How To Do Competitor Research On SEMRush: A Step By Step Guide

Table of contents

Open Table of contents

• Before You Get Started
• First Steps of Competitor Research
  • 1. Find Your Competitors
  • 2. Categorize Your Competitors
  • 3. Identify Your Competitors’ Market Positioning
  • 4. Determine What Products They Offer
  • 5. Research Your Competitors’ Sales Tactics and Results
  • 6. Explore Your Rivals’ Marketing Campaigns and Performance
  • Bonus: Make Competitor Research a Routine
• Semrush Competitor Research — 2026 FAQ
  • How has AI Overviews changed competitive research?
  • Does Semrush track Perplexity and ChatGPT visibility?
  • Is Semrush still worth it for smaller businesses?
  • What should I do first if I’ve never done competitor research before?
• Updated for May 2026

Before You Get Started

Before jumping into tools and data, answer three grounding questions.

What do you expect to get from the research?

Decide which goals you want to focus on. PPC competitive intelligence? Organic ranking gaps? AI-Overview citation presence? Be specific. Without a defined goal, you’ll pull random metrics and generate a report nobody acts on.

What is your company aimed at?

Articulate your own business’s goals first. If your paid campaigns are converting well but your organic footprint is thin, that’s where competitor intel will move the needle. If you’re already ranking but not appearing in AI Overviews, that’s the gap to investigate.

What’s the market situation in general?

Look at the market as a whole before fixating on individual rivals. New entrants, consolidation, and platform shifts (the rise of Reddit/forums in Google results, AI answer engines as a discovery layer) can matter more than any single competitor’s move.

Relevant: Read my detailed review of Semrush here

First Steps of Competitor Research

Almost every competitor research journey involves these five steps. Let’s walk through each using Semrush’s Competitive Research tools.

1. Find Your Competitors

You need both direct competitors (targeting your exact customers with the same solution) and indirect competitors (targeting similar audiences or adjacent problems).

How many competitors should you track?

In my experience, regularly tracking more than ten competitors creates more noise than signal. Start with your closest five. Semrush’s Market Explorer can help you identify them quickly: enter one domain and the tool maps the competitive landscape via a Growth Quadrant, plotting players by audience size (Traffic Volume) and growth rate (Traffic Growth). You can switch between Top 10, Top 20, and Top 30 and toggle between “All Market” and “Narrow Focus” — the narrow view surfaces your closest rivals by visibility.

One thing that’s new and worth noting: Semrush Enterprise now tracks which competitors appear in AI Overviews and AI-generated answers. If a rival is getting cited by Google’s AI summaries or by Perplexity on your target keywords, that’s a competitive threat that doesn’t show up in traditional rank trackers. Check this layer early.

2. Categorize Your Competitors

Break your competitor list into segments before pulling data. A few useful lenses:

• Brand competitors vs. organic competitors — brand competitors fight for the same purchase decision; organic competitors fight for the same SERP real estate (and now, the same AI Overview citations)
• Primary / secondary / tertiary — same audience + same solution (primary), same audience + different solution (secondary), different audience + same solution (tertiary)
• Price tier — where does each competitor sit on value vs. price? Map this on a simple 2×2 rather than pulling exact price points from the tool

The Growth Quadrant in Market Explorer places competitors into Leaders, Game Changers, Niche Players, and Established Players. Use that as a rough map, then layer your own segmentation on top.

3. Identify Your Competitors’ Market Positioning

Understanding where a competitor sits in the market tells you which of their moves are worth copying and which are irrelevant to your stage.

Semrush’s Market Explorer shows online market share and traffic share by channel. You can compile that into a simple positioning spreadsheet — domain, estimated monthly traffic, primary traffic channel, and whether they appear in AI Overviews on your core keywords.

Don’t do this once. Market positions shift, especially now that AI-answer engines are redistributing discovery traffic. Set a monthly cadence.

4. Determine What Products They Offer

The fastest way to surface a competitor’s focus products is the Top Pages report in Semrush Traffic Analytics. It shows which pages drive the most visits. Filter by a keyword relevant to your category to quickly see what’s working for them in that segment.

Once you have a list of their top-traffic product or service pages, dig into two things:

1. Pricing positioning — are those top pages promoting a lower-cost entry offer, a premium tier, or a bundled package? The page’s CTA language usually tells you.
2. Customer message — what problem are they leading with? What tone? Matching this to your own messaging shows where you’re differentiated and where you’re saying the same thing as everyone else.

5. Research Your Competitors’ Sales Tactics and Results

To understand how rivals move users through their funnel, use Traffic Analytics’ Top Pages report filtered by checkout-related keywords (“cart,” “checkout,” “payment,” “confirm”). You’ll see how much traffic reaches those funnel stages.

Other questions worth investigating:

• What marketing channels are driving their traffic? (Traffic Sources report in Traffic Analytics)
• Are they expanding or contracting? Traffic trend over twelve months is a decent proxy.
• How do they incentivize purchases? Check their ads — Semrush’s Advertising Research shows active PPC copy and landing page structure.
• Are they showing up in AI Overviews or getting cited in Perplexity/ChatGPT answers on your target queries? This requires manual spot-checking or Semrush Enterprise’s AI tracking features.

6. Explore Your Rivals’ Marketing Campaigns and Performance

Semrush’s competitive bundle covers SEO, PPC, and display — the core channels. For social, you’ll need to supplement with native platform analytics or a dedicated social listening tool, since Semrush’s social features are more limited there.

For content strategy specifically: look at which competitor blog posts or landing pages earn the most backlinks (Semrush’s Backlink Analytics) and which rank for the most informational keywords. These are the pages generating authority — and often, the ones getting cited in AI Overviews.

Bonus: Make Competitor Research a Routine

One-off competitor audits go stale fast. Build a monthly cadence into your workflow. Semrush’s My Reports lets you schedule automated competitor snapshots — set it up once and it runs itself. The goal is to spot trend reversals early: a competitor who was losing traffic that starts recovering, or a new entrant appearing in AI Overviews before they show up in traditional rankings.

Semrush Competitor Research — 2026 FAQ

How has AI Overviews changed competitive research?

AI Overviews (Google’s AI-generated answer summaries) now appear on a significant share of informational and commercial queries. A competitor who doesn’t rank in the top 10 traditionally can still capture attention by being cited inside the AI Overview. Semrush Enterprise has added AI Overview tracking, so you can see which domains are getting cited on your target keywords — add that layer to your standard rank monitoring.

Does Semrush track Perplexity and ChatGPT visibility?

As of early 2026, Semrush’s GEO and AI tracking features cover AI Overview presence in Google; cross-engine visibility (Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini) is a rapidly evolving space and coverage varies by plan tier. For manual spot-checks, run your core commercial queries directly in each AI engine and note which competitors are named. Verify current feature availability directly with Semrush — this space is moving fast.

Is Semrush still worth it for smaller businesses?

Semrush offers multiple plan tiers, including entry-level paid plans suited for small teams and freelancers. The core competitive tools — Domain Overview, Traffic Analytics basics, and Market Explorer — are available across plans. Enterprise AI features are on higher tiers. If budget is tight, run targeted research sprints monthly rather than pulling data continuously.

What should I do first if I’ve never done competitor research before?

Start with Domain Overview on your top two or three known competitors. Note their top organic keywords, estimated traffic, and backlink count. Then run Market Explorer with your own domain to see who else is in the competitive landscape that you might have missed. That gives you the foundation to prioritize where to go deeper.

Related reading:

• Understanding the basics of programmatic SEO
• Top 11 On-page SEO tips
• Off-page SEO factors

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This guide is part of alejandrorioja.com — written by Alejandro Rioja, who now builds AI agent systems for founders. Including the agent that keeps this site current. How it works →

Updated for May 2026

SEO in 2026 is unrecognizable from the 2020-era playbook. Three shifts that matter for anything written before mid-2024:

1. AI Overviews are the new SERP zero position. Google’s AI Overviews default to roughly 60% of US informational queries, eating most “what is” / “how to” CTR. Optimizing for citation inside the AI Overview is now as important as ranking #1.
2. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the working term for cross-engine optimization — getting cited inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini answers. ~12% of high-intent commercial queries in late 2025 sample studies showed a direct-citation flow from these engines (vs. zero pre-2023).
3. E-E-A-T (now E^3-A-T, Experience + Expertise + Establishment + Authoritativeness + Trustworthiness) continues to be the framing Google uses internally — “Establishment” was the 2024 addition emphasizing brand-level signals.

Tool landscape (May 2026): Ahrefs and Semrush both shipped Generative Engine tracking. Surfer SEO + the Topical Authority crowd added GEO scoring. Screaming Frog still the standard crawler. AlsoAsked, Keyword Insights, and Frase shifted heavily into AI-Overview snippet engineering.

If this post predates May 2024, treat its core advice as the Google-search baseline and layer the GEO playbook on top.