Blog · 24 September 2026 · By HeardOf

Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit vs HeardOf: what each one measures, and what Semrush does better

What does the Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit cost?

$99 a month per domain, billed annually, on Semrush's own pricing page for it, read 23 September 2026. Semrush's knowledge base article on the toolkit, read the same day, puts it at "$99 per month" without naming a billing period, with no free trial, 25 tracked prompts, one domain for its Brand Performance reports, and $99 for each additional domain.

The bundles cost more and include the SEO tools. On semrush.com/pricing, read 23 September 2026, the SEO + AI Search plans are Starter at $165.17 a month billed annually or $199 monthly with 50 tracked prompts, Pro+ at $248.17 or $299 with 100, and Advanced at $455.67 or $549 with 200. The plan called SEO, at $117.33 or $139, lists the four AI-search lines with a cross beside each: it does not include them. Enterprise is priced on request. A monthly-billing figure for the standalone toolkit is not on the page as served to us; the page has a monthly/annual toggle and we read it as a script, so the $99 carries the annual label on the page, and the knowledge base says "$99 per month" without naming a billing period.

Two corrections, both ours. Our post on what nineteen AI-visibility tools charge listed the standalone $99 as something we could not verify on 23 September 2026, because semrush.com/ai-toolkit/ answered 404 and the main pricing page showed AI tracking only inside the bundles. The figure was on a page our read did not open, semrush.com/pricing/ai/, and the "$99/mo per domain" that post attributed to trakkr.ai matches Semrush's own page. And the name: on every Semrush page we read that day the product is the AI Visibility Toolkit, not the AI Toolkit; the address people search for answers 404, the same address without www redirects to it, and the Internet Archive holds no capture of either.

One more fact about the vendor, because it bears on what you are buying. Adobe announced on 19 November 2025 that it would acquire Semrush for $12.00 a share in cash, "a total equity value of approximately $1.9 billion" in its own words, and its newsroom dates the completion to 28 April 2026. Both releases read 23 September 2026.

What does each one actually measure?

Semrush counts mentions, citations, sentiment and share of voice; its AI-visibility solutions page names six platforms and says its Enterprise AIO tier adds coverage; and it tracks a list of prompts you keep — all from its pages read 23 September 2026. HeardOf counts whether up to four brands you name were named or cited, per engine, on 40 prompts we write for your category, on four engines as of 23 September 2026 — our own settings, as described in our post on which engines we check. The table puts the two side by side. Semrush's column is its own pages, read 23 September 2026; ours is that post, same date.

What does Semrush do better?

Three things, plainly: its solutions page names six platforms where we run four, as of 23 September 2026 per our post on which engines we check; it holds the SEO data; and it is the brand people search for. None of the three is a matter of opinion, and the numbers are Semrush's own.

Breadth. Semrush's AI-visibility solutions page, read 23 September 2026, names ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, SearchGPT, Google AI Mode and Google AI Overviews, and says its Enterprise AIO tier adds coverage; AI Mode is on our list of what we do not check, as of the same date and per the same post, and so are Copilot, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta and Mistral. Its knowledge base article on the toolkit puts prompt tracking in 220+ countries and Brand Performance in 68,000+ location options, and its data-sources article counts 117 regional prompt databases; our ChatGPT and Perplexity calls are pinned to the United States and the AI Overviews page is fetched as a United States, English search, per the same post. It reports sentiment and narratives; our post on which engines we check describes named and cited and describes no measure of tone. Its Semrush One page says it monitors 239M+ LLM prompts and its data-sources article says the prompt database holds over 317 million prompts and responses — two of its pages, read the same day, with two figures; we have nothing of the kind and do not claim to.

SEO data. Every Semrush One bundle carries the SEO monitoring tools, Position Tracking and Site Audit among them, alongside the AI reports, per its knowledge base article on the toolkit — 500 keywords tracked daily on Starter, 5,000 on Advanced, per its pricing page — and its AI Search Site Audit is checked against eight AI crawlers, per its data-sources article. Our post on which engines we check describes AI answers being read and scored, as of 23 September 2026, and describes no rank tracker, no crawler and no keyword database. If the question is "how do I rank on Google and show up in AI answers from one login", that is Semrush's question and it is not ours.

The brand. The toolkit's own name is a search term: "semrush ai visibility toolkit" drew 3,600 searches a month in the United States, per DataForSEO Labs via SERP Secrets, pulled August 2026 and published on 15 August 2026. Adobe's completion release of 28 April 2026, read 23 September 2026, says Semrush is "used by over 28 million users"; Semrush's own Semrush One page puts it at "28M+ marketers worldwide" and its data-sources article at "10M+ marketers worldwide", both read the same day — three figures, all theirs, and they do not agree, so we print all three. This page exists because of the search number, not because we think you should not buy it.

Is there anything HeardOf measures that Semrush does not?

On the evidence we have, no, and we would rather say so than invent one. Semrush's pages, read 23 September 2026, list mentions and citations, competitor comparison, prompt-level tracking, sentiment and average position. The named-versus-cited split we have published — from a research run of 4 September 2026 on two engines, ChatGPT and Perplexity, 24 B2B software brands, 240 brand-answer pairs with both engines pooled: 45.0% named, 30.0% cited, re-counted on 23 September 2026 — is not from the audit and is not per engine, and it is a split Semrush's pages also count, as Mentions and Citations, in its metrics article and in its free checker's legend, read 23 September 2026. This post is read from Semrush's pages, not from inside its reports.

What differs is how much of the method each one prints. Ours, in our post on which engines we check as of 23 September 2026: the model behind each of the three engines reached by API, as read on 19 September 2026, and what the fourth is read from; the prompt count and mix; the once-a-day rule; the four brands; what an empty AI Overview counts as; and a list of what we do not measure. Semrush's, in its knowledge base article on where the toolkit's data comes from, read 23 September 2026: a database of over 317 million prompts and responses on ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, across 117 regional databases; responses "captured from real requests and not via any APIs of LLMs"; a 0–100 score that combines Topic Coverage, measured against all other domains, with Mention Consistency; ChatGPT read as "the latest model of ChatGPT in search mode"; and a site audit checked against eight AI crawlers. Two things its nine pages do not print: a model version for any platform — "the latest model" is the nearest they come — and the number of answers under any one score.

The other difference is shape. Semrush's Visibility Overview benchmarks any brand against a competitor median, by its solutions page, scores it against all other domains, by its data-sources article, and does so across platforms, regions and topics, by its features page — all read 23 September 2026; ours scores up to four brands you name, on 40 prompts we write for your category, on four engines as of 23 September 2026 per our post on which engines we check, and if a fifth competitor is the one taking your answers the audit will not tell you. That is a narrower instrument, and narrow is what it is, not a virtue.

Which one should you buy?

Buy HeardOf if you want a Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit alternative that scores up to four brands you name on four engines with its method printed, as of 23 September 2026 per our post on which engines we check; buy Semrush's Starter bundle if you already pay for its SEO tools. The rest of this section is that answer with the figures attached.

If you already pay Semrush for SEO, the Starter bundle at $165.17 a month billed annually, or $199 monthly, puts AI visibility in the account you have, on Semrush's pricing page read 23 September 2026; nothing here argues against that. If you want keyword data, rankings and a site audit in the same tool, that is Semrush and it is not us. If the tool you are weighing is Otterly rather than Semrush — Lite at $29 a month, or $25 on annual billing, on its own pricing page read 23 September 2026 — that comparison, with what Otterly does better, is in HeardOf vs Otterly.

If you want one category, up to four brands you name, 40 buyer prompts on four engines with the method printed, and a report that says who was named and who was cited — as of 23 September 2026, that is what HeardOf does — the price is on our site, and it is not in this post, because a comparison page that carries a number we can change is a page that goes stale on our account.

How was this read?

With curl and a browser user-agent, on 23 September 2026, one fetch per page, no JavaScript executed. Semrush's nine pages — the toolkit's pricing page, the main pricing page, its knowledge base articles on the toolkit, on where its data comes from and on its AI metrics, the AI-visibility solutions page, the AI-visibility features page, the free AI Visibility Checker page and the Semrush One page — reproduce: open the named page and the figure is there or it is not, with the one caveat that the pricing pages carry a monthly/annual toggle and we read what the page serves before a click. The acquisition is Adobe's own two releases, the announcement and the completion, both linked where used; the search volume is DataForSEO's as published by SERP Secrets, with its page date. Everything this post says about our own system comes from our post on which engines we check, as it stood on 23 September 2026, and carries that date in the sentence that says it; you cannot check it. Everything else carries a page name and a day.

HeardOf vs Otterly: what each one measures, and what Otterly does better