Semrush vs Surfer
Both are seo tools. Here is what separates them.
What Semrush is
Semrush is a subscription platform covering SEO, AI visibility, content, local listings, advertising and social. It is organised into nine solution areas: Semrush One, SEO, AI Visibility, Traffic and Market, Content, Local, Advertising, AI PR and Social. Named tools include the Keyword Magic Tool, Site Audit, rank tracking, Backlink Analytics and an AI visibility checker. Those tools read from indexes that Semrush builds itself: 28 billion keywords, 43 trillion backlinks and 808 million domain profiles, held across 142 geographic databases. Four plans are listed, and they differ in how many websites, keywords and AI prompts they cover. The SEO plan is $139 per month, or $117.33 a month on annual billing, and covers 5 websites and 500 tracked keywords. Starter is $199 per month, or $165.17 annually, and covers 5 websites, 500 tracked keywords and 50 tracked AI prompts. Pro+ is $299 per month, or $248.17 annually, and covers 15 websites, 1,500 tracked keywords and 100 tracked AI prompts. Advanced is $549 per month, or $455.67 annually, and covers 40 websites, 5,000 tracked keywords and 200 tracked AI prompts. Users beyond the first are charged separately, at $45 each on Starter, $80 on Pro+ and $100 on Advanced. The SEO Toolkit is sold in Pro, Guru and Business tiers. Pro tracks 500 keywords, audits 100,000 pages a month and returns 10,000 results per report. Guru tracks 1,500 keywords, audits 300,000 pages and returns 30,000 results. Business tracks 5,000 keywords, audits 1,000,000 pages and returns 50,000 results. A single audit is capped at 20,000 pages on Pro and Guru, and at 100,000 pages on Business. Additional users on toolkits other than SEO cost $20 each regardless of tier. Without an SEO Toolkit subscription, Site Audit crawls only 100 pages a month and 100 pages per audit. Unused crawl budget does not carry over between months, and the allowance resets on the first day of each month. A seven day free trial is available.
What Surfer is
Surfer is an SEO content optimisation platform. It analyses the pages already ranking for a keyword and turns what it finds into guidance you write against, covering research, briefing, drafting and on-page optimisation in one place. The core tools are the Content Editor, the SERP Analyzer, a Topical Map and NLP keyword suggestions, with a plagiarism checker alongside them. Surfer's own framing of the loop is research, audit, write, optimise and generate an SEO-optimised article in twenty minutes. Pages that already exist are catered for as well as new drafts, so a piece that has slipped can be audited and reworked rather than replaced. It was built by a team of engineers, marketers and SEO specialists. Topic handles briefing. A brief takes about ten minutes to put together, which Surfer describes as half the time editors and agencies otherwise spend, and about three hours less per report than gathering the same insights by hand. Surfer also cites a threefold increase in organic search clicks from using it. That is a vendor figure, so read it as a claim rather than a measured result. Surfer is designed to sit where the writing already happens. There is a WordPress connection for optimising directly, keyword suggestions inside Google Docs, Surfer guidelines visible while editing in Contentful, and Zapier for building custom workflows around the rest. It works with ChatGPT for SEO-tuning AI-generated drafts, and with Jasper for writing to Surfer's own best practices. Keyword Surfer, a free Chrome extension, puts keyword data into Google's results pages themselves, which is the cheapest way to see how the tool thinks before paying for anything. Plans, billed yearly, run from Discovery at $49 a month through Standard at $99 and Pro at $182 to Peace of Mind at $299. AI Search Analytics tracks 100 AI prompts for $158 a month. API access is not included by default: it is available only to active users who buy the API add-on or who are on an Enterprise plan. Surfer reports users in more than 159 countries and a community of over 150,000 customers.
We are not affiliated with either product. Upvote counts come from the published formula and neither position was paid for.