Semrush Sold to Adobe. Ahrefs Stayed Independent. Which Path Wins?
Semrush and Ahrefs sell into the same market but built very different businesses—one for scale, the other for efficiency and independence.
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If you work in digital marketing, SEO is hard to ignore. And when the conversation turns to SEO tools, the same comparison comes up again and again:
Semrush or Ahrefs?
I have known both companies for years, and I used to think of Ahrefs as the more expensive option.
Before Ahrefs introduced its $29-per-month Starter plan in September 2024, its entry price was higher than Semrush’s for a long time. Both companies have since changed pricing repeatedly. By August 2026, Semrush’s entry-level SEO plan cost $139 a month, while Ahrefs had a $29 entry point.
But when I revisited the two companies, the more interesting question was no longer which tool is better. It was this:
How did two companies selling similar products into the same market end up taking such different paths?
Ahrefs has neither gone public nor raised venture capital. Public information suggests that it has nine-figure ARR; one outside estimate put its 2024 ARR at about $149 million. Yet it had only around 200 employees in 2026.
Semrush went the other way: it went public, broadened its product line, moved into enterprise accounts, and built a sales organization. By 2025, it had 1,567 full-time employees and $443.6 million in revenue.
Then, in 2026, Adobe acquired it for about $1.9 billion.
That raises a question I find fascinating: which path would you choose for a SaaS company?
1. Semrush Is No Longer Just an SEO Tool
At its simplest, Semrush helps businesses with SEO and search engine marketing. It tracks keyword rankings, competitors, website traffic, backlinks, domain authority, ad keywords, and more.
One of its most important moats is the data it has accumulated:
- 808 million domains;
- 28 billion keywords;
- 43 trillion backlinks;
- Roughly 10 billion URLs crawled each day;
- More than 200 million LLM-prompt data points.
As people move beyond Google to find information through ChatGPT, Gemini, and other AI products, Semrush is extending these capabilities into generative engine optimization (GEO).
It is increasingly positioning itself not as a traditional SEO company, but as a broader online visibility and AI visibility company.
The business model is just as interesting as the product:
PLG + sales-assisted growth + sales-led growth
At the base is a large product-led funnel. Free products, free trials, SEO content, affiliate marketing, and Semrush Academy continually bring people into the product.
Semrush Academy has accumulated about 1.4 million registered students and issued more than 600,000 certificates. Worldwide, Semrush has had about 28 million registered users.
Once users are in, the company moves them up through different plans, increasing average revenue per user:
- Core SEO: Pro / Guru / Business;
- Semrush One: SEO + AI Visibility;
- Enterprise: for large organizations;
- Add-ons: Social, Local, Content, and more.
Sales starts to play a role with mid-sized customers. This isn’t just a team prospecting for new customers: sales reps also help paying customers get started and identify smaller accounts with growing usage, more complex needs, or room to expand.
With large enterprises, Semrush becomes fully sales-led: understand a company’s problems one-on-one, show relevant cases, help with complex integrations, and negotiate the contract.
Over time, Semrush has moved from an SEO tool bought largely through self-serve channels to a marketing SaaS platform serving SMBs, mid-sized businesses, and enterprises.
2. Revenue Rose 44%, but Revenue Is Not the Most Interesting Number
Start with Semrush’s core metrics over the past three years:
| Metric | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | $307.7M | $376.8M | $443.6M |
| Revenue growth | 21% | 22% | 18% |
| ARR | $337.1M | $411.6M | $471.4M |
| Operating cash flow | $8M | $47M | $60M |
| Free cash flow | Approximately $0 | $35M | $43M |
| Paying customers | Approximately 108,000 | Approximately 117,000 | Approximately 108,000 |
| ARR per customer | $3,125 | $3,522 | $4,369 |
| NRR | 107% | 106% | 104% |
On the surface, the performance looks good. Revenue climbed from $307.7 million in 2023 to $443.6 million in 2025—about 44% growth over two years.
But two other numbers are more revealing: the number of paying customers stopped growing, while revenue per customer rose quickly.
Semrush had about 108,000 paying customers in 2023—and about the same number in 2025. Over that period, ARR per customer rose from $3,125 to $4,369, an increase of nearly 40%.
Increasingly, Semrush’s growth comes not from more customers but from getting customers to buy more. That helps explain its focus on enterprise, AI, and upselling.
In 2025:
- The number of customers paying more than $10,000 a year grew 31%;
- Enterprise ARR reached $37 million, up from about $9 million a year earlier;
- AI product ARR rose from about $4 million to $38 million.
Enterprise ARR and AI ARR cannot simply be added together; some enterprise customers also buy AI products. After removing that overlap, the two represented about $63 million in ARR, or 13.4% of total ARR.
In other words, roughly 86% of Semrush’s ARR still came from its traditional SEO and SMB base.
3. Semrush’s Real Challenge: Growth Is Getting More Expensive
Look only at growth, and Semrush looks like a solid SaaS business. In 2025, revenue grew 18%, ARR reached $471.4 million, AI ARR increased almost tenfold, and enterprise ARR grew quickly.
But one number changes how I see the business: 1,567 full-time employees.
$443.6 million of revenue divided by 1,567 people is about $283,000 in revenue per employee. That is not bad.
Put Ahrefs beside it, though, and the comparison becomes interesting. Ahrefs is private and has not raised outside capital. It says it has reached nine-figure ARR, while an outside estimate put 2024 ARR at about $149 million. It has only around 200 employees.
Even using just $100 million in ARR, that is more than $500,000 in ARR per employee. If the $149 million estimate is close, it would be over $700,000.
The cash picture is striking, too. At the end of 2024, Ahrefs set aside 3% of ARR for an employee bonus pool; its founder later raised that to 5%. If ARR were indeed $149 million, 5% would be about $7.45 million.
A company of roughly 200 people, without VC backing or public-market financing, willing to distribute nearly 5% of revenue directly to employees is at least showing confidence in its cash position.
Now look back at Semrush: roughly $60 million in operating cash flow and $43 million in free cash flow in 2025. Its free cash flow margin was about 9.7% of revenue.
This is not a struggling company, but it is hard to call it an exceptionally powerful cash machine.
Semrush built a bigger business; Ahrefs built a leaner one. Entering more markets required Semrush to add products, sales reps, customer success staff, and management layers. Revenue rose, but so did the organization needed to sustain that growth.
4. One Market, Two Very Different Answers
When I compare Semrush and Ahrefs now, I am less interested in deciding which is the better SEO tool.
I am more interested in a founder’s question: Which company would you rather own?
Semrush took a familiar VC-backed, public SaaS path:
Product success → larger total addressable market → more products → enterprise customers → a sales organization → IPO → continued growth
The result: about $440 million in revenue, more than 1,500 employees, and an eventual sale to Adobe for about $1.9 billion.
Ahrefs chose another path:
Bootstrapping → focus on the core product → PLG → strong profits → a controlled team size → growth funded by its own cash flow
It does not have Semrush’s revenue or a public listing. But its founder still controls a nine-figure-ARR SaaS business with around 200 employees.
Both paths have worked. They reflect different definitions of success.
Semrush pursued scale. Ahrefs seems to have pursued efficiency and freedom.
The more SaaS businesses I study, the more I think that a company with $100 million in ARR, very high gross margins, just a few hundred employees, no dependence on funding, substantial annual cash generation, and founder control may already be an excellent business.
Taking it to $500 million in ARR would certainly be a kind of success. But if doing so means growing from 200 people to 1,500, building complex sales, management, and capital-markets systems, and constantly finding new growth curves to satisfy public investors, is it necessarily a better business? The answer is not obvious.
For SaaS products like SEO tools—high margin, global, self-serve, relatively low marginal delivery cost, and naturally suited to PLG—Ahrefs offers another answer:
A company does not have to keep raising money, expanding its organization, and chasing ever-higher ARR to count as successful.
Sometimes a smaller, more profitable, more independent company is the destination.
Semrush and Ahrefs have each taken one of these choices remarkably far. Which would you choose?
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Hi, I’m Renee.
I lead SaaS operations and am a big believer in product-led growth. I share SaaS earnings analysis and growth strategy here. If you work on SaaS, I’d love to talk shop.