Semrush

Semrush is less a keyword tool than an marketing platform: SEO, content optimization, technical audits, PPC research, and now AI visibility tracking across ChatGPT, Claude, and other assistants, all under one login.

Keyword research sits at the center of it, with a database large enough to cover long-tail variants most smaller tools miss, plus keyword clustering that groups related terms into a single content target instead of leaving you to sort them by hand.

The AI visibility features are the newest addition and reflect where the whole category is heading: tracking not just whether you rank in Google, but whether an AI assistant mentions your brand when someone asks it a related question. Whether that is worth paying for depends on how much of your traffic already comes from AI search versus traditional results.

The catch is cost and complexity. Entry pricing starts around $117 a month on an annual plan, and the feature set is deep enough that new users spend real time just learning where things live.

Position Tracking updates daily across search engines, devices and locations, and now large language models, tracking not just where you rank but which SERP feature you show up in, featured snippets, AI Overviews, local packs and more.

You can follow up to 20 competitors alongside your keywords, and it goes further than Google Search Console by giving keyword-level, ZIP-code-level detail with side-by-side competitor visibility that GSC's aggregate data does not offer.

Backlink Analytics tracks your own link profile and competitors' side by side, and the Backlink Gap tool specifically finds domains linking to several competitors but not to you, a natural starting point for an outreach list. Authority Score blends multiple signals into one number for judging a prospect quickly, and Bulk Backlink Analysis checks up to 200 domains at once, useful for an agency vetting a long list of link targets before committing outreach time to any of them.