Semrush review

This review is based on Semrush’s public pages and third-party ratings, checked on 3 October 2026. The rating out of 10 is the editor’s own judgement. The focus is on link building and off-page features, not the full suite.

Backlink data

Semrush’s Backlink Analytics page states a database of more than 43 trillion backlinks across more than 800 million domains. It says its own crawler visits about 10 billion pages a day and that backlink data is updated daily. By the vendors’ own figures, that is the largest count among the big suites: Ahrefs states 35 trillion live backlinks and SE Ranking 2.9 trillion. Vendors count links in different ways, so treat these numbers as a rough guide to scale and not as a ranking.

The report shows referring domains and their authority, which is the starting point for checking any site you are offered. Our guide on how to vet a publisher explains what to look for.

Audit and monitoring

Backlink Audit identifies links that look like spam and generates a disavow file. That makes it useful for quarterly health checks and for spotting unknown new links. Our research lists Semrush Backlink Audit among the standard tools for tracking lost links across a whole profile. See how to track backlinks for the checks worth running.

Prospecting and outreach

Backlink Gap finds domains that link to your competitors and not to you, which is the fastest way to build a prospect list. Semrush also offers a Link Building Tool for managing prospects and outreach inside the suite. Its public feature page was not reachable on the day we checked, so we do not describe its limits here.

Semrush is not a dedicated outreach platform. Teams that send a lot of pitches usually add a tool such as BuzzStream or Pitchbox, and Pitchbox lists a Semrush integration on every plan.

AI visibility and digital PR

Every paid plan includes AI search tracking. The pricing page lists 50 daily tracked prompts on Starter, 100 on Pro+ and 200 on Advanced, and says the SEO plan tracks daily performance in AI search and custom prompts.

Semrush also promotes an AI PR Toolkit, which it describes as a way to distribute content and earn citations with search engines and AI models. That ties the product to digital PR, not only to link data.

Pricing

Plan	Monthly billing	Annual billing, per month
Free	EUR 0	EUR 0
SEO	EUR 134	EUR 112.52
Starter	EUR 190	EUR 158.40
Pro+	EUR 286	EUR 238
Advanced	EUR 526	EUR 436.99

Prices are as shown in euros on Semrush’s pricing page on 3 October 2026. The page did not break down backlink report limits by plan, so check the limits before you choose.

What public reviews say

Semrush holds a Trustpilot score of 1.7 from 1,406 reviews, checked in October 2026. Software ratings on Trustpilot skew towards billing and cancellation complaints, and say little about data quality. It is still a low score, so read the cancellation terms before you subscribe.

For other options, see our backlink tools comparison.