Semrush Integrates with ChatGPT, Reshaping the MarTech Landscape

BOSTON, MA – December 17, 2025

Semrush, a leading platform in online visibility management, today announced the launch of its official application within ChatGPT. The integration provides marketers, SEO specialists, and data analysts with direct, real-time access to Semrush’s vast repository of marketing data from within the popular conversational AI interface, a move poised to significantly alter daily workflows and intensify competition in the marketing technology sector.

A New Era of Efficiency for the AI-Powered Marketer

The core promise of the new integration is a dramatic boost in productivity. By embedding its tools directly into ChatGPT, Semrush (NYSE: SEMR) aims to eliminate the constant and time-consuming task of toggling between different applications—a common friction point for digital marketing professionals. Users can now execute complex data queries using simple, natural language prompts.

“Marketers today win with data and speed – they must quickly sift through large data to draw relevant insights and determine their next move,” said Vitalii Obischenko, Chief Product Officer at Semrush, in the announcement. “The Semrush app in ChatGPT enables them to operate intelligently and efficiently, all within the ChatGPT interface.”

Early use cases highlight the integration’s potential to transform key marketing functions. For SEO and content teams, the ability to generate data-driven content briefs in seconds is a major leap forward. By prompting the app, users can instantly pull keyword clusters, conduct competitive gap analyses, and create article outlines anchored in Semrush’s real-time metrics of search demand and difficulty. This allows content strategy to be more closely aligned with live market data, rather than relying on static reports.

Another high-value workflow is automated competitive monitoring. Teams can now instruct the app to pull traffic, ranking, and visibility metrics for competitors on demand, creating a near-instantaneous alert system for shifts in the market. This capability transforms a traditionally periodic reporting task into a continuous intelligence stream. Similarly, the app can automate the creation of recurring performance reports, assembling live Semrush data and delivering it directly to platforms like Google Docs, Notion, or Slack.

The practical benefits are already being recognized by industry leaders. “The Semrush ChatGPT app enables enterprise-level visibility analysis across virtually any domain, subdomain, or folder,” noted Gus Pelogia, SEO Product Manager at Indeed. “It’s a comprehensive way for Indeed to understand search visibility across huge sites and entire industries.”

A Strategic Gambit in the Competitive AI Arena

Semrush’s launch is more than a feature update; it’s a calculated strategic maneuver in the increasingly competitive MarTech landscape. As artificial intelligence becomes a central component of enterprise software, deep integrations with dominant AI platforms like ChatGPT are emerging as a critical battleground. By being one of the first major SEO platforms to launch a direct, official app with live data access, Semrush establishes a significant first-mover advantage.

Competitors such as Ahrefs and Moz have also been incorporating AI, primarily by building features into their own platforms to assist with content optimization and keyword clustering. However, Semrush's approach of meeting users where they already are—inside ChatGPT—represents a different strategic philosophy. It capitalizes on the massive user base and workflow centrality of OpenAI's platform, potentially lowering the barrier to entry for its data and attracting users who prefer a conversational interface.

This integration is built on Semrush’s OpenAI Apps Software Development Kit (SDK) and Model Context Protocol (MCP) infrastructure, which allows for a more secure and seamless connection than manual API workarounds. This technical foundation suggests a deeper, more reliable partnership that could be difficult for competitors to replicate quickly.

The move also carries strategic implications for OpenAI. By welcoming a leading SaaS provider like Semrush into its ecosystem, OpenAI reinforces ChatGPT’s evolution from a general-purpose chatbot into an indispensable enterprise platform. Such integrations enhance the "stickiness" of ChatGPT for business users, making it a central hub for a variety of specialized professional tools and validating its security and capability for handling critical business intelligence. This partnership sets a powerful precedent, likely encouraging other SaaS companies to pursue similar deep integrations and accelerating the growth of a robust app ecosystem around the AI model.

Building Trust: Navigating Data Security and Privacy

As businesses increasingly integrate AI tools into their operations, questions surrounding data security and privacy have become paramount. The prospect of connecting proprietary analytics and strategic data to a third-party large language model naturally raises concerns about data leakage, compliance, and confidentiality.

Semrush and OpenAI appear to have proactively addressed these concerns in the app's architecture. The integration requires users to authenticate their Semrush account once, which then governs data access based on their existing user permissions. This ensures that an individual's visibility into sensitive data via ChatGPT mirrors their access rights within the Semrush platform itself, preventing unauthorized data exposure.

The use of OpenAI’s dedicated enterprise protocols is also key. OpenAI has publicly stated that for its API and ChatGPT Enterprise customers, it does not use their data to train its models by default. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) leveraged by Semrush is specifically designed to facilitate a secure and controlled exchange of information, giving organizations greater assurance that their queries and the resulting Semrush data remain private.

Despite these safeguards, the onus will remain on businesses to practice due diligence. Experts advise that companies should still maintain clear internal policies on what types of data can be queried through such integrations and ensure their teams are trained on best practices for secure AI usage. The transparency of both Semrush and OpenAI regarding their data handling policies will be critical in building and maintaining the trust necessary for widespread adoption among enterprise clients, who must balance the promise of AI-driven efficiency with their stringent data governance and compliance obligations.

Market Opportunity and the Future of MarTech

The launch arrives at a time of explosive growth in the AI-powered marketing industry. Market analysts project the AI in marketing sector to expand from a valuation of around $20 billion in the mid-2020s to potentially over $100 billion by the early 2030s. In this environment, AI is no longer a novelty but a core expectation.

For Semrush, this integration is positioned to capture significant value. By making its powerful data more accessible and easier to use, the company can drive user growth, attracting new customers from ChatGPT's vast user base. It also serves as a powerful retention tool and an incentive for existing customers on lower-tiered plans to upgrade to access the feature, which is available on Pro, Plus, Business, EDU, and Enterprise plans.

This move effectively broadens Semrush's addressable market to include professionals who may be less inclined to master a complex, standalone analytics platform but are comfortable with a conversational AI interface. By embedding its intelligence into a workflow that is rapidly becoming a daily habit for millions, Semrush is not just enhancing its product but fundamentally changing how its data can be consumed. The integration sets a new benchmark in the industry, signaling that the future of marketing technology lies not just in having the best data, but in delivering it in the most seamless, intelligent, and integrated way possible.