Semrush’s New Traffic Insights Explains Changes In Competitor Traffic Performance
New AI-powered Traffic Insights in Traffic Analytics help teams identify competitor traffic spikes and drops, understand the drivers, and act faster.
June 11, 2026
Industry-first reporting unifies AI and SEO visibility, giving marketers a complete understanding of their search performance.
Semrush launches AI vs SEO Comparison (Beta), one of the first solutions on the market that directly compares a domain's performance in large language models against its traditional search engine rankings.
This unified report addresses a critical gap in search marketing: understanding how brands perform across both the established world of SEO and the emerging opportunity of AI search.
Dividing Search Puts Visibility and Revenue at Risk
Strong performance in Google search doesn't guarantee visibility in ChatGPT, AI Mode, or Perplexity responses. Conversely, brands devoting all their attention to AI search may be missing current opportunities in search engines, where 88% of search traffic is.
While Google and AI search require their own strategies for visibility and like-for-like performance comparisons are difficult to make, until now, marketers lacked the tools to track both search formats holistically.
But now teams can identify where gaps exist and determine which optimization investments would drive the greatest impact.
A Complete Performance Overview in One Place
AI vs SEO Comparison synthesizes performance data from search engines and major AI models into a single, actionable view. The dashboard delivers:
- Side-by-side share of voice trends: Track AI Share of Voice and SEO Share of Voice over time to identify patterns, gaps, and opportunities
- Prompt vs keyword rankings comparison: Directly compare how your tracked AI prompts perform versus search keywords
- Dual leaderboards: See competitive positioning across both search formats, revealing where competitors are winning
- Advanced filtering: Segment insights by country, domain, and custom tags to focus on specific markets or business units
This unified intelligence helps brands and marketing teams to confidently answer: Where are we winning? Where are we losing? And where should we focus our optimization efforts?
Built for the Modern Marketing Stack
The AI vs SEO Comparison is available in workspaces with both an AIO project and an SEO project for the same domain and country, alongside active subscriptions for both products.
This seamless integration ensures marketers are equipped to act on insights across both channels, turning visibility intelligence into measurable performance improvements:
- SEO Managers can compare domain rankings across search and AI to identify gaps and understand how SEO strategy impacts AI visibility
- Brand Managers can track brand representation consistency across both traditional and AI-generated results, ensuring coherent presence across channels
- Executives and CMOs gain a complete organic performance view, seeing overall visibility and its revenue impact
Pioneering the Future of Search
Search is no longer a single channel but a multi-dimensional ecosystem requiring sophisticated, unified intelligence. As the first solution to directly benchmark AI performance against search rankings, the AI vs SEO Comparison answers this shift and ensures marketers can understand and optimize online visibility in a comprehensive way.
Semrush continues its leadership in helping brands navigate the convergence of traditional search and AI discovery, ensuring marketers have the intelligence and tools needed to win across every channel where their customers search.
