Semrush review 2026: every rating on Trustpilot, G2, Capterra and Reddit, star by star

• Is the tool good? Yes. Reviewers who use it every day rate the keyword, competitor and site audit tools highly, and by its own count it holds 29 billion keywords.
• Is it worth it for you? If you run SEO for several sites, or for clients, or do paid and organic search together, probably. If you run one blog on a small budget, probably not, and cheaper tools cover most of what you'd use.
• What do the bad reviews say? Almost all of them are about money: a free trial that turned into a charge, a refund that was refused, a cancellation that didn't go through. Very few are about the software.
• If you try it: the trial becomes a monthly charge after seven days, monthly payments are never refunded, and cancelling takes a form plus an email link you must click within 24 hours. Cancel on day five.

The figures this review rests on, in one place. Each one has its source and the date it was read, and each is explained in the section it comes from below.

Here is every public rating of Semrush I could read, with where each figure came from.

Capterra, Product Hunt, the Chrome Web Store, the App Store, Trustpilot and the Better Business Bureau were read live on 17 October 2026. G2 and TrustRadius block automated reading, so their figures are from their own pages as archived by the Wayback Machine, G2's on 4 October 2026 and TrustRadius's on 16 April 2026.

Two numbers aren't in that chart because they aren't out of 5. TrustRadius scores 8.6 out of 10. The Better Business Bureau gives Semrush a D-, and its reason is that Semrush failed to respond to 56 complaints.

The scores look like a contradiction. They're closer to two answers to two different questions.

Who is asked. G2 and Capterra check that a reviewer actually uses the software, and vendors invite their own customers to review, often with a small gift card. Of the ten reviews on G2's default page on 4 October, six came from an invitation by Semrush and eight were marked as incentivised. On Trustpilot, 367 of the 370 reviews from the last 12 months came in unprompted.

What is asked. G2 and Capterra ask about the software: its features, how easy it is, whether it does the job. Trustpilot asks about the company, and for a subscription, the company is mostly the bill.

Who has a reason to write. Someone charged $199 they didn't expect goes looking for somewhere to say so, and Trustpilot is open to anyone. Someone who used it all month without trouble rarely goes looking for anywhere.

The proof that both are measuring something real is that they agree at the bottom. The lowest reviews on G2 and Capterra tell the same story as Trustpilot: a trial that turned into a charge, and a refund refused. Of the 14 reviews Capterra added between March and October 2026, six gave one star, and nearly all of those were about billing.

So read them as two answers. G2 and Capterra say the software is good. Trustpilot and the Better Business Bureau say leaving it can be expensive. Both are true, and the second is easier to manage once you know how.

trustpilot.com/review/semrush.com

Trustpilot shows 41% of Semrush's reviews at five stars and 44% at one, with very little in between. That split covers every review on the profile, back to its first. The last 12 months look nothing like it.

Trustpilot weights recent reviews more heavily, which is how a profile with 41% five-star reviews scores 1.7. The score is mostly describing the last year, and in the last year, about five in six reviews gave one star.

I read over 200 reviews across the five levels, most from 2025 and 2026. Here's what each level says.

5 stars: the product, not the company

The five-star reviews are about the software. People who have used it for years call it the tool they open first for keyword, content and competitor research.

• September 2026, United States. Years of use. Their main tool for content, keyword and competitor research.
• November 2025, Canada. A three-year user. Pricier than its rivals, but worth it for tracking early on how often a brand turns up in ChatGPT.
• August 2025, United Kingdom. Missed cancelling a trial because of a technical problem, and support sorted it out.
• September 2026, United States. First posted a complaint about being charged for an AI toolkit they never used, then raised it to five stars after Semrush refunded them.

Even here, price comes up. Only one of the 60 five-star reviews I read from 2025 and 2026 named a support agent, so this isn't a profile padded with thank yous after a support chat.

4 stars: a good tool, but

• January 2026, Australia. Strong keyword and competitor data. Somewhat expensive.
• January 2026, Canada. Valuable for SEO. One star off for the high price and the paid add-ons.
• December 2025, United States. About ten years of use. An excellent platform, but pricey, with no account manager to call.
• July 2025, United Arab Emirates. The core product beats Ahrefs, but the upsells never stop and support is hard to reach.
• August 2026, Netherlands. Charged €290.04 at sign-up despite an advertised trial. Updated after the money was refunded.

The pattern is "good tool, but". The "but" is nearly always money.

3 stars: works well, costs too much

• August 2026, France. Reliable keyword and rank data. High cost, and low limits on the base plan.
• May 2026, United States. It was better in 2024, and the prices are too high now.
• September 2026, United Kingdom. Likes the tools. The billing is hard to follow, and add-ons were switched on by accident.
• December 2025, United Kingdom. Add-ons nobody approved pushed up the renewal. Semrush later removed them and gave credits.
• July 2025, United States. A user since before it was called Semrush, paying over $3,000 a year, and tired of being charged separately for each new feature.

2 stars: trying to leave

• March 2026, United States. Sent the cancellation form, never got a confirmation, and the renewal was charged.
• July 2026, United States. A useful year, then missed the email that confirms a cancellation and was charged again.
• November 2025, United States. Repeated price rises, and emails about logging in from several devices.
• February 2026, United Kingdom. Hit paywalls inside a mid-tier trial, cancelled, and moved to Ahrefs.
• February 2025, Slovenia. The data is far from reality, and the keyword research is weak.

1 star: the trial, the refund, the email step

• October 2026, Cambodia. A free trial charged $199 on the first day, and no refund. Semrush replied that an earlier sign-up may have made the account ineligible for a trial.
• October 2026, United States. Cancelled in the app, then found there was one more confirmation step by email. Refund refused.
• September 2026, India. A long-time customer renewed automatically without a reminder, at 35 to 40% more than before.
• September 2026, United Kingdom. Thought the trial was cancelled, missed the email step, and was charged £450.
• September 2026, United Kingdom. Account locked for security reasons after signing up for a trial, with ID requested by email.
• August 2026, United Kingdom. Add-ons appeared after a trial, about £3,000 in charges, and the refund was refused under the seven-day policy.

Of the 80 one-star reviews I read, from January to October 2026, 72 are about billing: a trial that converted, a refund refused, a cancellation that didn't take, or add-ons on the bill. Three are about locked accounts. Only a handful mention the data at all.

Semrush answers most of them, usually the same day. The replies point to the trial terms, say monthly plans can't be refunded, say an earlier trial made the account ineligible, or list the cancellation steps. Trustpilot shows it has replied to 68% of negative reviews, down from more than 92% in every archived copy of the page through 2025.

The archived copies are the Wayback Machine's, and the figures come from the data Trustpilot embeds in its own page, so they are exact. About 330 reviews have arrived since November 2025, and roughly 280 of them gave one star.

Two things changed at once. The complaints grew, and the invitations stopped. The same page data records how each review arrived. In the January 2024 copy, 18 of the 19 positive reviews on the first page came through a review link that a business sends its customers, while the one-star reviews arrived on their own. Asking customers for reviews is allowed and common. It means the 4.3 was partly a measure of who Semrush asked. Of the 370 reviews from the last 12 months, Trustpilot counts 3 as invited.

Trustpilot's transparency page also shows Semrush flagged 9 reviews in the last year, all of them one-star. Eight came down because the reviewer didn't answer Trustpilot's request to fix them, and one stayed up.

G2: 4.4 out of 5, from 4,051 reviews

From G2's page as archived on 4 October 2026. G2 files half stars with the level above, so a 3.5 counts as a 4.

G2 sorts what reviewers mention into pros and cons and counts them. The top pros were features (742 mentions), ease of use (732) and keyword research (679). Four of the top five cons were the price, under four different names: expensive (507), high pricing (437), high costs (388) and pricing issues (332). The fifth was the learning curve (292).

The score has been 4.4 since July 2026, down from 4.5. Between late April and early June 2026, about 534 new reviews arrived, against about 86 in the four months before.

What each level says, from reviews in 2025 and 2026:

• 5 stars, August 2026, analytics manager at a mid-sized company. Rank tracking, site audit and AI visibility in one place. The complaint: a team member could buy an add-on that went straight onto the invoice without any confirmation.
• 5 stars, August 2026, small business. Runs Semrush through its API from AI agents. Finds the AI monitoring too expensive.
• 4 stars, September 2026, managing partner at a small business. Likes the backlink tracking. The project and keyword limits run out fast, and the traffic figures drift from Search Console.
• 4 stars, December 2025, website specialist at a mid-sized company. No proper team management: keyword lists belong to whoever made them.
• 3 stars, June 2026, SEO manager at a small business. Rank tracking showed big drops that the live results didn't.
• 2 stars, January 2026, small business owner. Likes the tools, but the price is far too high for what it offers.
• 2 stars, August 2025, small business. Billed wrongly twice, and moved to Ahrefs.
• 1 star, June 2026, marketing consultant. A trial turned into a $199 charge, and the refund was refused, though they asked within about half an hour.
• 1 star, December 2025, small business director. Rank tracking showed no search volume for a keyword that Google's Keyword Planner put at 590.

Capterra: 4.6 out of 5, from 2,330 reviews

capterra.com

The split is from Capterra's page as archived on 6 October 2026, when it had 2,329 reviews. Capterra also scores features at 4.6, customer service 4.4, ease of use 4.3, and value for money lowest, at 4.2. Of its reviewers, 85% work at small businesses.

Capterra's summary of the last two years agrees with G2's. Its most praised point is the range of SEO tools, positive in 95% of 1,004 mentions. Its most criticised is "expensive and fragmented pricing", negative in 59% of 396.

• 5 stars, July 2026, marketing agency owner. Pays for itself with a single client. Would like an entry plan at about half the price.
• 5 stars, May 2026, graphic designer. A deep keyword database, but expensive for a freelancer, and the screens are overwhelming.
• 4 stars, November 2025, non-profit. The site audit is useful, but doesn't say where on the page an error is.
• 4 stars, April 2025, founder. Learned a lot from it. A steep learning curve, and too much sits behind the paywall.
• 3 stars, July 2026, marketing head at a software company. Says Semrush was slow to add AI metrics, and that AI search can now do much of what its tools do.
• 1 star, September 2026, furniture business. Couldn't find the cancel option, was charged again while trying, and the refund was refused.
• 1 star, September 2026, aviation business. "Cancelling the subscription did not stop the billing." Charged €285.25 at renewal.
• 1 star, June 2026, small SEO agency paying $517 a month. Says historical AI brand data changed after the fact, was offered a $50 credit, and moved to SE Ranking.

There were no two-star reviews on Capterra in 2025 or 2026 at all.

Reddit has no star rating, so instead of a score, here's what comes up. I read 26 threads about Semrush in full, from r/SEO, r/bigseo, r/SEMrush, r/PPC, r/Entrepreneur and others, all from 2025 and 2026, and about 40 more for context. Reddit blocks automated reading, so they were read through Arctic Shift, a public archive of Reddit posts.

Two warnings before the detail. People post on Reddit when they're annoyed, so the sample leans negative. And people from rival tools, including Ahrefs staff, reply in these threads.

Price: the data is fine, the bill isn't

One of the busiest threads, in r/SEO in January 2026, was an agency owner leaving after eight years because the estimates no longer justified several hundred dollars a month. It drew 138 comments. One consultant said add-ons had taken them to nearly $1,000 a month, and they were cutting back to the base plan. Another, back on the $139 plan after a break, found competitor traffic cost $279 more and that projects are deleted 30 days after cancelling.

A February 2026 thread announced that prices had gone from $139 to $199, and many replies called it a 43% rise. People in the same thread corrected it: the SEO plan stayed at $139.95, and $199 is Starter, which adds the AI visibility tools. It still reads as a rise to anyone who wants the AI tools.

The defenders are mostly people at large companies. An in-house SEO at a very large organisation, who had used BrightEdge and Conductor, said Semrush gives the best value per dollar of the lot.

Data: wrong in both directions

Several people compared Semrush with their own analytics:

• A site owner with five sites: 5,600 visits in Google Analytics, 20,000 in Semrush.
• Another: 144 in Semrush against 4,100 real visits on one site, and 26 against 1,000 on another.
• An in-house SEO compared four tools against one month of Search Console data for a site with 487,646 clicks. Semrush said 563,520, which was 16% high and the closest of the four. Ahrefs was 23% low and Similarweb 27% high.

So it overestimates some sites and underestimates others, and no tool is consistently right. The advice that recurs, from people who've used it for over a decade: read its numbers relatively, to compare sites with each other, never as one site's real traffic. One thread blamed a model that predates AI Overviews, which take clicks that the old click-through curves assume go to the top results.

Billing: the email step, again

These threads tell the Trustpilot stories in more detail:

• March 2026: a thread calling the seven-day money-back guarantee a trap. A trial rolled over at $199, and support said the guarantee only covers a first annual plan.
• April 2026: charged $211 after cancelling on the website but missing the confirmation email.
• August 2026, Germany: an SEO who had cancelled on day seven was already charged, with no reminder.

What worked for people: one got their money back through a chargeback, which their bank credited about 60 days later. Semrush's own account replies in many of these threads asking for a private message, and in one case it started a refund.

There's balance too. Some replies call it user error. One person had used the trial many times without trouble. And someone noticed these posts appear almost daily, often enough to look organised. The billing threads go back to August 2025, well before Adobe's purchase, though later threads blame Adobe for them.

Locked accounts

The r/SEMrush threads describe accounts disabled after logging in on a phone and a laptop, a VPN user asked for two forms of ID and then locked out, and a trial blocked within ten hours. Long-time users reply that the usual cause is several people sharing one login, which the terms forbid.

Adobe, and the AI tools

When Adobe announced the deal in November 2025, the top reply in r/bigseo, with 118 upvotes, said it was time to leave before Adobe-style cancellation fees arrived. Others saw sense in it: Adobe sells marketing software to large companies, and Semrush fills a gap there. In June 2026, a user said some tools from the paid plans had already become add-ons.

On the AI tools, Reddit is sceptical. One user watched an AI visibility score fall from 34 to 0 in two days. The replies made the point every vendor would rather you missed: AI assistants don't publish what they show people, so every AI visibility tool is estimating. A few find it useful as a rough benchmark.

The Better Business Bureau gives Semrush, Inc. of Boston a D-. It isn't accredited, which is a choice a business makes, but the rating comes from something else: Semrush failed to respond to 56 of the 60 complaints filed in the last three years. In the archived complaints page from February 2026, 23 of 38 were about product issues and 8 about billing, and the stories match Trustpilot's: charged after cancelling, a confirmation email nobody noticed, trials that turned paid.

TrustRadius scores it 8.6 out of 10 from 774 ratings, of which 154 are written reviews. Product Hunt gives 4.4 from 41 reviews, with competitor analysis and keyword research the most praised, and price the most criticised.

The app stores are the odd ones. Semrush's iPhone app scores 2.0 from 67 ratings and hasn't been updated since 2019. SEOquake, its free Chrome extension with a million users, scores 3.5. Its September and October 2026 reviews are mostly about a redesign that removed features people used.

Editorial reviews are kinder, and mostly earn a commission when you sign up:

Backlinko's review is worth reading, but its own page says Semrush owns it and its articles are written by Semrush staff or paid contractors. When a "Semrush review" ranks well, check who owns the site.

semrush.com/prices

Semrush replaced its old Pro, Guru and Business plans with a new set in 2025 and 2026. The SEO plan is the old Pro at the same price. Starter, Pro+ and Advanced, which Semrush calls Semrush One, add its AI visibility tools.

Every plan includes one user. Logged out, the Advanced plan now shows as "Custom" with a demo button; the page's own code still lists it at $549.

The plans are only part of the bill. Several tools that used to come with a subscription are now toolkits, sold on top:

So a year costs more than the plan price suggests:

• One person, one site, SEO plan, paid monthly: $1,679.40 a year, or $1,407.96 paid upfront.
• A team of three on Starter: $199 plus two extra users at $45 is $289 a month, or $3,468 a year.
• An agency on Pro+ with three users and competitor traffic for one: $299, plus $160 for two users, plus $289 for Traffic & Market, is $748 a month, or $8,976 a year.

That last one is why "Semrush is $139" and "we pay over $3,000 a year" are both things people say.

The one-star reviews make the same few claims again and again. Each one can be checked against what Semrush itself publishes.

"The free trial charged me"

The trial lasts seven days, needs a card, and turns into a monthly subscription on its own unless you cancel first. Semrush checks the card with a $1 authorisation and refuses virtual cards. Each trial can be used once per account, and anyone who has had a trial or paid plan before isn't eligible again. Semrush's billing help page says a second trial attempt is charged as a monthly plan straight away.

That last rule explains most of the "charged on day one" reviews. It's written down, but on a help page, not on the button that says "Try for free".

"They refused my refund"

semrush.com/refund

Semrush's refund policy, last updated on 20 August 2025, offers a one-time, seven-day money-back guarantee. It covers only:

• a first subscription of 12 months or more, or
• a first add-on purchase,

bought on Semrush.com with a credit card, and asked for in writing within seven calendar days. It doesn't cover monthly plans, renewals, or a payment made when a trial converts, because a trial converts to a monthly plan.

So the person most likely to ask for a refund, someone who tried it, forgot to cancel and was charged for a month, is the one person the policy excludes. Cancelling doesn't request a refund either. You have to ask for it in the comment box of the cancellation form, or through the contact form.

"I cancelled and was still charged"

There's no cancel button. Semrush's help page on cancelling describes the steps:

1. Log in and open the cancellation form.
2. Answer every question on it.
3. Click the link in the confirmation email within 24 hours. If you don't, nothing is cancelled and billing carries on.
4. Wait for support to process it and email you.
5. Check that your subscription shows "Recurring: Inactive".

Extra users and add-ons are removed separately, through the contact form, and a subscription can't be paused. Step 3 is the one most one-star reviewers missed.

"My account was locked"

Semrush's terms of service say each account is for one person. If an account is used repeatedly from different places, devices or IP addresses beyond what the plan allows, Semrush may suspend it straight away. Its help pages say only one computer can be logged in at a time, and the fix for an "unusual activity" lock is to buy more seats. If a team shares one login, expect this.

"The traffic numbers are wrong"

This one has independent evidence behind it. Semrush's traffic figures for other people's sites are estimates, and studies that compared them with real Search Console data found large gaps:

None of this makes the tool useless. It means the traffic estimates are good for comparing sites with each other, and poor as a measure of any one site's actual visits. Every tool of this kind is estimating, as the keyword tools comparison explains, and only Search Console shows your own real numbers.

The reviews that praise Semrush praise its range, and the numbers bear that out. On its own stats page, updated on 16 October 2026, Semrush lists:

• 29.21 billion keywords across 142 country databases, including 530 million for India
• 43 trillion backlinks from 390 million referring domains
• 808 million domain profiles, with 10 billion URLs crawled a day
• 317 million AI prompts tracked across five AI engines

Those are Semrush's own figures, not audited ones. What reviewers actually value is that keyword research, rank tracking, site audits, backlinks, competitors' ads and local listings sit in one login. An agency that would otherwise pay for four tools pays for one, and that's the case for Semrush in a sentence.

Semrush One is the name for the Starter, Pro+ and Advanced plans. Their difference from the SEO plan is AI visibility: tracking how often your brand turns up when people ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews about your topic, and how it's described.

The limits matter. Starter tracks 50 prompts a day, Pro+ 100 and Advanced 200. The SEO plan's card lists "monitor custom prompts", but its own comparison table, and Semrush's help pages, give it no prompt tracking at all. On its own, the AI Visibility toolkit costs $99 a month for one domain, has no trial, and every extra user needs a licence of their own.

Whether those numbers mean much is still an open question. If AI answers matter to your business, the guide to getting cited by AI covers what can be measured and what can't, and the free AI crawler checker shows whether AI search bots can read your site at all.

Adobe agreed to buy Semrush on 19 November 2025 for $12 a share in cash, about $1.9 billion, and completed the deal on 28 April 2026. Semrush is no longer listed on the New York Stock Exchange. It's an Adobe subsidiary, and its logo now reads "An Adobe Company".

Semrush's FAQ for customers says nothing changed straight away: the same services, support and billing. It makes no promise about future prices. Its last annual report, for 2025, gives revenue of $443.6 million, up 18%, and about 108,000 paying customers, down from about 117,000 a year earlier.

The timing matters for reading the reviews. Most of the Trustpilot fall, from 4.3 to 2.3, came before Adobe was involved at all.

Prices are from each tool's own page on 17 October 2026, except Mangools, whose prices only load for signed-in users.

On Reddit, Ahrefs was the alternative named most, in 9 of the 26 threads, for its link data, its cleaner screens and fewer upsells. Google's free tools, Search Console, Analytics and Keyword Planner, came next, in 8, often with an AI assistant on top. Screaming Frog was named in 5 for site audits, and SE Ranking in 4 as the closest match for less money, though a long-time Semrush user in one thread rates its data lower.

1. Decide which plan you'd keep before you start. You get one trial per account, and a second attempt is charged at once.
2. Use a real credit card you check. Virtual cards are refused, and the refund policy only covers credit card purchases.
3. Set a reminder for day five. The trial converts on day seven, and the conversion can't be refunded.
4. Cancel through the form, and answer every question.
5. Click the confirmation email within 24 hours. Then check that your subscription says "Recurring: Inactive".
6. If you buy a year and regret it, ask in writing within seven days. Put the refund request in the form's comment box. Cancelling alone won't do it.
7. Don't share a login. One account is for one person, and sharing it is the usual reason for a lock.
8. Read the invoice before each renewal. Check for add-ons and extra users you don't remember choosing.

Semrush is a very good tool sold on terms that punish one mistake.

The software earns its 4.4 and 4.6. The data is broad, the tools work together, and the people who use it every day keep paying for it for years, while complaining about the price. The 1.7 is earned too, by a trial that turns into a charge that can't be refunded, and a cancellation with a step most people miss.

If you'll use most of what it does, for several sites or for clients, it's worth the money, and the trial is safe if you follow the steps above. If you need one or two of its tools, a cheaper tool does those for less. And the most important number for your own site, how many people actually find it, is in Search Console, for free.