Semrush vs Ahrefs on Reddit

When it comes to SEO tools, Semrush and Ahrefs are the two behemoths, and they’re constantly being compared. That comparison often comes up when someone is buying one (or both) of these tools, and I wondered what Reddit had to say about each. I wanted hard numbers, not impressions. So I counted every post and comment that mentioned either tool over the last 24 months (October 2024 through September 2026), here’s what I found:

The counts are broken out by month, by subreddit and by person. I also read a sample of the comments to get a sense for how people felt about each tool.

A “mention” is any post or comment where the name of the tool was typed (not linked). It says nothing about whether the author actually pays for the tool. They could be a fan, critic, salesperson, or have never even opened it.

The number of people who mentioned the tools excludes known bots, based on the KissMyPost list of 105,103 automated accounts. Monthly mention counts do include bots. Bots accounted for about 4.6% of Semrush mentions and 3.1% of Ahrefs mentions, a small fraction of both.

A dead heat after a long lead

This window goes back 12 months, from October 2025 through September 2026. In that time, Ahrefs was mentioned 24,459 times and Semrush 23,360, meaning Semrush got 48.9% of the combined total. The volume is effectively tied, with a slight edge to Ahrefs, and that’s the pattern month by month. September 2026 saw 1,470 mentions of Semrush and 1,473 of Ahrefs, as close to a tie as you can get. That doesn’t exactly support the expectation that one tool would dominate Reddit.

Nobody switched, new people showed up

My first guess at what could explain the change in mentions was that people were leaving Semrush for Ahrefs, but the data says that’s not what happened. Here are the people who named only one or the other tool, for the October 2024 through September 2025 period, compared to the last 12 months. Only 51 people moved from naming only Semrush to naming only Ahrefs. The number going the other direction is almost exactly the same, 43. Both are tiny numbers, mere fractions of the thousands of people who write about these tools. If anyone is migrating from one to the other, I can’t see it here.

The real change here is about who is writing about these tools: In the last 12 months, 83.3% of people who mentioned Ahrefs didn’t name it in the year before. For Semrush, that number is 78.1%. Both tools are very much dependent on newcomers. But those people aren’t sticking around: Of the 8,084 people who named Semrush in the earlier year, only 921 mentioned it again, a return rate of 11.4%. For Ahrefs, that number is 13.5%.

If you’re looking for a core group debating the merits of one tool or another, you won’t find it on Reddit, at least when it comes to SEO tools. Mostly, it’s a passing crowd.

Where Ahrefs gained ground

I also clustered the subreddits by authors who posted in more than one of them at a time. There are 12 SaaS and founder subreddits, where Semrush was mentioned 1,393 times and Ahrefs 3,313; Semrush is only 29.6% of the pair. On a per 100 active authors basis, that’s 8.7 mentions of Semrush and 20.7 for Ahrefs. In the SEO subreddits, it’s about even, 6,203 mentions of Semrush versus 6,190 for Ahrefs. And in digital marketing subreddits, it’s about even, 3,147 versus 3,117. But the whole gap comes from founder communities, where people discuss building their own products.

The biggest gaps are in the discussion spaces where builders talk to each other, like r/SaaS, where Semrush was mentioned 617 times and Ahrefs 1,533. Or r/microsaas, where Semrush was mentioned 131 times and Ahrefs 404. Or r/buildinpublic, where it’s 84 versus 212. It seems like in these audiences, where people are talking about building their products, which tool gets mentioned matters.

Ahrefs’ weak spot here is r/PPC, where Semrush was mentioned 151 times and Ahrefs 48.

r/SEO used to be a big old hub of SEO discussion, but it’s shrinking, as you can see by comparing January-September 2025 with 2026. Semrush mentions there dropped from 2,152 to 1,327, or -38%. Ahrefs mentions there dropped from 1,534 to 1,188, or -23%. It’s the best-known subreddit for SEO, but it’s getting quieter on both tools, and Semrush is dropping faster than Ahrefs. It’s still the top source of mentions for both, but if either has grown, it’s been somewhere else.

Some of that discussion moved to newer AI-search subreddits, like r/WebsiteSEO, where Ahrefs went from a handful of mentions to 580, and Semrush from a handful to 405. Or r/aeo, which started outside the top 200 for both tools, but finished at 229 Ahrefs and 261 Semrush. The low start might be because the subreddit is small, or just missed the cutoff, so I can’t know the rate, only the direction. But both tools clearly tracked the conversation as it moved to new venues, neither was left behind.

Equally recommended, criticized three times as often

Among comments that mentioned only one tool, 31.9% of Semrush mentions and 31.7% of Ahrefs mentions were recommendations, basically a tie. Criticism was counted when the writer complained about or warned other people away from using the tool, and mere mentions of a perceived flaw weren’t counted. Criticizing shares were 18.9% for Semrush versus 6.3% for Ahrefs. These are likely ranges, so they’re 15.3% to 23.0% for Semrush and 4.3% to 9.2% for Ahrefs, with no overlap. Even if you exclude comments made in Semrush’s own subreddit, the criticizing share is still 17.5% for Semrush. That means there are roughly three complaints about Semrush for every complaint about Ahrefs.

There were 74 critical comments about Semrush, and the most common reasons cited were data accuracy (24.8%), price (19.8%), and lack of certain features (18.6%). Support was mentioned as a reason (15.2%) and I have labeled it broadly enough to encompass thoughts on cancelling and refunds. Those shares sum to more than 100% because a comment could list multiple reasons. The word “cancel” appears 194 times for Semrush but only 100 times for Ahrefs, and the word “refund” appears 170 times for Semrush but only 73 times for Ahrefs. There were only 25 critical comments about Ahrefs, which is too small a sample size to meaningfully rank reasons, so the apparent prominence of Semrush support in this comparison is largely an artifact of comparing thin figures.

Praise of the tools also varies by tool, with reasons coming from unprompted recommendations, showing what each tool’s fans like most about it. Among those who recommended Semrush, 32.2% cited features, followed by artificial intelligence tools (10.4%). Among those who recommended Ahrefs, 19.4% cited its free version, 14.6% cited its learning materials, and 8.8% cited its backlink data. This suggests that Ahrefs’ pitch is “free and teachable” while Semrush’s is “breadth”.

Named more, recommended the same

Since the people choosing which tool to use are closer to making a purchase, I consider threads where they directly ask about choosing a tool ( 3,587 total, found by searching for threads with “ahrefs” or “semrush” in the title) to be more weighty than casual mentions.

In these threads, Ahrefs was named in 73.1%, but I only counted a recommendation when the commenter told the asker to use the tool or said it was the better choice. Semrush was named in 63.6%, and got 85 recommendations. Ahrefs got 70, so Semrush’s share is 54.8%. The likely range is 47.0% to 62.5%; an even split falls within it.

So, while Ahrefs was mentioned more often, it wasn’t recommended more.

Who writes the names

The writers of these names are mostly men; using the site KissMyPost, I estimated that 24.8% of those who wrote “Semrush” were women, and 23.1% of those who wrote “Ahrefs”. Those estimates cover only 29% of authors of comments mentioning Semrush, and 25% of those mentioning Ahrefs, so that’s just a rough picture. But it does seem to indicate that women are a smaller share of people writing about these tools than they are of commenters in marketing and SEO subreddits generally. (Women are 29.5% of commenters in these subreddits, compared to 41.3% overall on Reddit).

Authors also skew toward being based in the United States, among those whose country is known. 50.5% of Semrush authors are in the US, while Ahrefs is slightly less US-centric (46.1%), suggesting a somewhat wider reach for Ahrefs. In both cases, the UK, India, and Canada follow the US as the most common countries of origin for authors.

Median age of authors is 31.5 for Semrush, and 32 for Ahrefs; there’s not much difference between the two tools there.

In an earlier look at those who post links on Reddit, I found a larger gender split, 27.3% women against 20.4%. That’s larger than the split I see here, where counting those who write names into comments mostly erases it. So I’m going to trust the count of name-writers more here.

What these counts can't see

I should note that mentions aren’t necessarily customers, many are just mentioning the tool’s name rather than saying they use it, some are job postings, some are stock talk, etc. I did find 290 texts in November 2025 mentioning Semrush alongside Adobe. I also noticed that if you go to Semrush’s homepage, it says “An Adobe Company”, which makes sense given the recent news about the deal, but those texts I didn’t read. I gave ranges rather than single numbers because I think the model can be wrong on individual comments. And I thought of Reddit as one opinionated corner of the internet, not the whole market.

So who is bigger on Reddit?

Neither of them is leading right now; their names are mentioned about equally, in the last 12 months. But Ahrefs has been growing: 75.4% vs 22.6% for the same nine months a year ago. The growth was driven by newcomers, not people defecting from Semrush; most of the newcomers were posting in founder-focused and AI-search subreddits.

Recommendations are split evenly between the two. But there are three times as many criticisms of Semrush as of Ahrefs, mostly about data quality, price, and support.

This criticism gap is the most trustworthy finding of this article, and it was also found by a second model.

How this was counted

Conflict of interest: KissMyPost makes Reddit research tools. Funding: none.

Corrections: contact me; each fix gets a dated note on this page.

Questions people ask

The data

The counts behind the charts are in these files. License: CC BY 4.0; credit KissMyPost, link to this page.

• CSVMentions by month, 2019 to 2026Posts and comments with the name Semrush or Ahrefs per month, and Semrush's share of the pair.
• CSVSubreddit groupsSeven groups of neighboring subreddits: mentions of each tool in the last 12 months, mentions per 100 active authors and Semrush's share.
• CSVCounts by subreddit, last 12 monthsPosts and comments naming each tool in every subreddit that made the top 200 for either tool, with subscribers.
• CSVChange by subreddit, 2025 to 2026Mentions of each tool in January to September 2025 and 2026 by subreddit, and the difference.
• CSVPeople who named the tools, year over yearHow many people sat in each group (none, only Semrush, only Ahrefs, both) in the year before and in the last 12 months.
• CSVReasons for criticism and recommendationShare of critical and recommending comments that gave each reason, by tool, and the number of comments.
• CSVStance and tool-request threadsShare of comments that recommend or criticize each tool with 95% ranges, the share of tool-request threads naming each tool, and the recommendation split.
• CSVWho names the toolsPeople who named each tool against commenters in SEO and marketing subreddits: share with a gender estimate, women's share, median age, share in the United States.
• CSVOther SEO tools, last 12 monthsPosts and comments naming each of 18 tools and the subreddits where they come up most.

Zenodo DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.24038633