Semrush vs Ahrefs

Semrush, an Adobe company, is a nine-toolkit suite spanning SEO, content, local, social and advertising, with an AI visibility module tracking five engines, metered by prompts per tier. Ahrefs is the research index: backlinks, keywords and Brand Radar's 475M-prompt AI visibility database across seven AI platforms, powered by the web's second-most active crawler. They compete only where the categories overlap, and the chapters below walk every dimension a buyer would price: which AI engines each can see, how the tracking actually meters, what each produces on the content side, what surrounds the core product, and the full published tier lists.

Semrush, now an Adobe company, is the biggest suite in search marketing, with homepage scale stats of 28 billion keywords, 43 trillion backlinks, 808 million domain profiles, 142 geo databases and 289M+ LLM prompts. Nine toolkits share one login across SEO, traffic analytics, content, local, social, advertising and PR, and the AI visibility module tracks how often your brand appears in answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and AI Overviews, with sentiment and custom prompt monitoring from the entry SEO plan.

Pricing model. SEO $139, Starter $199, Pro+ $299 and Advanced $549 a month billed monthly, with annual billing saving up to 17% ($117.33 to $455.67); AI prompt tracking is metered at 50, 100 and 200 prompts daily by tier, and a free $0 plan offers one demo project.

Ahrefs is one of the great research platforms in search, powered by the web's second-most active crawler and 10+ years of web-scale data. Alongside Site Explorer's backlink index, Keywords Explorer, Site Audit and Rank Tracker, it now runs Brand Radar: an AI visibility database of 475M+ monthly search-backed prompts spanning AI Overviews (323M), ChatGPT (31M), Gemini (31M), Copilot (30M), Perplexity (30M), AI Mode (21M) and Grok (6M), with YouTube, TikTok and Reddit source tracking in beta. Their FAQ is blunt about discounts: they never run them.

Pricing model. Lite $129, Standard $249 and Advanced $449 a month (annual saves up to 17%), plus a $29 Starter and a free tier for site owners; full Brand Radar runs $398 (selected platforms) to $699 (all platforms), custom prompt packs start at $50 for 2,500 checks, and Enterprise is $1,499 a month with an annual commitment.

Semrush. The features page publishes the engine list: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and AI Overviews, making Semrush one of the few big suites with Claude included. Grok, DeepSeek and Google AI Mode do not appear in that list.

Ahrefs. Brand Radar's index covers seven platforms: AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Perplexity and Grok, an index built from 475M+ monthly search-backed prompts. Claude and DeepSeek appear nowhere on the pricing or Brand Radar pages, and the $398 platform picker lists five options that do not include Grok.

Summarized: Semrush reads 5: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, AI Overviews; Ahrefs reads index across AIO, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok. On Claude specifically, Semrush: yes; Ahrefs: not listed anywhere.

Semrush. AI prompt tracking meters by tier: 50 prompts daily on Starter, 100 on Pro+, 200 on Advanced, alongside classic position tracking with 500 to 5,000 keywords and 5 to 40 monitored websites. AI brand sentiment and AI visibility reports for any domain ship from the $139 SEO plan.

Ahrefs. Tracking your own prompts is metered three ways: 5 to 20 tracked AI prompts with 150 to 600 monthly checks on the core plans (updated daily), custom prompt packages from $50 a month for 2,500 checks with per-check overage, or full Brand Radar at $398 to $699. The Google Rank Tracker updates weekly on every tier including Enterprise, with 750 to 5,000 tracked keywords.

Semrush. The content toolkit generates full-length, SEO-ready articles from a brief, with AI features woven through Domain Overview and Keyword Suggestions. CMS publishing targets are not enumerated on the pricing or features pages, so where the generated article lands is a question for their sales team.

Ahrefs. The Content Kit add-on, from $99 a month, is an AI Content Helper and Grader that aligns drafts with search intent and scores them, with an AI Content Inventory marked Soon. Nothing on the pricing page writes full articles or publishes to a CMS.

Semrush. Classic SEO is the suite's backbone: position tracking, a technical site audit crawler, the 28B-keyword research database and the 43T-link backlink index. A local toolkit with listing management and map rank tracking exists; whether it draws a geo-grid or covers Apple Maps is not stated on the rendered pages.

Ahrefs. Classic SEO research is the backbone: the backlink index, Keywords Explorer, Site Audit with 100K to 1.5M crawl credits by tier, and Web Analytics plus Bot Analytics. A GBP Monitor ships in beta; no geo-grid or map-pack tracking appears on the pricing page.

Semrush. MCP access lists from the $199 Starter tier and API data integration only on the $549 Advanced tier. White-labeling arrives through the Pro Report add-on at $20 a month, and the suite's own research database is the underlying asset most buyers pay for.

Ahrefs. API access and an MCP server ship on all tiers with rows metered by plan (100 to 500 rows per request, uncapped on Enterprise), plus a Looker Studio integration from Advanced and Report Builder as an add-on. Export rows run 500K to 4M a month by tier.

Every cell below was read from the vendors’ own rendered pages as of August 2026. Where a vendor’s public pages neither confirm nor deny a capability, the cell says so.