A Semrush alternative

→ A proprietary backlink index. Link gap analysis, toxic-link audits, disavow work — that is an index built over years of continuous crawling, and it is genuinely hard to replicate. If your work turns on it, keep the tool that has it.

→ Years of stored history. Our trend lines start the day your domain is added. A suite that has been recording since 2015 can show you 2015. We cannot invent a past we did not observe, and a chart that implied otherwise would be a fabrication.

→ Daily rank tracking, PPC tooling, ad intelligence. Not built, not sold, not on this page pretending to be.

Everything below this line is something the product does today. That is the whole standard we hold this page to, and it is why the list above comes first.

Search did not stop mattering; it stopped being the only place people ask. Most teams now run a legacy suite for the first channel and nothing at all for the second, because the second has mostly been sold as advice rather than measurement.

The audit here scores one domain on both at once — classic SEO basics and AI-citation readiness, in the same pass, with the exact markup to paste for whatever is missing. One run, one picture, no reconciling two dashboards that disagree.

See AI SEO for how the two jobs differ, and What is AEO? for the definition.

Every keyword tool you have used reports one number: how often a phrase is typed into a search engine. We report two — that one, and an estimate of how often the same phrase appears in prompts to AI assistants.

They diverge, often violently. We have measured phrases with almost no Google volume carrying more than ten times that demand in AI prompts, and category terms with thousands of monthly searches and effectively none. A rank tracker looking at those first phrases sees nothing worth writing about. That is the whole point: it is a channel the incumbents were not built to see.

Both columns are modelled estimates, and they are labelled as estimates everywhere they appear — including in the free audit, where a blank means no estimate is available for that term rather than a demand of zero.

This is the category's blind spot, and it is worth stating plainly because everyone selling in this space — us included — has to answer for it.

A site can pass every checklist item that exists. Schema present, llms.txt served, crawlers allowed, server-rendered HTML, provenance on every page. Perfect score. And still be cited by nothing. A readiness score measures whether you are set up to be quoted. It does not measure whether you were.

So we measure the outcome separately: a fixed set of real questions, asked of real answer engines on a schedule, recording whether your domain appears and which domains appeared instead. The score tells you what to fix. The citation check tells you whether fixing it worked, and those are allowed to disagree — most tools in this category only report the first one.

You do not need access to a competitor's site to see their ranking footprint, the terms they show up for, or whether an answer engine names them. All of it is observable from outside — the same public substrate every SEO suite resells.

→ Verified — 3 tracked competitors, snapshots monthly.

→ Grounded — 10 tracked competitors, snapshots weekly.

A snapshot describes ranking footprint. It is not traffic, we never present it as traffic, and where a snapshot has not been captured yet the dashboard says so instead of showing a zero.

Rank tracking observes. It does not attest. A v=AEO1 record is a signed TXT record at _aeo.yourdomain.com pointing at a fact catalog whose contents are cryptographically signed and whose every fact carries its source, method and fetch time.

That answers a question no keyword tool is even asking: when an engine repeats a claim about your business, how does it know the claim came from you? The specification is open and published at aeorecord.org — anyone may implement it, including the incumbents.

The usual end of an audit is a PDF of problems and a quote. Ours ends with the fix in a form something can act on.

→ A copy-paste prompt. One block of text you hand to any AI assistant — Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini — containing the exact files, markup and DNS record, written so it merges with what you already have instead of overwriting it.

→ An MCP endpoint. Remote, free, nothing to install. An agent audits the domain, applies the fixes with its own access, and re-runs the audit to confirm the score moved.

→ Briefs for what to make next. Your demand and citation data becomes creator-ready content briefs — the question to answer, the format, the outline, and the verified facts that may be claimed — so you can hand one to anyone.

→ A report to send upward. Scores and deltas, owner-versus-competitor trends, citation share, the AI-versus-Google demand table, and an explicit note of what is not measured — exportable for the people who approve budgets.

Ours is annual, theirs is monthly, so compare the year. Grounded AEO is $99, $499 or $999 per year — Listed, Verified, Grounded. The audit itself is free and needs no account.

Semrush lists its entry paid plan at $139 per month ($117.33 per month billed annually) and its top self-serve plan at $549 per month, as of August 2026 on semrush.com/prices.

These are not the same product and the comparison is not feature-for-feature — see 001. The point is narrower: adding the answer layer to your stack should not cost like a second suite, and for most businesses the cheapest correct move is to run the free audit first and see whether anything needs buying at all.

Worth knowing when you pick a tool to depend on for years: Semrush completed its acquisition by Adobe in April 2026. Grounded AEO is a service of Meadow Mountain AI LLC — founder-owned, Colorado-built, no outside investors, no board. Who owns this →