 | 3 to 5 |
| Source pages logged | 183 | 58 |
| Source pages on geekflare.com | 13 | 1 |
The two non-branded wins were different prompts. ChatGPT placed us 11th for “What are the best ScrapingBee alternatives?” and cited our Guides article on that topic. AI Mode named us for a broken link checker API, with no position and citation. ChatGPT had mentioned us for a TLS scanning API on November 1 and had dropped us by November 8, so one week’s snapshot can flip either way.
The competitor view was the most useful part for me. Firecrawl appeared on 9 of ChatGPT’s prompts against our 4, and Bright Data on 7. In AI Mode, Reddit led the Competitors Discovery report and social pages made up 29% of the sources, looks like Reddit matter more there than in ChatGPT.
The Landscape report gave us 15.83% AI Visibility on ChatGPT and 15.87% on AI Mode, which lines up with 4 of 25 prompts. Competitors Discovery showed 12.22% and 2.75% for the same dates. Landscape’s own summary said AI Mode visibility fell 0.71% next to a tile showing a 4.14% gain. ChatGPT recorded zero mentions on November 3 and three the next day, which looks like a collection gap to me.
Semrush Pricing
These are the plans I’d consider for SEO and AI search.
| Plan | Billed monthly | Billed annually |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 |
| SEO Classic Pro | $139.95/mo | $117.33/mo |
| SEO Classic Guru | $249.95/mo | $208.33/mo |
| SEO Classic Business | $499.95/mo | $416.66/mo |
| AI Visibility Base | $99/mo | $99/mo |
| Semrush One Starter | $199/mo | $165.17/mo |
| Semrush One Pro+ | $299/mo | $248.17/mo |
| Semrush One Advanced | $549/mo | $455.67/mo |
Semrush One Starter includes 5 monitored websites, 500 keywords tracked daily, 50 prompts tracked daily, one domain for AI Brand Performance, 300 AI visibility reports a day, and MCP access.
Pro+ raises that to 15 sites, 1,500 keywords, and 100 prompts, and adds historical data and multi-location tracking. Advanced goes to 40 sites, 5,000 keywords, 200 prompts, and API data access. Extra users start at $45 a month each.
Limits I Ran Into
Learning curve
Semrush has a lot of tools, and related features are not always together. Prompt tracking is under Position Tracking, while AI visibility reports is in a separate toolkit.
AI engines covered
Prompt tracking let me choose ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Mode. I didn’t see Claude or Microsoft Copilot anywhere in the setup, which is a gap.
Pros and Cons
Pros & Cons
PROS
CONS
FAQ
Does Semrush have a free trial for new users?
Yes. New users can try paid plans free for seven days. You can cancel before day seven to avoid the first charge. There’s also a free plan with 10 Analytics requests a day.
What is Semrush One?
Semrush One is the plan that bundles the SEO Classic toolkit with the AI Visibility toolkit.
Is Semrush good for B2B SaaS and API companies?
Yes, if you want keyword research, technical audits, and AI answer tracking in one tool. Expect high difficulty on head terms and some noise in long-tail developer keywords, and filter hard.
What if my firewall blocks the Semrush Site Audit?
Allowlist Semrush’s SiteAuditBot in your firewall or bot settings. You can also change the crawler user agent in the Site Audit settings. I used the OpenAI-Search option because our Cloudflare rules blocked it.
