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Bye Semrush. After 8 years, cutting the cord.
Posted by on January 5, 2026 at 1:30 pmI find myself using ahrefs and semrush so much less over the last year. I'm finally cutting the cord for semrush.
I'll miss the few leads that come in from my agency page, and of course the backlink.
But it's not worth the money anymore.
Not when I have so many tools at my disposable that link the raw data to AI analysis.
My biggest issue is the data is so inaccurate on these SEO platforms. The estimations don't even match anything close to reality in many cases.
I find having bad data is worse than having no data.
Bad data can lead to the wrong conclusions, and those conclusions are confident. Meaning you think they're right, and that's worse than knowing that you might be wrong.
So I don't think it's worth the multi-hundred dollars per month.
Anyone else cutting the cord on these SEO platforms this year?
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1 Reply
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Dumped for Serprecon and Clearscope.
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How do you measure the performance of your clients’ competitors’ websites, and how do you compare them to each other and to your client’s site?
Do you know of a better or alternative industry standard? -
It’s been many many years since I stopped using racist ahrefs. Only dumped semrush 8 months ago.
They are nice to have tools, but not essential. -
I’ve dumped SEMRush and AHREFS in favor of going vanilla. Google Search Console + Google Adwords Keyword planning.
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SEMrush has got so bad recently on so many levels imo. I still use it, but can’t see me using it for much longer.
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If they were more affordable you wouldn’t mind. But at the price they are at it’s ridiculous to have data that isn’t accurate…
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In the era of AI it’s so easy to pull your own SEO data with an API. Instead of paying monthly I spend about 10 cents every report I pull.
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What’s the minimum one would need to pay them to get featured on the my agency page?
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seo neo is the best for me. By far best experience and results.
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I just ended my subscription in Dec. the data never seems accurate compared to what I see in GSC or GA. Not worth the cost to me anymore.
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I did wonder how many leads come through the agency pages. Have you had much luck there?
The pricing structure just seems greedy and ever more complicated to me that I think I’ll jump eventually. It’s getting harder to justify the cost versus how much use and what’s available.
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I still use Semrush regularly. But I don’t use it for the data on sites I’m working on. Of course you have better data for those. I use it for analyzing a markets and competitors.
And I don’t look at the data in absolute terms. I look at it in relative terms.
It’s highly useful for things like which pages on a competitor’s site are bringing in the most traffic. I don’t necessarily need the exact figures (but obviously that would be nice), but understanding where they get most of their traffic from is useful.
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I work mainly with small businesses with small budgets and, over the years, my SEMRush plan kept increasing in price until it got to the point where it didn’t make financial sense anymore. I was paying close to $1K per month by time all the add-ons and extra features were added. And the platform feels increasingly cluttered.
While I’m not canceling altogether, I am pulling back this year to a base level plan + AI and will just use Semrush for research. And, even that’s hard to justify, when I spend most of my time on search console and keyword planner, anyway.
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I think in 2026, you don’t need to mess up with data you need AI agent to work for you. Imagine AI agent curating data from multiple sources like Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and any other reliable data source. Then it will generate the SEO Report then another AI agent would act upon the intelligence.
We are building something like that, analysis part is done, we will be working on the executor part next.
If you want to join our beta test group, then let me know, your suggestions would be valuable for us.
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