Adobe closed a $1.9B acquisition of Semrush in April 2026. As a solo developer who does SEO, PPC and content for client sites, I wanted to know if the "new Semrush" was worth the premium pricing — so I ran a 30-day test across real projects: site audits, keyword gap analysis, PPC research, social tracking and content scoring.
What actually changed post-acquisition:
- Keyword database jumped to 280B (from ~24B), and it's now the largest in the category.
- AI Visibility — tracks your brand mentions across ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity (31M+ prompts monitored). I confirmed this surfaces real mentions I couldn't find with a manual search.
- MCP connectors — native Semrush data inside Claude/ChatGPT/Perplexity. This is genuinely new; no competitor ships this out of the box yet.
- Content tools and historical data are still locked behind the Guru plan ($249.95/mo), which is a real cost wall.
The honest cons: entry plans are single-seat (even Business starts with 1 user), a 220-post site triggered 3,800+ audit issues, and the AI writing output still needs heavy editing. And there's no self-serve cancellation.
If you're weighing Semrush vs Ahrefs for an all-in-one stack, I wrote up the full 30-day breakdown with per-module scores at [https://nicheaitool.com/semrush-review] — including who should skip it.
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