Semrush AI Tools: What’s New and How to Use AI in Your SEO Workflow

By Guy Sheetrit, CEO of Over The Top SEO

Semrush’s AI Evolution: From Data Tool to AI-Powered SEO Platform

Semrush, the SEO platform used by over 10 million marketers and SEO professionals globally as of 2026, has undergone a significant transformation over the past two years. What was primarily a data and analytics platform has incorporated AI across its core toolset — from the front-end Copilot assistant that proactively surfaces insights, to AI-powered content optimization, AI Overview tracking, and machine learning-driven competitive analysis.

This guide covers Semrush’s current AI capabilities in detail: what each tool does, how it integrates into a professional SEO workflow, and where the AI assistance is genuinely valuable versus where traditional Semrush data tools remain the primary asset.

Semrush Copilot: AI-Driven SEO Intelligence

What Copilot Does

Semrush Copilot is the most prominent AI feature in the platform — a contextual AI assistant that appears on the Semrush dashboard and continuously monitors the SEO data connected to your configured domain. Unlike asking an AI model a question, Copilot proactively monitors your domain and alerts you to developments that require attention.

Copilot’s monitoring covers:

• Ranking changes: Significant position drops or gains for tracked keywords, highlighted with context about whether competitors moved or SERPs changed structurally
• Backlink events: New high-authority backlinks acquired, important backlinks lost, and toxic link spikes that may require disavow action
• Competitor movements: Competitors gaining significant ranking share on your target keywords, including content gap opportunities their new content reveals
• Technical issue detection: Crawl errors, Core Web Vitals regressions, indexing anomalies surfaced from Site Audit integration
• Content opportunities: Queries where you rank on page 2 with high-volume potential that targeted content optimization could push to page 1

The Copilot interface uses natural language to explain what it found and what action it recommends. For example: “Your page ranking #4 for ‘technical SEO audit’ dropped to #7 yesterday. The page that moved above you added 800 words covering Core Web Vitals — consider updating your guide.” This actionability is the primary differentiator from standard dashboard metrics.

Copilot Limitations

Copilot’s insights are as good as the data fed into it. It requires Position Tracking campaigns to be configured for your key terms, Site Audit to be run regularly, and Backlink Analytics to be monitoring your domain. Teams that haven’t fully configured these underlying data sources will see generic rather than domain-specific insights from Copilot.

Copilot also doesn’t replace strategic SEO judgment — it surfaces tactical opportunities and issues but doesn’t generate comprehensive SEO strategies, conduct market analysis, or replace the expert interpretation that determines which opportunities to prioritize.

AI Keyword Research and Clustering

Keyword Strategy Builder

Semrush’s Keyword Strategy Builder uses AI clustering algorithms to automatically group large keyword sets into topical clusters — identifying which keywords should be targeted together on a single page (cluster members) versus which require separate, dedicated pages (pillar topics).

The workflow: enter a seed keyword or import a keyword list, and the AI clusters keywords by semantic relationship and search intent rather than just surface-level similarity. A cluster for “email marketing” might group “email marketing software,” “email marketing tools,” and “best email marketing platforms” as page-level targets, while identifying “email marketing strategy,” “email automation,” and “email segmentation” as separate pillar topics requiring their own pages.

This AI-driven clustering replaces what previously required manual spreadsheet work and expert judgment — historically one of the most time-consuming steps in content strategy development. Semrush’s benchmarking indicates the AI clustering approach produces topical structures that rank for 35% more long-tail variations than manual keyword grouping, based on a 2024 analysis of 1,000 domains using the tool.

AI Keyword Intent Classification

Semrush’s AI now automatically classifies keywords by search intent (Informational, Commercial, Navigational, Transactional) across its keyword database. This classification is applied automatically in keyword research outputs, making it faster to filter keyword lists to the specific intent relevant to a piece of content or landing page.

The intent classification also informs content type recommendations — Semrush will suggest whether a keyword is best served by a long-form guide, comparison page, product page, or FAQ-style content based on current SERP composition and AI intent analysis.

AI Content Optimization: SEO Writing Assistant

Real-Time Content Scoring

Semrush’s SEO Writing Assistant (SWA) provides real-time AI feedback as you write or paste content. The tool scores content across four dimensions: SEO quality (keyword usage, semantic coverage), readability, originality, and tone of voice consistency.

The SEO scoring is grounded in Semrush’s keyword data — recommendations to add or reduce keyword usage are based on the actual keyword density patterns of top-ranking pages for your target keyword, not generic content rules. This data-driven foundation makes SWA’s SEO recommendations more actionable than standalone AI writing assistants.

AI Rephraser and Smart Writer

SWA includes AI rewriting capabilities: select any sentence or paragraph and choose to rephrase, expand, simplify, or improve the writing. The Smart Writer feature generates new paragraphs from a topic prompt, informed by the target keyword and competitive content context.

These AI writing features are most useful for overcoming content production bottlenecks (rewriting mediocre first drafts, expanding thin sections, simplifying complex technical explanations) rather than generating full articles. Content generated with AI assistance in SWA still requires human expert review and editing — the tool is a productivity multiplier, not an autonomous content producer.

Google AI Overview Tracking in Semrush

Position Tracking Integration

Semrush’s Position Tracking tool shows, for each tracked keyword, whether a Google AI Overview appears in the SERP and whether your domain is featured within it. This capability, added in 2024, makes Semrush one of the most accessible tools for systematic AI Overview monitoring.

The Position Tracking AI Overview view shows:

• AI Overview presence rate for your tracked keyword set (what % of your keywords trigger AI Overviews)
• Your domain’s inclusion rate within those AI Overviews
• Competitor domains appearing in AI Overviews for keywords where you don’t appear
• Historical trending of AI Overview presence (are AI Overviews expanding or contracting for your keyword set?)

Sensor AI Overview Tracking

Semrush Sensor tracks daily SERP volatility across industries and search categories. In 2024-2025, Semrush added AI Overview presence rate to Sensor data — showing how the prevalence of Google AI Overviews is changing across different search verticals (Healthcare, Finance, Technology, E-commerce, etc.).

This macro-level view helps SEO teams understand whether AI Overviews are expanding into their search category (requiring GEO investment) or remaining stable (allowing traditional SEO to remain the primary focus).

Competitive Intelligence with AI

Traffic Analytics AI Insights

Semrush’s Traffic Analytics tool has integrated AI interpretation of competitive traffic data — rather than presenting raw traffic estimates, it now provides context: “This competitor’s traffic increased 34% following the publication of 8 new long-form guides in the [category] cluster. Their core pages account for 67% of their total traffic — a concentration that represents a vulnerability if those key pages are targeted.”

These AI-generated competitive narratives accelerate the process of extracting strategic insights from competitive data, though they require verification — Semrush’s traffic estimates are directionally useful but not precise enough to rely on without cross-referencing.

Building Semrush AI into Your SEO Workflow

Recommended Weekly Workflow

1. Monday (5 min): Copilot review — Check Copilot for priority alerts: ranking drops, lost backlinks, technical issues. Assign action items from flagged issues.
2. Tuesday (30 min): Position Tracking review — Review AI Overview presence for tracked keywords. Identify content that should be updated to improve AI Overview inclusion.
3. Wednesday-Thursday: Content production — Use Keyword Strategy Builder clusters to guide content priorities. Use SWA for real-time content scoring during writing.
4. Friday (30 min): Site Audit review — Check AI-surfaced technical issues. Prioritize issues by impact on indexing and Core Web Vitals.

Semrush’s AI tools are most powerful when the platform’s data sources (Position Tracking, Site Audit, Backlink Analytics) are fully configured and consistently maintained. The AI assistance quality scales directly with the completeness and freshness of the underlying data it analyzes.