SEO Tools You Can Trust for the AI Search Era

Getting started with SEO doesn't have to be overwhelming. Focus on these essential tools that deliver immediate value:

• Site Audit is your foundation—scan your website to identify critical issues that hurt your rankings and conversions. Fix broken links, slow pages, and technical problems before they cost you customers.
• Keyword Magic Tool helps you discover what your audience actually searches for. Find high-intent keywords that bring buyers, not just visitors, and build content around terms that drive meaningful results.
• Position Tracking shows exactly where you rank for your target keywords. Monitor your progress daily and see which pages need improvement to climb higher in search results.
• Organic Research reveals your competitors' strategies. See which keywords they rank for, identify gaps in your approach, and discover opportunities they're missing.

Start with these four tools to build a solid SEO foundation. They work together to help you understand your current performance, find opportunities, and track improvements over time. Most beginners see results within the first few weeks of implementing insights from these tools.

Remember: successful SEO starts with understanding your audience's search intent and ensuring your website is healthy enough to rank well.

Agencies need tools that scale across multiple clients while delivering measurable results. Here's your essential toolkit:

• Site Audit handles enterprise-level crawling up to 1,000,000 pages per month on Business plans. Monitor multiple client websites, identify critical issues, and generate branded PDF reports for client presentations.
• Position Tracking manages up to 40 projects and 5,000 keywords across all clients. Track rankings in multiple locations and devices, perfect for local businesses and international campaigns.
• Keyword Gap and Backlink Gap reveal competitive opportunities across your entire client portfolio. Show clients exactly where their competitors are winning and how to capture those opportunities.
• Organic Research provides comprehensive competitor analysis to demonstrate your strategic expertise. Identify trending keywords, content gaps, and backlink opportunities that drive real business growth.
• API access (Business plan) integrates Semrush data into your existing workflows and client dashboards. Automate reporting and scale your analysis across dozens of client accounts.
• White-label reporting lets you brand all exports and scheduled reports with your agency logo and contact information.

The Business plan includes free migration assistance from other tools, ensuring smooth transitions for new client acquisitions. Advanced features like Share of Voice tracking help you measure and communicate your impact on client visibility.

Yes, Semrush integrates seamlessly with Google Search Console to give you the complete picture of your SEO performance.

• Enhanced Data Analysis: Import your Google Search Console data directly into Semrush to analyze it alongside our comprehensive keyword database. See not just which queries drive traffic, but also discover related keyword opportunities you're missing.
• Position Tracking Integration: Compare your actual Google Search Console rankings with Semrush position tracking data. This dual-source approach provides more accurate ranking insights and helps identify discrepancies that might indicate technical issues.
• Comprehensive Reporting: Combine Google Search Console performance data with Semrush competitive analysis, backlink data, and technical SEO insights in unified PDF reports. Show clients the full story of their SEO performance.
• My Reports Feature: Create custom dashboards and recurring PDS reports that blend Google Search Console metrics with Semrush analytics, Google Analytics 4, and other data sources. Build comprehensive reporting that demonstrates your SEO impact across multiple metrics.
• Automated Insights: Semrush Copilot analyzes your Google Search Console data alongside other Semrush tools to provide AI-powered recommendations for improving your SEO performance.

This integration eliminates data silos and gives you actionable insights that pure Google Search Console data can't provide on its own.

Semrush leverages AI throughout the platform to accelerate your SEO success and provide smarter insights:

• Personal Keyword Difficulty (PKD) uses AI to analyze your specific domain's ranking potential for any keyword. Instead of generic difficulty scores, get personalized recommendations based on your site's actual authority and content.
• Topical Authority uses AI to identify the relevance and authority of your site as it relates to a specific keyword topic. Use this metric to understand if a keyword opportunity is something that your site already has high topical authority on. If so, you’re more likely to be able to compete for visibility.
• Semrush Copilot acts as your AI-powered SEO assistant, analyzing your projects to provide personalized recommendations. Get alerts about traffic drops, new keyword opportunities, and competitor improvements automatically.
• Topics and Pages Analysis in Keyword Strategy Builder uses AI to organize thousands of keywords into logical content clusters. Create comprehensive content strategies that cover entire topic areas, not just individual keywords.
• Competitor Topics in Organic Research uses AI to identify and categorize the most effective topics that bring search traffic to a website. This helps you learn what content strategies work best in your niche.
• Potential Traffic Forecasting predicts your ranking and traffic potential using machine learning models trained on millions of data points.

These AI features don't replace SEO expertise—they amplify it, helping you make data-driven decisions faster and identify opportunities that manual analysis might overlook.

Absolutely. Semrush offers both approaches:

• Manual Research: Access our 26.2 billion keyword database, competitor analysis, and technical audit data with advanced filtering and detailed analytics.
• AI-Powered Insights: Semrush Copilot analyzes your data automatically, delivering personalized recommendations, alerts, and AI-curated keyword clusters.

You can use either approach or combine them—the same data powers both manual analysis and AI automation.

Semrush provides the most comprehensive keyword research suite available, designed to uncover opportunities that drive real business growth:

• Keyword Magic Tool is your primary research powerhouse with access to over 26.2 billion keywords. Find semantically related terms, question-based keywords, and long-tail opportunities organized into topic clusters. Advanced filtering helps you identify high-intent keywords that attract buyers, not just browsers.
• Keyword Overview delivers instant insights into any keyword's difficulty, search volume, trend data, and SERP features. See exactly what you're competing against and whether a keyword is worth targeting.
• Keyword Gap reveals the exact keywords your competitors rank for that you don't. Identify missed opportunities and find gaps in their strategies you can exploit. Compare up to 5 competitors simultaneously across organic, paid, and shopping results.
• Organic Research shows you any competitor's complete keyword portfolio. Discover their top-performing keywords, track their ranking changes, and identify content opportunities in your niche.
• Position Tracking monitors your keyword rankings daily across multiple locations and devices. Track up to 5,000 keywords on Business plans and get alerts when rankings change significantly.
• Keyword Strategy Builder organizes your research into actionable content plans with AI-powered topic clustering. Send keyword groups directly to content creation tools or campaign management platforms.

These tools work together to provide complete keyword intelligence—from discovery to tracking to competitive analysis—ensuring you never miss profitable opportunities.

Semrush offers comprehensive link building tools that help you build authority and outrank competitors through strategic link acquisition:

• Backlink Analytics provides complete analysis of any website's link profile. Examine your competitors' strongest backlinks, identify their referring domains, and understand what types of content earn links in your industry.
• Backlink Gap compares your link profile against up to 5 competitors simultaneously. Discover high-authority websites linking to your competitors but not to you—these become your prime outreach targets.
• Link Building Tool streamlines your outreach campaigns from prospecting to relationship management. Send personalized emails, track responses, and manage your entire link building workflow in one platform.
• SERP Analysis within keyword tools shows you how many links you need to rank at the top, and what types of content earn links for specific search terms, helping you create linkable assets that naturally attract backlinks.

These tools transform link building from guesswork into strategic, data-driven campaigns that build sustainable domain authority and improve your competitive position.