Surfais and the Semrush AI Toolkit compared on engine coverage, pricing structure, method and roadmap, with figures read from both sites on 6 September 2026.
Verified
6 September 2026
| Dimension | Surfais | Semrush AI Toolkit |
|---|---|---|
| AI engines included | All five on every plan, including the £69 Starter: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. | Reported as four to six engines depending on the source, among ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini and Perplexity. Claude and Microsoft Copilot are not listed in any source we checked. The exact count is not clearly stated on their own site as at 6 September 2026. |
| Engine gating | None. No engine add-ons and no engine unlocks by tier. | Not by engine selection. AI visibility is gated by product bundle instead: the base SEO plans include no AI toolkit at all. |
| Entry price | £69/mo Starter, ex-VAT. Growth £199, Scale £479, Enterprise from £1,999. 15% off annual. | $99/mo for the AI Visibility Toolkit standalone add-on (1 domain, 25 prompts/day). Semrush One bundles are Starter $199, Pro+ $299, Advanced $549, Enterprise custom. Base SEO plans are Pro $139.95, Guru $249.95, Business $499.95 and include no AI toolkit. A free plan exists at $0 with no card, 10 reports/day and basic AI visibility. |
| Prompts at entry price | 20 prompts, 1 brand, 1 country, 2 competitors. Extra prompts £6 each on brand tiers. | 25 prompts per day on the $99 add-on. 50/day on Semrush One Starter, 100/day on Pro+, 200/day on Advanced. |
| Seats | Not published. Plans are scoped by brands, prompts, countries and competitors rather than by seat. | Additional seats $45/mo. Not unlimited. |
| Refresh cadence | Twice weekly on brand tiers, weekly on Agency Mode, daily on Enterprise. | Reported as daily for prompt rankings and weekly or monthly for broader analytics, from a single source we could not corroborate. Treat as unconfirmed. |
| Published score methodology | AIS Score weights are published and versioned. Version 2, dated 10 June 2026: Visibility 60%, Position 15%, Sentiment 10%, Share of voice 15%. Published at surfais.com/methodology. | No published scoring formula found as at 6 September 2026. |
| Free trial | 7 days, no card. 1 brand, one weekly scan plus two manual scans, one audit. | 7 days, card required. Semrush states it charges a nominal amount which is refunded. |
| Agency / white-label | Agency Mode at £59 per client brand, minimum 5 brands, 20 prompts each, pooled. White-label reporting is scheduled to ship at the end of September 2026 and is not live. | No dedicated agency or white-label programme found. |
| API and integrations | No public API, no MCP server and no Looker Studio connector. | MCP access. API is metered and bundled into Enterprise only. Deep integrations across the wider Semrush suite. |
| Security certifications | None. No SOC 2 and no ISO 27001 — SOC 2 is budgeted, not achieved. No SSO or SAML. | Their own security page discloses PCI DSS Level 1 and GDPR. It does not claim SOC 2 or ISO 27001. |
| Company stage | Early-stage UK company. Small customer base, no published customer count, no named enterprise logos. | Boston. Being acquired by Adobe for $1.9B: announced 19 November 2025, approved by shareholders in February 2026 and reported completed. Very large existing SEO customer base. |
Verified 6 September 2026. Prices and features in this category change often; check each vendor's own site before you buy. Prices are shown in each vendor's own published currency and are not converted.
The coverage gap is the substantive point. Semrush's AI visibility coverage does not include Claude or Microsoft Copilot, and the exact engine count is reported as somewhere between four and six depending on which source you read — their own naming is inconsistent across AI Toolkit, AI Visibility Toolkit and Semrush One. Surfais covers ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews on every plan, including the £69 tier, and the list is the same at every price.
The second point is structural. There are currently three overlapping ways to buy AI visibility from Semrush: a $99 standalone add-on, the Semrush One bundles from $199, and base SEO plans that include no AI toolkit at all. Working out what you are actually buying takes effort, and the free tier's basic AI visibility is not the same product as the paid toolkit. Surfais has four published tiers and one engine list.
Third, method. We found no published scoring formula from Semrush as at 6 September 2026. Surfais publishes the AIS weights, versions them, and recalibrated them downward in June 2026 against its own commercial interest.
Semrush is a far larger business than Surfais and several rows reflect that honestly.
A real free tier. $0, no card, ten reports a day, with basic AI visibility included. Surfais has no free tier at all — only a seven-day trial. If you want to explore before you commit anything, Semrush lets you and we do not.
Dataset and integration. One of the largest SEO datasets in existence, and AI visibility sitting inside the tool where your keyword, backlink and competitive research already live. For a team that works in Semrush daily, that adjacency is worth more than any feature comparison suggests.
Language and location reach. Semrush claims 68,000+ location-language combinations, refreshed weekly. We have not verified that figure independently and report it as their claim, but nothing in our own coverage approaches that ambition.
Integrations. MCP access and deep connections across the suite. Surfais has no API and no MCP server.
Backing. Adobe's balance sheet behind the roadmap, and PCI DSS Level 1 and GDPR disclosed on their security page. Surfais holds no certifications.
Choose Semrush if your team already runs on Semrush. The AI Toolkit's value is not that it is the best AI visibility measurement available — it is that the data sits beside everything else you use, at an incremental $99 a month, with a free tier to try first. For an SEO-led team with a Semrush licence, adding a second vendor needs to clear a higher bar than a feature table.
Choose Surfais if Claude or Copilot matter to your buyers, or if you need to know exactly which engines are being measured and how the score is built. Coverage that is reported inconsistently across a vendor's own pages is difficult to build a board report on.
If you are Semrush-native and Claude is irrelevant to your market, stay where you are. If you are not, the adjacency argument does not apply to you and the coverage question does.
Semrush is a Boston-based SEO and marketing visibility platform with one of the largest search datasets in the industry. Its AI visibility product measures brand presence in AI answers, with sentiment and narrative reporting and citations split between branded and non-branded, though we could not establish whether citation reporting is at domain or URL level. It is sold three ways at present: a $99 monthly standalone add-on covering one domain and 25 prompts a day, the Semrush One bundles from $199 to $549, and a free plan at $0 with basic AI visibility. The base SEO plans — Pro at $139.95, Guru at $249.95, Business at $499.95 — include no AI toolkit.
Surfais is a UK product built for one job: measuring how five AI answer engines describe a brand, and scoring it on a published, versioned scale.
Adobe agreed to acquire Semrush for $1.9 billion, announced on 19 November 2025, approved by shareholders in February 2026 and reported as completed. We raise it neutrally and only because it is a legitimate roadmap consideration for a buyer signing an annual contract: acquisitions change product priorities, pricing and integration paths, sometimes for the better. Adobe's resources behind an AI visibility product could equally accelerate it considerably. It is a factor to ask about in a sales conversation, not an argument against them.
Semrush's AI visibility engine list is reported as four to six engines depending on the source, and its own product naming varies between AI Toolkit, AI Visibility Toolkit and Semrush One. What is consistent across sources is the absence of Claude and Microsoft Copilot. For a B2B software brand, whose buyers frequently use Claude, or an enterprise whose staff sit inside Microsoft 365 with Copilot, those are not marginal omissions.
Surfais includes ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews on every plan from £69 upward, with no add-ons and no tier unlocks. That is the one row we would ask any buyer to weigh first, because it is the row you cannot fix later without changing vendor.
We found no published scoring formula from Semrush as at 6 September 2026. One independent reviewer characterises their approach as using simulated rather than real user queries; that is the reviewer's assessment, not ours, and we report it as such rather than asserting it.
Surfais publishes the AIS weights — Visibility 60%, Position 15%, Sentiment 10%, Share of voice 15%, version 2 dated 10 June 2026 — versions them, and recalibrated them downward in June 2026 after finding a customer with six mentions across sixty-nine runs was being described as competitive. The IAB's August 2026 framework calls measurement decision-grade when it is reproducible, disclosed and versioned; that is the standard we are trying to hold ourselves to, and it is available at surfais.com/methodology for anyone who wants to argue with it.
No free tier, no SOC 2 or ISO 27001, no SSO, no public API or MCP server, no Looker Studio connector, twice-weekly rather than daily refresh below Enterprise, white-label reporting not shipping until the end of September 2026, and a customer base a tiny fraction of Semrush's. Semrush's security page discloses PCI DSS Level 1 and GDPR; ours discloses no certification because we hold none.
Verified 6 September 2026. Prices and features change; check the vendor's own site.