Alternatives · researched 15 September 2026
By Advik Jain, Co-founder & CEO, Optivus Technologies · Published 11 September 2026 · Updated 15 September 2026
Teams usually look past Semrush when they pay for far more of it than they use. We list the alternatives in the order our published scoring rules put them, with Veritas, our product, scored by the same rules.
Leave Semrush only if you use a small part of it; its 27.3 billion keyword database and backlink tools are hard to replace. Pick the tool that covers the part you actually use.
Ordered by the score our published rules calculate, with Semrush included for reference. Veritas is ours, is scored by the same rules, and sits where they put it.
| Tool | Best for | From | Engines | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Frase | Content teams who mainly used Semrush for research and briefs | $49/mo | At least 1 of 7 | 76 |
| Writesonic | Single-brand teams that want GEO fixes and outreach rather than a research database | $79/mo | 3 of 7 | 70 |
| Semrush The tool you are comparing against | Agencies and in-house teams that need the deepest historical keyword and link data across many markets and can absorb per-user fees. | $199/mo | At least 5 of 7 | 69 |
| VeritasOurs | Teams of three to ten who want cited drafts, SEO research and AI visibility in one workspace | ₹20,000/mo | 5 of 7 | 68 |
| Surfer | Writers who used Semrush mainly as a content scoring tool | $82/mo, yearly | At least 3 of 7 | 62 |
| Otterly.AI | Teams that only need to know where AI answers mention them | $29/mo | 4 of 7, +3 add-ons | 62 |
| Profound | Enterprises that moved up Semrush tiers mainly for AI search | $99/mo | 1 of 7 | 49 |
From is the cheapest published plan that tracks AI answers, with any add-on that tracking requires. Veritas bills in rupees, excluding GST; everything else is in US dollars as each vendor publishes it.
Using Semrush mostly for content?
Veritas researches keywords, audits your site and drafts from your own documents, with every knowledge-based claim cited to its source. Users are included in the workspace price.
On the cheapest plan that tracks AI answers. Most vendors list more engines than that plan includes, so this is what you get at the price shown, not the brochure maximum.
| Tool and plan | ChatGPT | Claude | Gemini | Perplexity | AI Overviews | AI Mode | Copilot |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Frase Starter | Included | Not on this plan | Not on this plan | Not on this plan | unclear | unclear | Not on this plan |
Writesonic Starter | Included | Not on this plan | Included | Not on this plan | Included | Not on this plan | Not on this plan |
Semrush Starter | Included | Included | Included | Included | Included | unclear | unclear |
VeritasOurs Content + SEO Premium | Included | Included | Included | Included | Included | Not on this plan | Not on this plan |
Surfer AI Search Analytics | Included | unclear | Included | unclear | Included | unclear | unclear |
Otterly.AI Lite | Included | add-on | add-on | Included | Included | add-on | Included |
Profound Starter | Included | Not on this plan | Not on this plan | Not on this plan | Not on this plan | Not on this plan | Not on this plan |
A tick is included. Add-on means an extra monthly fee. Pick means you choose a limited number of platforms. Unclear means the vendor’s wording does not say.
The cheapest published plan that fits each team, over twelve months, with seat fees and required add-ons. Where no published plan fits, the note says why instead of guessing.
| Tool | One marketer, one brand1 seat, 50 tracked prompts, 1 brand | Team of five, one brand5 seats, 100 tracked prompts, 1 brand | Agency, three brands10 seats, 300 tracked prompts, 3 brands |
|---|---|---|---|
| Frase | $588lowest | $2,244lowest | $5,328lowest |
| Surfer | $984 | $3,588 | No published fit1 |
| Profound | $1,188 | No published fit1 | No published fit1 |
| Otterly.AI | $2,268 | $2,268 | $5,868 |
| Semrush | $2,388 | $5,748 | No published fit1 |
| VeritasOurs | $3,780 | No published fit1 | No published fit1 |
| Writesonic | No published plan fits any of these setups2 | ||
Bars share one scale across the whole table, so cost growth shows as well as rank. A figure far above the rest is marked off scale.
Standard monthly rates, without annual discounts unless a vendor publishes only a yearly price. Taxes, overage and negotiated terms are excluded. Indian rupee figures are converted at 95.2 INR to the US dollar, a rate we maintain by hand and review periodically. It is an approximation, not a live rate, and Veritas bills in rupees.
Veritas’s price includes keyword research, site audits, AI visibility on five engines and cited drafting.Start a 7-day trialSee pricing
Best for content teams who mainly used Semrush for research and briefs.
The most complete research-to-publish loop among content optimisers, at a low entry price.
Article generation is capped at 10, 40 or 100 a month by plan.
Best for single-brand teams that want GEO fixes and outreach rather than a research database.
Measurement, prioritised fixes, page rewrites and outreach in one product.
Starter to Growth track three platforms; the full ten are Enterprise-only.
Best for teams of three to ten who want cited drafts, SEO research and AI visibility in one workspace.
Every knowledge-based claim in a draft opens the passage it came from, so review is a check rather than a rewrite.
AI answers are re-checked every two weeks, with on-demand checks in between. Several dedicated trackers refresh daily.
Best for writers who used Semrush mainly as a content scoring tool.
The most widely used content score, now covering AI Search as well as SEO.
The $49 Discovery plan does not include AI visibility tracking.
Best for teams that only need to know where AI answers mention them.
The lowest paid entry point among dedicated trackers, with daily refresh on every plan.
Claude tracking costs $29, $109 or $439 a month on top of Lite, Standard or Premium.
Best for enterprises that moved up Semrush tiers mainly for AI search.
The deepest measurement of any dedicated tracker compared here, including real prompt volume data.
The $99 Starter plan tracks ChatGPT only, with 50 prompts and one seat.
It depends on the job Semrush was doing. For content and briefs, Frase. For content scoring, Surfer. For AI visibility alone, Otterly.AI. For cited drafts, SEO research and AI visibility in one workspace with users included, Veritas.
None of these matches Semrush’s database of over 27.3 billion keywords, and this page does not claim otherwise. If market-wide historical data is the job, Semrush remains the tool for it.
On prices read 11 September 2026, Otterly.AI starts at $29 a month and Frase at $49. Both widen engine coverage as the price rises, so check which engines the entry plan includes.
Every feature, price, pro and con, each fact linked to the vendor page it came from.
Best for: Content teams who mainly used Semrush for research and briefs
Frase covers the part of Semrush most content teams use daily, research, briefs, drafting and optimisation, and adds site audits, backlinks, decay monitoring and AI visibility from $49 a month, month to month. It will not replace Semrush’s historical keyword and competitor data, and article generation is capped by plan.
Frase began as a SERP research and brief tool and now covers the loop from research to publishing: topic clusters, an AI agent that drafts with your brand in context, brand voice, content optimisation for Google, GEO optimisation for AI citation, site audits, backlinks with drafted outreach, Content Guard for ranking decay, and its own FraseCMS.
AI visibility tracking covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google AI across its plans, widening as the price rises. It publishes to WordPress, Webflow, Sanity and Wix, and connects to Claude and Cursor through MCP and a CLI.
Trial: 7 days, no credit card. source, 11 Sept 2026
Not the right fit for: Teams that need every claim traced to their own documents, or high monthly volume without article caps.
frase.ioBest for: Single-brand teams that want GEO fixes and outreach rather than a research database
Writesonic replaces Semrush’s AI visibility and adds execution Semrush does not describe: an Action Center that ranks fixes by citation impact, an agent that rewrites pages for GEO, and drafted outreach to sites citing competitors. Its self-serve plans track three platforms and allow one to three users.
Writesonic began as an AI writer and now presents itself as a generative engine optimisation platform. It tracks AI visibility, ranks opportunities in an Action Center by visibility and citation impact, and uses an AI agent to rewrite pages for GEO with FAQ blocks and comparison tables.
It also audits robots.txt, schema, indexing and broken pages from AI bot visits, surfaces the Reddit threads, YouTube videos and listicles citing competitors with drafted outreach, and connects to Google Analytics, Search Console, Looker Studio, WordPress, an API and MCP. It says more than 10,000 marketing teams use it.
Trial: Free trial, no credit card. source, 11 Sept 2026
Not the right fit for: Teams of more than three, or anyone who needs Perplexity or Claude tracked without an enterprise contract.
writesonic.comBest for: Teams of three to ten who want cited drafts, SEO research and AI visibility in one workspace
Compared with Semrush, Veritas trades data depth for a tighter workflow. Keyword research, gap analysis, backlinks and site audits cover the domains you work on rather than a market-wide database, and the same workspace drafts content from your own documents with a citation on every knowledge-based claim. Users are included in a flat workspace price, so a team of five pays one fee instead of per-user add-ons.
Veritas is an AI content and SEO platform built by Optivus Technologies. It organises a company’s own documents into a knowledge graph and drafts marketing content from it, attaching a numbered citation to every knowledge-based claim that opens the passage it came from. Claims it cannot trace to your material are left out rather than filled in.
Around the editor it bundles keyword research and gap analysis, competitor and SERP analysis, a live content score, site audits, backlinks, Google Analytics with Search Console, and AI visibility tracking across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. Plans are priced per workspace in INR with users included.
Trial: 7 days on one SEO domain; nothing is charged until it ends. source, 12 Sept 2026
Not the right fit for: Solo writers, teams that need market-wide historical SEO data or an API, and anyone who needs AI answers re-checked daily.
See Veritas pricingBest for: Writers who used Semrush mainly as a content scoring tool
If Semrush was mostly your writing assistant, Surfer’s Content Editor and unified SEO and AI Search score do that job more directly, and AI Tracker refreshes daily on Pro and above. Its product pages do not describe backlink tools or a technical crawl, so keep another tool for those, and every published price is billed yearly.
Surfer describes itself as an AI Visibility Platform. Its Content Editor scores drafts in real time with a unified score that shows SEO on one side and AI Search on the other, fixed with Auto-Optimize, and Surfer AI generates branded articles, inserting internal and external links to sources as it writes rather than afterwards.
AI Tracker, launched in June 2025, measures mentions, position, sentiment and cited sources across ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode and Perplexity, refreshing daily on Pro and above and weekly on Standard. Content Audit, Topical Map, an API and, since August 2026, an MCP server round out the product.
Trial: None listed on the pricing page. source, 11 Sept 2026
Not the right fit for: Teams that want monthly billing, a trial first, or backlinks and technical audits in the same tool.
surferseo.comBest for: Teams that only need to know where AI answers mention them
For teams whose only reason to upgrade Semrush was AI tracking, Otterly.AI is the lowest-cost credible swap: $29 a month to start, daily refresh and unlimited team members, with API and MCP access from Standard. It does not describe keyword research, backlinks or content drafting.
Otterly.AI is a monitoring-first platform for AI search. It tracks how brands are mentioned and websites cited across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot on every plan, with Claude, Google AI Mode and Gemini as paid add-ons, refreshing daily with unlimited team members.
Around monitoring it adds AI Prompt Research, a Content Audit with crawlability checks and content briefs, GEO optimisation recommendations, Agent Analytics, ChatGPT Ads tracking, and API and MCP access on its higher plans. It says more than 40,000 marketing professionals use it, and was named a Gartner Cool Vendor for AI in Marketing in 2025.
Trial: Free trial offered from its homepage; terms not listed on the pricing page. source, 11 Sept 2026
Not the right fit for: Teams that want the tracker to draft and publish the fixes, or need Claude and Gemini without add-on fees.
otterly.aiBest for: Enterprises that moved up Semrush tiers mainly for AI search
If AI visibility is what pushed you toward Semrush’s higher tiers, Profound goes much further on that one job, with real prompt volume data, crawler analytics and Agents that draft and publish content. It is not an SEO suite: keyword research, backlinks and technical audits are not described on its product pages.
Profound is a dedicated answer engine optimisation platform built for large brands. Its core modules are Answer Engine Insights for how brands appear in AI conversations, Prompt Volumes for what people actually ask AI systems, and Agent Analytics for how AI crawlers read your site, across engines including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Grok, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek and Google AI Overviews.
It has added execution on top of measurement. Profound Agents create net-new content, refresh declining pages and generate FAQs using your brand kit, knowledge base, Answer Engine Insights and prompt data, with human approval before anything is published through a CMS integration. Profound raised a $96 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation in February 2026.
Trial: “Try for free” offered on Growth; none listed on Starter. source, 11 Sept 2026
Not the right fit for: Small teams tracking more than ChatGPT on a budget, or anyone who needs a full SEO toolkit alongside.
tryprofound.comWhere a figure below is missing, the charts say so rather than estimate it.
Every fact about a tool other than Veritas comes from that vendor’s own pricing page, product pages, documentation or announcements. Each one is linked where it appears, with the date we read it.
We build Veritas and use it every day. We have not run paid accounts of every other tool on this page, so we describe what each vendor publishes rather than scores from tests we did not run. Where a capability was not described on a vendor’s pages, the table says exactly that, which is not the same as saying the product lacks it.
G2, Capterra and TrustRadius blocked our automated reads, so any rating shown is the figure the vendor publishes about itself, labelled as such.
Prices and plans change. We re-read every vendor page at least every 90 days and record what changed in the update log below.
The scores and cost figures on this page are calculated, not assigned. Our full methodology sets out every rule, what each criterion is worth, and where our evidence runs out.
Disclosure. Veritas is our product. It appears on this page because it competes in this category, and we have tried to state its limits as plainly as anyone else’s. If anything here is wrong or out of date, write to support@getveritas.io and we will correct it and note the change in the log.
How this page was made. Veritas is our product. This page was written with AI assistance and checked against the vendor pages linked beside each fact, on the dates shown. Scores and costs are calculated by our published rules.
7 days on one domain. Nothing is charged until the trial ends.
