Semrush Review 2026: What Changed After Adobe’s $1.9B Acquisition

Looking for an honest, current Semrush review? Here’s the short version: Semrush is still the most complete SEO platform I use, and 2026 has been its biggest year of change yet, from a brand overhaul to a full acquisition by Adobe. I go through everything below, what’s new, what still works well, and what I’d skip.

What Semrush Actually Is in 2026

I’ve used Semrush for years, and I have to say, it doesn’t look or work like the tool I started with. The biggest news first: Adobe completed its acquisition of Semrush on April 28, 2026, in an all-cash deal worth $1.9 billion. Semrush is now officially “an Adobe company,” though it still operates under its own name and continues serving its existing customer base, including smaller, non-enterprise users like me.

Before that, in March 2026, Semrush rolled out a full brand refresh. It now positions itself as a “unified intelligence engine” rather than just an SEO toolset, reflecting how much of its product now revolves around AI search visibility, not just Google rankings. I’ll be honest, the branding language is a bit much, but the underlying shift is real. Semrush isn’t just tracking where you rank in Google anymore. It’s tracking whether ChatGPT, Gemini, or Google’s AI Mode mention your brand at all.

Semrush’s core strength has always been its data. It crawls the web independently, and as of this year, its database covers over 27.5 billion keywords and 43 trillion backlinks. That’s the engine behind every tool I’m about to walk you through.

I always say:

Your success in internet marketing depends on your smartness to spy.

So this is the tool which made me much smarter in terms of spying, analyzing and taking proper steps for my niche sites.

In this SEMRush review I am going to explain each feature in detailed manner so that you can understand more about this tool and give it a try.

Note: I have requested special SEMRush promo code for SaaS Ultra readers which you can grab here (Coupon will be added automatically).

Let’s start digging with this online tool and see what we can do with this.

For the reference I am taking example of my website Android Rooting (Now AndroidRooting.org).

The New Dashboard

The first thing I noticed logging back in this year is the dashboard itself. Semrush redesigned it with a cleaner, more modern layout, and honestly, it’s easier to navigate. I used to lose time hunting through submenus for a specific report. Now the main tools sit front and center, and I don’t have to scroll through clutter to find what I need.

Semrush Copilot: The Feature I Use Daily Now

Semrush Copilot is the AI assistant built into the platform, and it’s become part of my daily workflow. Copilot reads your core SEO data, Site Audit results, Position Tracking, Organic Research, Keyword Gap, Backlink Analytics, and turns all of it into a prioritized task list.

Instead of me manually checking five separate reports every morning, Copilot flags what actually needs attention: a technical issue that’s hurting rankings, a competitor who just outranked me on a keyword, a backlink opportunity worth chasing. It also has a “backlink detective” function that spots risky or spammy links pointing to my site, which used to take me a lot of manual digging to catch.

Is it perfect? No. Sometimes it flags something as urgent that really isn’t, and I’ve learned to use my own judgment rather than blindly following every suggestion. But as a daily starting point, it saves me real time.

#1. Overview

In overview this is giving me complete picture of my website in a screenshot. With first impression of the graph I can clearly see that this site was penalized in August 2013.

As I am the owner of this website so I can tell you that this graph is showing EXACT data.

#2. Positions

With this feature you can check the ranking keywords of your competitors and see the exact position in the search engines.

In this graph I can see my positions, number of searches, CPC, ranking URLs, traffic, results and other important things.

How can you use these metrics?

1. Find easy to rank keyword with number of searches.
2. Track exact keywords for which your competitor is getting traffic.
3. Trac his ranking URL and see what he/she has done in the article.
4. CPC to find high paying keywords.

#3. Competitors

SEMRush will go more deep in the niche of your website and find related websites for you. Either you can consider them your competitors or your friends. I am using the word friends as you can get backlinks from the same niche websites very easily and strengthen the SEO of your own blog.

#4. Backlinks

Now comes the interesting thing. 😉

A great way to find the quality backlinks for your blog.

This tool will fetch all the backlinks of your competitors and gives you option to export the file for later use.

You can check the anchor texts used by your competitor, exact time when his backlink got indexed, dofollow, nofollow and external links on that particular page.

You can study:

1. Backlinks
2. Referring Domains
3. Referring IPs
4. Indexed Pages
5. Backlinks Comparison

#5. Keyword Research

This is a worth thousand dollar feature alone.

You can do very advanced keyword research very easily by putting your keywords in the search box.

SEMRush results will give you complete data about your keyword by giving number of searches, CPC, related keywords etc.

You can find all the websites ranking for your main keyword.

You can study:

1. Keywords Overview
2. Full Search
3. Related Keywords
4. Ads History

This tool gives you complete freedom to know more about your competitors and see what they are doing to rank their keywords.

Some other tools

1. Position Tracking
2. Domain vs Domain
3. Charts
4. Keyword Difficulty
5. Site Audit

#1. Position Tracking

You can set a campaign for your website and add all important keywords which you want to track daily. This option will help you to track your daily progress very easily.

#2. Domain vs Domain

You can easily compare the stats of one website with another website.

#3. Charts

You can grab the chart code for your blog by entering the URL and display it anywhere.

#4. Keyword Difficulty

This is a recently introduced feature that helps you find the difficulty to rank a keyword.

This tool compare your keyword with all top 10 ranking sites and calculate the ranking factor.

#5. Site Audit

You can audit the full site and see what are the missing ranking factors.

This gives you a complete report about the errors, warnings, and notices which helps to take the proper action for making SEO of any website much stronger.

Note: You can start a professional audit service on your blog where you can provide these reports to your customers.

Plan and Pricing

This tool offers 3 pricing options that you can select as per your need.

Note: I would suggest trying SEMRush 14 days trial before making any final decision.

Here is the full screenshot of SEMRush dashboard displaying all features.

Click on image to see large version.

What I Like

Semrush’s data depth is genuinely unmatched in my experience. The Copilot feature has saved me real hours every week. The Site Audit tool catches technical problems I’d otherwise miss. And being an early mover into AI visibility tracking, even with some rough edges, puts Semrush ahead of most competitors who haven’t built anything comparable yet.

Honest Negatives

Pricing is steep, especially once you start stacking add-ons on top of a Guru or Business plan. A team of three on Guru can easily cross $400 a month once seat costs are added in. The AI Visibility Toolkit, while promising, is still incomplete in places, so don’t expect it to fully replace a dedicated AI-search tool just yet. And with Adobe now owning the company, I’ll be watching closely over the next year to see whether pricing, support, or product priorities shift as integration with Adobe’s ecosystem deepens.

My Verdict

Semrush remains the best all-in-one platform I’ve used for SEO, content, and now AI visibility tracking. If your budget allows for Guru or above, it’s worth the investment, especially with the AI Visibility Toolkit factored in. If you’re just starting out or working with a tight budget, Pro covers the essentials well, and you can always upgrade once you outgrow it.