Similarweb vs. Semrush: Full Comparison Review

Choosing the right digital marketing platform can make or break your strategy, especially when it comes to SEO, competitive research, and campaign planning. Two of the most popular tools in the space, Similarweb and Semrush, both offer powerful features but cater to slightly different needs and marketing approaches.

In this post, we’ll break down how each platform performs across key areas like keyword research, paid advertising, rank tracking, site audits, and backlink analysis to help you decide which one is the better fit for your business.

Whether you’re focused on tactical execution or strategic market insights, this comparison will give you the clarity you need.

Introducing the Platforms

What is Similarweb?

 

Similarweb is a digital intelligence platform that gives businesses powerful insights into website traffic, SEO strategies, and mobile app performance. Its market-leading datasets allow businesses to conduct full competitive analyses, keyword research & tracking, backlink analysis, website audit, and much more. It’s designed for SEOs, search experts, analysts, and business leaders who need data to drive strategic decisions.

Similarweb helps users:

• Research keywords and find long-tail opportunities
• Spy on competitors’ SEO and PPC strategy
• Track keywords and check their performance on SERP
• Analyze AI visibility & traffic from AI chatbots
• Schedule & automate website audits for technical SEO
• Get deep insights to improve your search strategy
• Analyze & benchmark web traffic sources against competitors
• Understand how your audience interacts with websites and apps

It aggregates data from multiple sources to provide a complete, real-time picture of the digital landscape.

Similarweb enables businesses to track their website performance and compare it to competitors in their industry. Starting from searching keywords and creating a content plan, to auditing your site and tracking its performance across search engines and AI chatbots.

In addition, Similarweb launched several new AI Agents. One of them, The AI SEO Strategist, specializes in building smarter SEO strategies by providing key insights, competitor comparisons, and actionable recommendations for your website.

What is Semrush?

semrush is a comprehensive digital marketing platform built to help businesses improve their online visibility and gain a competitive edge across search engines and paid channels. It’s widely used by:

• SEO professionals
• Content marketers
• Advertisers
• Agencies

Whether you’re looking to boost organic traffic, run more effective PPC campaigns, or uncover what’s working for your competitors, Semrush provides the data and tools to make it happen.

At its core, Semrush offers insights into how websites perform in search engines and how competitors acquire traffic. It enables users to track keyword rankings, analyze backlinks, audit their websites for technical issues, and develop optimized content strategies. Additionally, Semrush provides tools for planning and managing paid advertising campaigns and monitoring social media activity. This makes it a versatile platform that supports both SEO and broader digital marketing efforts.

Okay, we now understand both platforms at a high level. Let’s do some feature-by-feature comparisons.

Which paid advertising tools are better?

Both Similarweb and Semrush offer paid advertising analysis, but they cater to different needs. While Semrush is built for tactical campaign management and keyword targeting, Similarweb delivers broader visibility into your competitors’ ad strategies across multiple channels and platforms.

Similarweb:

Similarweb offers a comprehensive suite for analyzing PPC performance, giving marketers a powerful view into how competitors run both search and display advertising campaigns. Unlike tactical platforms, Similarweb’s strength lies in surfacing strategic insights, showing you what’s working in the market, who’s dominating visibility, and how to adapt your own paid strategy accordingly.

1. Search Advertising

 

This section allows users to dissect paid search strategies at both the domain and keyword level. From Google Ads campaigns to specific landing pages, Similarweb reveals how competitors are using paid search to acquire traffic and what’s driving results.

• Overview: Get a high-level view of how much traffic a site receives from paid search. Analyze traffic trends, see detailed paid search and engagement metrics, including PPC spend, visit duration, pages per visit, and bounce rate.
• Landing pages: Discover the specific landing pages receiving traffic from paid campaigns. See detailed metrics for each page, including clicks, spend, average position, keywords, and more.
• Search ads: View actual ad copy being used by competitors, including headlines, descriptions, and calls to action. Understand which messages are driving clicks and how different advertisers position themselves.
• Keywords: Uncover the top paid keywords sending traffic to a domain. Analyze metrics like search volume, zero-click rates, and SERP features.
• Competitors: See which domains are bidding on the same keywords. See how your site and your competitors overlap, who is winning the most traffic, and for which industry.

2. Display advertising

 

Similarweb’s display advertising analysis reveals how brands are using banner ads across the open web. It sheds light on ad creatives, placement strategies, and publisher relationships that would otherwise remain hidden.

• Overview: Get an at-a-glance breakdown of display traffic metrics, including spend, impressions, device breakdown, top ads by campaigns, and more.
• Campaigns: Explore display campaigns from any domain. See the landing pages used, number of impressions, ad spend, and traffic share per campaign to understand their scope and effectiveness.
• Ads: Access actual ad creatives, so that you can find insights into call-to-action styles, visual branding, or event-driven messaging.
• Publishers: See which websites and ad networks are distributing your competitors’ ads. Identify the top publishers and traffic drivers, helping you spot high-performing placements you might want to test in your own campaigns.

Semrush:

 

Semrush offers a set of tools designed to help marketers analyze paid advertising performance and streamline campaign management across search and social platforms.

• Paid search: Analyze traffic trends, see device breakdowns, and see top sources and top keywords.
• Paid social: Dive into traffic trends, device breakdowns, trending pages, and top sources.

Ad Assistant

The Ad Assistant simplifies ad management by centralizing performance monitoring across multiple accounts.

• Unified Dashboard: View and manage all your Google and Meta ad accounts in one place and manage your campaigns more efficiently.
• Smart Alerts: Receive automatic notifications when a specific metric hits a threshold or when unusual activity is detected.
• Anomaly Detection: Stay ahead of issues with alerts that flag sudden performance changes, helping you catch problems before they impact results.

Which keyword research tool brings the most value?

Similarweb:

Similarweb’s keyword research tools equip SEOs and digital marketers with deep, granular insights into actual user search behavior. Built around real-world queries across platforms like Google, Amazon, and YouTube, these tools go beyond static keyword lists to reveal how users interact with search results, uncovering intent, engagement patterns, and competitive gaps.

 

What sets it apart:

• Daily-updated keyword data: Similarweb’s dataset refreshes daily, giving access to insights from the past 28 days, which is ideal for trend spotting and reactive campaign planning.
• Zero-click and SERP behavior metrics: Similarweb shows you what keywords appeared as zero-click results, featured snippets, and more.
• Platform-level granularity: You can research keywords specific to Amazon, Google, or YouTube, which is critical for tailoring content and ads to each platform’s audiences.
• Competitor search strategy analysis: Similarweb lets you break down how competitors capture traffic across platforms, revealing hidden keyword opportunities that they’re ranking for but you’re not.

Semrush:

The Semrush keyword research is designed to help digital marketers and SEO plan and execute keyword strategies. Use it to find high-traffic seed keywords or easy-to-rank long-tail keywords. The Keyword Magic Tool lets users generate thousands of keyword ideas, complete with essential metrics such as search volume, keyword difficulty, CPC, and user intent.

To further enhance your strategy, Semrush also includes a keyword gap tool that helps you identify untapped opportunities by comparing your keyword profile against competitors helping you grow your market share or dominate your niche.

 

What sets it apart:

• Keyword Magic Tool: Automatically generates long-tail variations and related terms, which is great for building authority around your topical or niche.
• Search intent classification: Breaks keywords into categories like informational or transactional to align your content with user needs.
• Volume and difficulty metrics: Shows CPC, competition, and difficulty scores that help balance high-opportunity vs. low-effort keywords.
• Keyword Gap tool: Compares your domain with competitors to highlight missing keywords you could be targeting.

Which SEO site audit features are preferable?

Similarweb:

Similarweb’s SEO site audit tool is designed for teams that want a complete picture of their site’s technical health and insight into how they compare to competitors. It offers deep diagnostics with over 300 performance checks and organizes issues by impact to help you prioritize fixes effectively.

 

• Deep technical coverage: Scans 300+ technical SEO factors, including crawlability, page speed, internal linking, and metadata.
• Server-side crawling: Runs audits from Similarweb’s secure servers to avoid straining your own website or machine.
• Prioritized issue scoring: Flags issues as high, medium, or low impact so you can tackle what matters most.
• Competitive benchmarking: Compare your site’s technical SEO health with competitors to spot weaknesses and opportunities.
• Enterprise-ready diagnostics: Ideal for teams managing large sites or complex technical environments.

Semrush:

Semrush’s site audit tool offers a streamlined way to keep your website technically optimized and aligned with SEO best practices. It scans for over 140 potential issues, including crawlability errors, HTTPS misconfigurations, Core Web Vitals, and structured data problems, while flagging common pitfalls like broken links, duplicate content, and redirect chains. With clear, actionable recommendations, the tool makes it easy to fix issues and improve site health. 

 

• Comprehensive checks: Audits 140+ site issues, including crawl errors, HTTPS, hreflang, and structured data.

• Core Web Vitals tracking: Measures page speed and user experience signals in line with Google’s standards.

• Actionable recommendations: Provides step-by-step guidance to fix broken links, redirects, and metadata issues.
• Progress monitoring: Schedule recurring audits and compare results over time to track improvements.

Which rank tracker offers the most complete data?

Similarweb:

The Similarweb Rank Tracker is a powerful SEO tool designed to give you a comprehensive view of your Google rankings. At its foundation, it delivers daily tracking of keywords and landing pages, ensuring you’re always up to date on your performance.

Beyond basic tracking, it includes a SERP feature tracker that highlights quick-win opportunities across all major SERP features such as Featured Snippets, AI Overviews, Local Packs, and more.

The tool also includes competitor tracking, helping you identify which sites are ranking for your keywords so you can benchmark and adjust your strategy accordingly.

To streamline your workflow, you can tag and segment keywords into topics and subtopics, allowing you to focus your efforts topic by topic and stay organized throughout your SEO campaigns.

 

• Daily rank tracking: Get fresh, daily updates on how your core keywords perform in organic search.
• SERP feature visibility: Track your presence in features like Featured Snippets, Local Packs, and AI Overviews, and see where competitors are gaining ground.
• Keyword tags: Organize your site into topics and subtopics, allowing you to build authority on one area at a time and measure the impact of your optimization.
• Competitive benchmarking: Compare your SERP presence to that of competitors and identify where you can close the gap or expand your advantage.

Semrush:

Semrush’s Position Tracking tool delivers daily keyword ranking updates across both desktop and mobile devices, with support for tracking in any location. As well as report your rankings, it also shows whether your site appears in key SERP features like Featured Snippets, Knowledge Panels, and People Also Ask boxes. You can benchmark your performance against competitors to identify ranking gaps and new opportunities. With flexible reporting and historical data, Semrush makes it easy to monitor trends over time and fine-tune your SEO strategy for long-term growth.

 

• Daily position tracking: Monitor keyword rankings with daily updates to evaluate search performance over time.
• SERP feature tracking: See if your site appears in SERP features like Featured Snippets or Video Boxes that influence traffic.
• Competitor comparison: Benchmark your rankings directly against top rivals to uncover missed opportunities and threats.
• Device and location insights: Track rankings separately for desktop and mobile, and tailor tracking to specific cities or countries for localized SEO strategies.

Which backlink analysis tool gives you more insights?

Similarweb:

If you want a clear, in-depth look at your backlink profile, look no further than the Similarweb Backlink Analysis tool. It shows you big picture metrics that show you how your site is performing over time, as well as new and lost links. To go deeper, the tool shows you all the referring domains that are linking to your site or your competitor’s site. You can also dig into the very backlinks pointing to your site and see authority metrics, anchor text, and more.

 

• Detailed backlink profiles: Get a complete view of any site’s link landscape, including backlink volume, quality, anchor text, and trust scores, as well as metrics for referring domains.
• Historical insights and visual reporting: Access intuitive visualizations and timeline-based data to monitor backlink acquisition and loss trends, making it easy to measure link-building impact over time.
• Competitor link intelligence: Analyze your competitors’ backlink profiles to uncover the highest-value referring pages and gain strategic insights to inform your own outreach and acquisition efforts.

Semrush:

Semrush’s Backlink Analytics tool gives you detailed insights into the backlink profile of any website. You can view key metrics such as authority scores, authority trends, referring domains, and more. The tool also tracks your site’s progress over time by showing new and lost backlinks. For deeper analysis, you can explore individual backlinks, anchor texts, referring domains, and indexed pages.

 

• In-depth backlink analytics: Review key metrics like anchors, referring domains, indexed pages, and outbound domains.
• Toxicity scoring: Detect risky or spammy backlinks that could harm rankings and take action to protect your domain’s reputation.
• Historical tracking: Monitor link gains and losses over time to measure campaign effectiveness and refine strategy.
• Link-building recommendations: Use the Link Building Tool to get suggested prospects, send outreach emails, and manage your campaigns in-platform.
• Anchor text analysis: Analyze anchor text distribution to ensure alignment with your keyword strategy and avoid over-optimization.

Similarweb vs. Semrush: Choose the best platform for you

Choosing between Similarweb and Semrush depends on what matters most to your business, whether that’s data accuracy, competitive insights, or specialized SEO tools. Let’s break down how each platform compares across two key dimensions: data accuracy and feature depth.

1. Which tool has more accurate data?

Similarweb uses a multifaceted data collection methodology that combines direct measurement, contributory networks, public data, and trusted partnerships. This comprehensive approach provides a holistic view of digital behavior, offering powerful insights that drive digital marketing and SEO strategies. It is particularly effective for analyzing high-traffic websites and uncovering broader industry trends.

Semrush is highly regarded for the precision of its keyword and backlink databases. It’s a go-to tool for SEO professionals who need detailed insights into search visibility, rankings, and link-building opportunities.

Rand Fishkin of SparkToro analyzed several traffic estimation tools to determine which provides the most accurate data. He found that Similarweb’s estimates outperformed the others, closely aligning with actual Google Analytics figures.

Image reference: Sparktoro.com.

2. Winning combo: Real user data with winning features

Both platforms offer robust toolsets, but Similarweb stands out with features that go beyond SEO to deliver market-level visibility and strategic competitive analysis:

• Holistic traffic visibility: Similarweb delivers in-depth traffic insights, including market share, share of voice, and zero-click behavior, so that you can understand not just your own performance but how you stack up across the entire competitive landscape.
• Real-time competitor benchmarking: Instantly evaluate how your site performs against key competitors. Uncover their top traffic sources, winning tactics, and market position to guide smarter strategic decisions.
• Advanced SERP intelligence: Track the presence and impact of SERP features like Featured Snippets, AI Overviews, and Local Packs. See not only where your brand appears, but where users are actually engaging, giving you a clearer path to visibility.
• Up-to-date insights: With daily data refreshes and access to the most recent 28 days of search behavior, Similarweb equips you with fresh, real-time intelligence to respond quickly to market shifts.

While Semrush provides a rich set of tools for SEO, content marketing, and PPC, Similarweb’s broader market intelligence and deeper competitor tracking and full-stack SEO suite give it a strategic edge for businesses that need more than just tactical SEO support.

FAQs

What is the best alternative to Semrush?

Similarweb is widely regarded as one of the top alternatives to Semrush, particularly for businesses focused on SEO, competitive intelligence, and web traffic analysis. It provides robust tools for analyzing traffic sources, audience behavior, and digital marketing strategies across industries, alongside a comprehensive SEO suite.

How much does Similarweb cost?

Similarweb offers a free trial and four main pricing plans: Starter ($199/month), Professional ($399/month), Team (custom pricing), and Enterprise (custom pricing). Each plan includes varying levels of historical data, keyword limits, and user access.

Is Semrush enough for SEO?

Semrush is a solid choice for basic SEO tasks like keyword research and site audits, however, its data isn’t always fully accurate. If you’re looking for a more comprehensive SEO toolkit with fresh, reliable data from the past 28 days, Similarweb is the smarter choice. It offers advanced all-in-one SEO features like the AIOs keyword tracker, top competitors page prompts and much more. Powered by real user search behavior, Similarweb delivers the data accuracy and depth you need to achieve your SEO goals.