A Semrush customer on Trustpilot put it plainly. "Charges are taken directly from bank accounts without warning". That is a billing complaint, but it is also a strategy complaint. You are paying a monthly fee for a tool that was built to measure the old game.
The old game was Google rank. The new game is ChatGPT citations. Same word, search, different mechanic entirely.
Here is the short version. Google shows ten blue links. A user picks one. If you are number one, you get roughly 30 percent of the clicks. That was true for 15 years.
ChatGPT does not show ten links. A user asks "who is a good accountant in Bristol". ChatGPT picks two or three names and writes a paragraph. You are in that paragraph, or you are not.
There is no position two. There is no "we are on page one but could push to the top three". There is only cited, or not cited.
That is the thing Semrush cannot measure. Not because Semrush is bad. Because Semrush was built for the ten-blue-links game and bolted AI features on top.
Semrush gives you keyword volume, backlink counts, SERP position tracking, site health scores, and now a GEO module that tries to count AI Overview mentions. All fine for an agency running 50 clients.
For a solo plumber in Leeds, it is wrong-shaped. You do not need 100 million keywords. You need to know if ChatGPT names your business when someone asks for a plumber in Leeds.
Those two questions do not overlap.
Users on Capterra say Semrush is "overwhelming for solo business owners and beginners". That matches what I see. The dashboard is built for an SEO analyst. A solo business owner opens it, gets lost, cancels after two months, and nothing in the business changed.
The cost is real. Roughly £100 a month, £1,200 a year, to measure the wrong thing.
Three questions, answered monthly.
1. Does ChatGPT cite my business when a customer asks about my category and town?
2. If not, who does it cite, and which source does it pull from?
3. What is the one fix this month that would move me into the citation list?
That is the whole job. It does not require a subscription.
Write 20 questions a real customer would ask ChatGPT about you. Generic ("best electrician in Sheffield"), specific ("Sheffield electrician for EV charger install"), comparative ("reliable electrician in S6 with good reviews").
Open ChatGPT in a private tab. Run the 20, one at a time. In a spreadsheet, log whether you appeared, which competitor appeared, and which source was cited.
Re-run monthly. That is your AI visibility dashboard. It takes 20 minutes. No card on file.
Skip the manual setup.
The 20 Questions Your Customers Ask ChatGPT is a free PDF with the exact prompts we use across trades. Once you have the results, the free schema pack has the copy-paste JSON-LD for the most common small-business types.
To be fair. If you still care about Google rank for commercial keywords, Semrush works. If you run an e-commerce site doing £500k a year and need competitive keyword research, Semrush works. If you have a content team and a marketing budget and want a dashboard that ties it together, Semrush works.
That is not most small businesses. A plumber, a vet, a solicitor, a bookkeeper. For those, the old keyword game is shrinking. The ChatGPT citation game is the one that matters now.
Different game. Different tool. Or no tool.
Semrush measures Google rank. ChatGPT does not rank, it cites. The metric is whether the AI names you when a customer asks. That metric is not in the Semrush dashboard, and paying a monthly fee for the old metric will not move the new one.
Start with the 20 questions. Keep a spreadsheet. Measure citations, not clicks. That is the job.
The 20-page AI Search Readiness Workbook walks you through 20 exact fixes, one per page, with copy-paste schema snippets. Or hand it over.
Happy to answer anything. [email protected]
Bob