Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit: What You Get, and the Alternatives

The short answer

The Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit costs $99 a month for one project, one domain and 25 tracked prompts, and Semrush's own help page says it needs a paid Semrush subscription and has no free trial. It shows how AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Google AI Mode talk about your brand and your competitors, and it recommends fixes. The main alternatives are Ahrefs Brand Radar (from $199, sold on its own), Peec AI (from $95), Otterly.AI (from $29), AthenaHQ (free tier, then $295), Scrunch (from $250) and, for enterprises, Profound and Adobe LLM Optimizer. All of them measure. If you want the pages that get you named built and published for you, that is the work RunOctopus does.

What the Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit is

Semrush built its name on Google rankings: keyword research, rank tracking, site audits and backlink data. As people started asking ChatGPT and Google's AI answers instead of scrolling results, Semrush added a toolkit to measure that side. It now sells itself as "SEO + AI Search." The company also changed hands this year: Adobe completed its purchase of Semrush on April 28, 2026, and Semrush told customers there would be no immediate changes to contracts or services.

The toolkit's reports, as Semrush's help center lists them:

• Visibility Overview. An AI Visibility Score that benchmarks how present your brand is.
• Competitor Research. How your AI positioning compares with rivals.
• Prompt Research. Keyword-style research for the questions people ask AI.
• Brand Performance. Share of voice, sentiment and the stories AI tells about you, with AI-generated recommendations.
• Prompt Tracking. Daily tracking of specific prompts on platforms like Google AI Mode and ChatGPT.
• AI Search Site Audit. Flags problems that could block AI crawlers from reading your pages.

What $99 a month gets you

Twenty-five prompts is a small set. A local service business might cover its core questions with that. A store with several product lines, or a business in more than one city, will run out quickly, and each block of 50 more costs $60 a month.

Toolkit or a Semrush One plan?

Semrush's pricing page now bundles AI tracking into its main plans, so for many buyers the toolkit on its own is not the best deal:

There is also a free Semrush plan for trying the platform, extra users start at $45 a month, and Semrush offers a seven-day free trial of its plans. Semrush sells a separate Content Toolkit at $60 a month on yearly billing that drafts articles in your brand voice, so writing is available from Semrush, but as another product your team runs.

Where the toolkit falls short

• It is an add-on, not a door in. You need a paid Semrush subscription first, so the real starting cost is higher than $99.
• Narrow named coverage. The help page names Google AI Mode and ChatGPT. Specialist trackers list four to eleven engines, including Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Claude.
• Small prompt allowance. 25 prompts on the toolkit, against 50 on Peec's Starter and 125 on Scrunch's Core.
• Recommendations, not results. Brand Performance suggests how to improve your position. Turning a suggestion into a published, linked page is still a job for someone on your team.

None of that makes it a bad tool. If your team already works in Semrush every day, AI data next to your rankings is convenient, and that convenience is the main reason to pick it.

The alternatives at a glance

Lowest paid plan shown on each vendor's own pricing page on October 20, 2026, in US dollars per month, billed monthly unless noted.

Who does the work

The question that separates these products is who does each job between "we are not in the answer" and "we are in the answer."

Each alternative, honestly

Ahrefs Brand Radar: the other SEO suite's answer

Brand Radar AI starts at $199 a month and, unlike Semrush's toolkit, can be bought on its own. Ahrefs runs a database of more than 490 million prompts, built from real search queries, through AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot, so you can look up any brand without setting anything up. Custom prompt packages track your own questions. It is the stronger research tool if you want to study competitors, and it measures rather than writes.

Peec AI: a focused tracker at a published price

Starter is $95 a month for 50 prompts across three models you choose, Pro $245 for 150, Advanced $495 for 350, with unlimited users and daily tracking. It adds source and gap analysis, AI Shopping per product and a crawlability audit. Twice the prompts of the Semrush toolkit for about the same money, without needing a Semrush plan. Details in our Peec AI alternatives comparison.

Otterly.AI: the cheapest check

Lite is $29 a month for 15 prompts across ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot, with Claude, AI Mode and Gemini as add-ons. Standard is $189 for 100 prompts. If you just want to know whether you show up at all, start here.

AthenaHQ and Scrunch: more engines, some content help

AthenaHQ has a free tier, then Starter at $295 a month for 3,600 AI responses across 11 models, with a content optimization agent and Shopify and Webflow integrations. Scrunch Core is $250 a month for 125 prompts across four models, with basic content generation and one page optimization a month, and an Agent Experience Platform on Enterprise.

Profound and Adobe LLM Optimizer: enterprise platforms

Profound now sells brands only a free trial and a custom Enterprise plan, covering up to nine engines, with Agents that write and stage content in your CMS. See our Profound alternatives comparison. Adobe LLM Optimizer, now under the same parent company as Semrush, is sold as an annual license with at least 1,000 prompts and lets teams approve and deploy recommended fixes, with a native link to Adobe Experience Manager.

Surfer and Rankscale

Surfer's AI Search Analytics is $82 a month billed yearly for 50 daily prompts, and Surfer's writing plans also include a small prompt allowance. Rankscale's Pro plan is $99 for 1,200 credits across many engines, with a seven-day trial.

How to choose in five minutes

• You already pay for Semrush and want AI data beside your rankings: move to Starter or Pro+, which bundle 50 or 100 prompts, or add the $99 toolkit.
• You pay for Ahrefs instead: Brand Radar, from $199.
• You use neither and want tracking only: Peec from $95, or Otterly from $29.
• You want many engines at a published price: AthenaHQ Starter, 11 models.
• You run Adobe Experience Manager at enterprise scale: Adobe LLM Optimizer, or Profound.
• You want to be named in AI answers and have nobody to do the work: RunOctopus builds and publishes the pages, and your Semrush data can keep score.

A tracker tells you the same thing every morning until something on your site changes. Buy one for the number, not for the result.

If you only need measurement, stay where your team works

Plainly: if your team already lives in Semrush and you only need a view of AI answers, the toolkit or a Semrush One plan is a reasonable choice, and you do not need RunOctopus. If you are not on Semrush, Peec or Otterly will usually give you more prompts per dollar. Our free AI visibility checker gives a first reading before you buy anything, and our full Semrush comparison covers the rest of the suite.

Our verdict: to get named in AI answers, RunOctopus is the better choice

The Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit is a good way to find out where you stand. It is not the thing that changes where you stand. A tracker tells you that you are missing from the answer. The answer only changes when the right pages exist on your site, and somebody has to research, write, publish and link them. That is the job RunOctopus does, and it is why we are the better pick for a business that wants to be named, not just measured. Four reasons, in order of how much they matter.

1. We do the work and publish on our own

Ollie, our AI, and our team research, write, publish and link the pages on your own site. Nothing waits on you. You do not approve each page first, and you do not need a marketer to turn a dashboard into tasks. You can read anything that went live and ask for changes whenever you like. With the Semrush toolkit, every recommendation becomes a task for someone on your team, and nothing changes on your site until they finish it.

2. We know your catalog and services

Pages are built from your real products and services, and linked into the pages that sell them: product, collection and service pages. AI assistants recommend the specific business that the most sources vouch for, for that exact job. A page that names your actual products and your actual service area gives them something specific to cite, and the links carry the reader from the answer to the thing you sell.

3. Proven on real clients

We publish our case studies with the misses left in. On an AI answer check for a Los Angeles apartment broker, ChatGPT named the firm on 4 of 8 questions and Claude linked to it on 4 (the Sterman case study). For a reptile-feeder company, ChatGPT named the business on 4 of 8 generic buyer questions and on 8 of 8 comparison-style questions, and its site was the most-cited domain in every AI answer set we checked (the All Angles Creatures case study; that company was founded by the author of this page, and the study says so). In Google, a seven-week-old recruiting site went from showing on none of four broad recruiting searches to three of four (the Florida recruiting case study).

4. Fully automated, and built from real inputs

Ollie does the work automatically from start to finish, and our team keeps watch. Every page is built from real inputs, not generic AI text: your own catalog or services, your own search data, the real questions buyers ask AI assistants, and facts checked before anything publishes. Trackers only report. Generic AI writers produce text that could sit on anyone's site. Neither gives an AI assistant a reason to pick you.

If you are deciding between a tool and a service, our page on what an AI SEO agency does lays out the trade in plain terms.