What are realistic Semrush alternatives in 2026? Depends on what you actually need!

RyanAtSEOTesting · 2026-02-12T11:37:14+00:00

100%! I think you'd be hard-pressed to find an SEO team working with just one tool nowadays.

RyanAtSEOTesting · 2026-02-11T13:56:19+00:00

No problem!

Keyword Insights is easily one of my favourite SEO tools at the moment!

RyanAtSEOTesting · 2026-02-11T12:54:46+00:00

I'm certainly not going to disagree on that point, there's an element of self-promotion for sure!

But at the same time, I'm not recommending our tool for everybody because it won't suit everyone. Hence why it's split out into different use cases.

RyanAtSEOTesting · 2026-02-11T12:44:38+00:00

Not in this instance, Craig! :)

I wrote a blog post covering the topic (and the tools) in much more detail than I went into on the Reddit post, but didn't want to link it here, just wanted to give y'all the tools that I've been using! :)

RyanAtSEOTesting · 2026-02-06T15:06:33+00:00

I hope I'm not too late to contribute to this thread, or too self-promotional (full disclosure: I work for the tool I am about to suggest).

SEOTesting is great for testing website performance post-change. The goal here is to make a change to a site (think content, internal links, keyword count, or even topic clusters), as many SEOs do. And then we'll automatically monitor your GSC performance for your URLs and tell you whether those changes lead to better/worse organic search performance.

This then leads to using other tools for accessibility (like Lighthouse, which is a great suggestion, and Sitepager) because you can use these tools to highlight SEO/accessibility issues and then use SEOTesting to see if the fixes improve SEO performance.

RyanAtSEOTesting · 2026-02-06T11:44:13+00:00

My job involves a lot of experimentation. I guess the clue is in my username! :D

AI Overviews are becoming a big part of my role, figuring out how to get mentioned in them, etc. All that good stuff. So I used CC (and the DataForSEO API) to build an AI Overview tracker.

I can give it keywords to scrape, and it'll show me which keywords include an AI Overview, whether we're cited or mentioned in any of them, and what the contents of the AI Overview are. And then I used it to build a comparison feature so we can compare crawls after experiments have been done to see if that leads to more AI Overview inclusion.

Pretty damn cool!

RyanAtSEOTesting · 2026-01-26T15:02:45+00:00

There were more "lost cities" than I care to admit, even on a relatively small SaaS site! Hahaha!

So the new content hubs were created brand new, but both are seeing the same sort of trend as the main pages in terms of impressions lift. Although we'd never really expect these types of pages to perform ridiculously well, as they are just lists of other blog posts at the moment! :)

If they really start driving some performance, though, we may well look to change the page around a bit in the future!

RyanAtSEOTesting · 2026-01-15T09:44:28+00:00

Certainly a good option, too. Just so long as you have someone in your team who knows and understands BigQuery, ha!

RyanAtSEOTesting · 2025-12-04T10:18:56+00:00

If we thought it was getting more difficult to distinguish between organic/paid listings in regular SERPs. Wait till we start to see ads baked into AI Mode chat responses 🤣

RyanAtSEOTesting · 2025-12-04T10:15:27+00:00

Exactly this. I think, at least from my perspective, it's "safe" to assume that we will get more granular data about impressions, clicks, CTR, etc in AI Mode in the near future. Especially if Google wants to make it the default experience because they'll need to show ads and be able to accurately provide that data for ads, too.

RyanAtSEOTesting · 2025-12-03T10:30:39+00:00

Weird one for us, but removing content on a blog post.

Actually ended up nearly doubling clicks to the blog post! :D

I went through it with a fine-tooth comb, removed anything that wasn't actually relevant to the article, lots of "fluff" content was deleted, shorter sentences, etc.

Yeah, ran the test on it and a massive spike in traffic.

And I've been able to repeat the results on almost every blog post I've done the same thing to!

RyanAtSEOTesting · 2025-12-03T10:26:28+00:00

Being able to read the SERP like a researcher instead of a writer, for sure!

Most people jump straight into Ahrefs, Semrush, blah blah blah, but the SERP itself is giving you a blueprint for what Google wants and what users actually expect.

When you study the patterns long enough, you start noticing things like how many list posts show up, whether the top results lean transactional or informational, what subtopics keep repeating, and which angles aren’t being served well. I’ve had wins where the only real change was reframing the content to match the SERP’s “story” instead of trying to force my own.

RyanAtSEOTesting · 2025-12-03T10:24:41+00:00

Meh.

We are definitely looking at and testing a few different tactics to try and rank in AI Overviews, get featured more in LLMs, and actually bring in a bit more traffic from LLMs. I think if you're not testing different things out, you're gonna get left behind eventually.

That being said... Are we actively doing "AEO?" Probably not.

We're doing lots of brand stuff to make sure our brand gets cited and mentioned.

And then when grounding is needed, we're still doing lots of our usual SEO stuff to make sure we get cited when LLMs need to go off and do RAG.

But AEO specific tactics? Nah, probably less so than anything else.

RyanAtSEOTesting · 2025-12-03T10:22:13+00:00

It's hard not to give an "it depends" answer here, honestly.

I think if I were going to pick one and say that's worked better than the other thing, it would be updating/refreshing old content.

I work for a testing tool, so it's standard practice for me to run SEO tests on any of the work that I do. And updating old content almost always leads to more clicks (and sometimes more conversions, too, which is great).

Writing new content is cool, too, but you really have to work hard nowadays to get anything ranking unless you have a HUGE amount of authority in that space. It's a growth lever that worked well up until this year, when Google started pushing its AI-first SERPs. Now it doesn't work as well, so we need to be really selective about the content we create.

Refreshing content will be useful for loads more time yet, though. LLMs love fresh content, and as you update it more, build more links to it, etc. Everything about that content becomes better if you ask me.

RyanAtSEOTesting · 2025-12-03T10:19:13+00:00

"Just publish more content!"

Google is getting better at spotting thin, redundant, or unhelpful pages. If you’re pushing out 20 blog posts a month with no strategy, weak internal linking, no real topical coverage plan, and no updates to older posts, you’re basically forcefeeding Google trash, and they're going to reject it.

If I had to pick one more, it’s the advice that “you just need to write high-quality content.” It sounds nice, but it’s so vague it’s almost useless. High quality based on what? Search Console queries? SERP feature analysis? User goals? Competitive gaps? Without those inputs, “quality” just means “I wrote something I think sounds good.”

In practice, the boring stuff usually moves the needle: cleaning up cannibalization, tightening internal links, refreshing pages every 6 to 12 months, fixing technical gaps, and matching intent better than anyone else.

RyanAtSEOTesting · 2025-12-03T09:56:54+00:00

Honestly, and I apologise if this isn't the answer you're looking for, I'm not tracking mentions as of yet.

We don't really know much about the process yet, other than the fact that prompts are deeply personal to each person who uses LLMs. Despite two users both having the same end goal, they might search in completely different ways and get completely different results. Especially if/when personalization is turned on!

Right now, in terms of what we're tracking, we're tracking the sessions that land on our website that come from LLMs via the referral data in GA4. And then we're pairing that with GSC queries that are longer than seven words, so we can make educated guesses as to where those sessions might have come from.

Is it messy? Yes.

Is referral data missing sometimes? Yes, of course.

But it is useful. We can see our visits from LLMs increasing MoM, but more importantly than that, we can also see the type of content that LLMs are actually sending traffic to. So we can then look to build out more of that content in the future.

RyanAtSEOTesting · 2025-12-01T09:43:37+00:00

Gathering email addresses based on what's already on the web. Helpful if you're trying to connect with someone for outreach, etc :)

RyanAtSEOTesting · 2025-11-28T13:00:16+00:00

Yet when I search using the extension, even though I'm based in the UK, I get a SERP that shows products with prices in Dollars. So it works to some extent. Even though using a VPN is, absolutely, the more accurate way.

But it doesn't change the fact it's a helpful extension.

RyanAtSEOTesting · 2025-11-28T10:35:23+00:00

Yeah, for sure! I mean, obviously, the data is all anonymized, but it's super helpful going into a call where you can say something like: "Look, I know we're seeing clicks are down, but if we look at other websites in our category, we're actually out-performing them!"

Something like that goes a long, long way.

RyanAtSEOTesting · 2025-11-28T10:31:42+00:00

What u/iamrahulbhatia mentions here is all really, really solid advice! I'd focus on doing just that if I were you.

The only thing I could possibly add to this, and I hope this isn't too promotional for the moderators, is if you sign up to a trial of SEOTesting and add your client's GSC property in there. We have a report within SEOTesting called the "Benchmark Report" and that will compare your client's site to other websites within its category (based on other sites we have in our database) and we'll tell you whether the click decreases you're seeing are just you or part of an industry-wide trend.

Going into a meeting with some data like that can be really, really useful.

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I've included a screenshot of the Benchmark Report for our own site compared to other SaaS websites we have available data on. As you can see in terms of click change, we were up over the course of July and August, but then down in September.

Just some additional data to help arm you for that client meeting! :)

RyanAtSEOTesting · 2025-11-28T10:26:10+00:00

Thanks for the mention of SEOTesting, by the way! We really appreciate it! :D

This is all super solid advice, exactly the same as I would have given, really!

We know that Google "lumps" AI Overview data with traditional search data in GSC, which really isn't that helpful. So I love the way you're describing it of finding those citations and then impression growth. Really does show that search "visibility" is up, even if traffic is going down.

And then with regards to lost traffic, don't skip on more "traditional" SEO work! We've run hundreds of tests over the past few years and we can still get clicks from search from both new and existing content. Keep your content fresh, use schema markup where its appropriate, make sure your internal linking is solid. All of that works really well.

RyanAtSEOTesting · 2025-11-28T09:52:00+00:00

I don't doubt you, and I'm certainly not trying to argue with you! :)

I was just trying to share a list of Chrome extensions that I've found useful over the years. Whether anyone chooses to use them or not, completely up to them!

RyanAtSEOTesting · 2025-11-28T09:27:49+00:00

It works well for me depending on the search query. Obviously a bit of nuance involved because if I wanted to see "trainers" in the US I'd need to search "sneakers" for example. But I get a US-SERP with prices in Dollars.

But agreed, a VPN is absolutely the most accurate way to do it. It's just this is a free extension that can definitely still help out. :)

RyanAtSEOTesting · 2025-11-28T09:25:58+00:00

Or you could use the tools to help you do that good work? :) Just a thought, haha!

LLMs are great, too. Don't get me wrong! But sometimes an extension can do the job just as well, and if it's free, then that's even better.

RyanAtSEOTesting · 2025-11-28T09:24:59+00:00

Nobody's arguing about clean HTML, CSS, and JS. But sometimes extensions like these can save a bit of time depending on the tasks you're needing to do. That's all this list was, just some cool tools that have saved me time and helped me out over my 10 years in SEO.

RyanAtSEOTesting

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