A complete Semrush SEO review for 2026: Is it still the king?

Anyone involved in digital marketing is likely familiar with Semrush. The platform has evolved into Semrush One, aiming to help businesses improve their visibility everywhere, from Google search to AI engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity. While access to comprehensive data is valuable, the primary challenge often lies in converting those insights into high-quality, SEO-optimized content.

AI-powered tools can assist in this process. While Semrush provides the strategic roadmap, content generation tools like the eesel AI blog writer can translate keyword insights into publish-ready articles. This review provides a balanced look at Semrush’s latest SEO and AI tools, its new pricing structure, and its suitability for businesses in 2026.

What is Semrush One?

Semrush One functions as a central hub for various marketing efforts. Its stated goal is to help users "win every search", covering traditional search engines, ChatGPT prompts, and other information discovery platforms. The platform bundles classic SEO tools with new features designed for AI search and local visibility.

A key aspect of Semrush One is the extensive data it utilizes. The platform has access to 27.8 billion keywords and 43 trillion backlinks. This large database powers its toolset, providing information to help build marketing strategies for both human audiences and AI crawlers.

Turning Semrush data into content with eesel AI

Identifying a valuable keyword in Semrush is the first step, followed by the task of writing the blog post. This is a process where a tool like the eesel AI blog writer can be used in conjunction with Semrush's strategic data.

The process involves taking a keyword identified in Semrush and inputting it into the eesel AI blog writer. The tool then generates a complete article rather than just a basic outline.

Key features include:

• Automatic asset generation: The tool creates and embeds relevant images, charts, and tables directly into the post.
• Social proof integration: It finds and integrates relevant Reddit quotes and YouTube videos to add context.
• Context-aware research: It performs research to generate content that is optimized for both traditional search engines and AI answer engines like Google's AI Overviews.

This tool was used to grow the eesel AI blog from 700 to 750,000 impressions in three months. While Semrush helps determine what to write about, eesel AI handles the writing process. It is free to try, allowing users to evaluate its output without commitment.

Core capabilities

Semrush One is loaded with features, mixing its classic SEO tools with new ones for the AI era. Let's break down the most important ones.

Keyword research and discovery

At its core, keyword research is one of Semrush's main strengths. The Keyword Magic Tool is a frequently used feature. You enter a seed keyword, and it returns millions of related ideas, pulled from its keyword database, which is among the largest in the industry. The filters are useful, letting you narrow down the results by search volume, user intent, and keyword difficulty.

For a closer look, the Keyword Overview tool gives you the full picture of a single keyword. One notable feature is the AI-powered Personalized Keyword Difficulty (PKD) score, which estimates how hard it would be for your specific website to rank for that term.

Finally, the Keyword Gap tool allows you to analyze your competitors. You can compare your keyword profile against theirs to find valuable keywords they’re ranking for that you haven't targeted yet. While Semrush's keyword data is generally considered highly regarded, it’s worth mentioning that some users feel its backlink data is sometimes considered less comprehensive than what Ahrefs offers.

Competitor and market analysis

Understanding your competition is critical, and Semrush provides plenty of tools for it. The Domain Overview tool is your starting point, offering a high-level view of any website’s online presence. You can quickly see their organic vs. paid traffic, backlink profile, and top-performing keywords.

To go deeper, the Organic Research tool lets you analyze a competitor's SEO strategy by showing you the keywords they rank for.

The Traffic & Market Toolkit provides additional market insights. It estimates a site's total traffic from all sources, including newly added AI channels like ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews. The absolute numbers might not be perfectly accurate compared to a site's internal analytics, but it’s useful for spotting trends and seeing where your competitors are getting their visibility.

On-page and technical site audits

A strong technical foundation is essential for SEO, and the Site Audit tool functions as a comprehensive health check for your website. It crawls your site and flags over 140 different technical and on-page SEO issues.

It simplifies everything into a Site Health score, which gives you a quick benchmark of your site’s overall technical performance. A new and very timely addition is the AI Search Health check. This feature looks for specific problems that might stop AI crawlers from accessing or understanding your content, like a missing "llms.txt" file or content that's too long for a language model to easily process.

It’s great at finding major problems like crawlability errors, duplicate content, broken links, and slow pages. For beginners, the volume of information can be a challenge, as it may flag minor issues that are not a top priority.

Performance analysis: Link building and rank tracking

Once your content is live, you need to see how it's performing. Semrush has two main toolsets for this.

Backlink analysis and outreach

Semrush has a huge backlink index of 43 trillion links, and its Backlink Analytics tool lets you dig into any domain's backlink profile. To find new opportunities, the Backlink Gap tool is very helpful; it shows you websites that link to your competitors but not to you.

The Backlink Audit tool helps protect your site by finding potentially "toxic" links that could be hurting your rankings, giving you the option to disavow them. However, it's worth noting that many dedicated SEOs and link builders still prefer Ahrefs for backlink analysis. Community feedback often suggests that Ahrefs' crawler and data are highly regarded for reliability in this specific area.

SEMRush is what I pay for in my agency (10 person team) because it's better for content. As an SEO, I preferred Ahrefs, but their content tools just weren't as good.

Reddit

Here's a quick comparison based on their data and user feedback:

Position and prompt tracking

The Position Tracking tool is used to monitor your site's daily rankings for your target keywords. You can track performance across different locations and devices, which is key for both local and global SEO.

Importantly, it doesn't just track the standard blue-link rankings. It also shows your visibility in SERP features like Featured Snippets and AI Overviews. For 2026, it also lets you track your brand's visibility for specific prompts within Google AI Mode and ChatGPT, which is an important feature for future-proofing an SEO strategy. It even includes a cannibalization report to find pages that are accidentally competing with each other for the same keyword.

Beyond traditional SEO: Content and AI toolkits

Semrush has clearly been investing in tools that go beyond just SEO, moving into content creation and AI visibility.

The content marketing toolkit

The Topic Research tool is a solid starting point for brainstorming. You feed it a keyword, and it generates a map of related topics and questions people are asking, which helps you plan your content calendar.

The SEO Writing Assistant functions as a real-time editor. As you write, it checks your content for SEO best practices, readability, originality, and tone of voice. It also has some AI-powered features like Rephrase and Compose to help you when you're stuck.

These tools are designed to guide and assist the writing process, but the user remains responsible for the core research and writing. This is a challenge that tools like the eesel AI blog writer aim to address. It takes a keyword and manages the creation process to deliver a finished article, allowing users to focus more on strategy.

The AI visibility toolkit

This is Semrush’s answer to the rise of AI search. It's a dedicated set of tools made to track how your brand is performing inside AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.

Its main purpose is to monitor how often your brand gets mentioned in AI-generated answers. It provides key metrics like an AI Visibility Score, analyzes the sentiment of the mentions (positive, neutral, or negative), and even shows you which sources the AI is citing when it talks about you. In 2026, this functionality is becoming an essential part of a comprehensive SEO strategy.

To see these features in action, watching a hands-on review can be helpful. The following video provides a detailed walkthrough of the Semrush platform, covering its core functionalities and whether it's a worthwhile investment for different types of users.

A video providing a full walkthrough and Semrush SEO review to determine if the tool is worth it.

Semrush One pricing plans

With the new Semrush One bundle, you get the SEO and AI Visibility toolkits rolled into one package. The pricing is a significant investment, so here’s a clear breakdown of the plans if you pay annually, which saves you up to 17%.

Is Semrush worth it in 2026?

Pros:

• It is an all-in-one platform that covers both traditional SEO and the new world of AI search.
• The keyword research data and tools are some of the best in the business.
• The technical site audit is robust and includes forward-thinking checks for AI readiness.
• The AI Visibility Toolkit is innovative and essential for staying competitive.

Cons:

• There's a steep learning curve. The number of features can be overwhelming.
• It’s more expensive than buying separate, specialized tools for individual tasks.
• Some users find they are paying for features they do not use, like the Social Media Toolkit.
• The backlink data, while large, is considered by some users to be less reliable than Ahrefs'.

For agencies, in-house marketing teams, and businesses that need one platform to manage their visibility across all search channels, Semrush can be a worthwhile investment. However, if you're a solo blogger or an SEO focused only on link building, the price and massive feature set might be more than you need.

I recommend SE Ranking. In my opinion Semrush is very overpriced. For sure they have many tools, but I never used them as I find it easier and quicker using Screaming Frog.

Reddit

Semrush is an industry leader for SEO and AI search strategy. It gives you the high-quality data you need to find your way in a digital world that's changing faster than ever.

A primary challenge for many users is execution. Data is most valuable when it can be acted upon quickly and consistently. To maximize results, pairing Semrush's strategic insights with an efficient content creation engine can be effective. This is where a tool like the eesel AI blog writer can be used to convert keyword opportunities identified in Semrush into content.