Semrush vs Kradeos
AI visibility comparison at a glance
| GEO parameter | Semrush | Kradeos |
|---|---|---|
| GEO approach | Bolted onto an SEO tool | Built for GEO of software and SaaS products |
| GEO focus | All industries | Software products only |
| GEO product | Dashboard | Dashboard plus a GEO agent that connects to your website, ChatGPT, Claude and other AI engines |
| GEO outcome | Monitor your AI visibility | Improve your AI visibility, and understand what it's worth to your pipeline |
| Prompt generation | Generic database of prompts | Prompts generated from your industry, your website and your domain, which makes the visibility measurement more accurate |
| Prompts mapped to your ICP | No | Yes, you can see the prompts that relate to your ICP |
| Prompts mapped to buyer stage | No | Yes, you can see which prompts relate to which buyer stage |
| AI visibility analysis | Not available | Based on your ICP |
| AI visibility connected to pipeline | Not available | Yes, get estimated pipeline of your AI visibility. |
| AI visibility by customer type | Not available | Visibility broken down by small, medium and enterprise business |
| Recommendations to improve AI visibility | Not available | Specific recommendations traced to software buyer prompts and the competitor pages actually being cited |
| Support to improve visibility | Not available | A GEO consultant monitors your visibility and provides support, available on the enterprise package |
| Product strength | SEO | AEO |
| Entry pricing | 50 prompt package from $199 per month | 50 prompt package from $65 per month |
A fair comparison
When Semrush is the better AI visibility tool
SEO, Google rank tracking, backlink analysis, keyword research. Semrush does SEO really well, across every industry.
For AI visibility, Semrush relies on you knowing the prompts your audience is using. If you know those prompts, Semrush is a good bet.
The rest of this page is about the case where you don't.
The software vendor problem
Why generic AI visibility tools don't work for software vendors
Semrush's AI visibility tooling is built on an assumption: that you know which prompts matter to your business.
You define the topics and prompts you want tracked, and the tool measures your visibility against them. That works if you have that list. For a consumer brand with obvious category terms, or a company with years of search data pointing at clear intent, it's a fair assumption.
For a software vendor, it usually isn't.
Software buyers don't search the way they used to. They describe a situation to an AI engine and ask for a recommendation. "We run three manufacturing sites and our maintenance team is drowning in paper work orders, what should we look at." Nobody in your marketing team wrote that prompt down, because nobody has ever seen it. It happens inside a conversation you have no visibility into.
So the vendor arrives at the tool with exactly the question the tool expects them to have already answered.
The two products resolve this differently. Semrush matches your domain against a global prompt database and lets you define your own topics and prompts on top of it. Kradeos crawls your website, identifies the topics and capabilities your content actually covers, and generates buyer-intent prompts from that, mapped to your industry, customer types and product features, and classified by buyer stage.
The three tests below compare how each approach handles software visibility prompts, prompt accuracy, and competitor identification.
Evidence from software visibility tests
Three tests we ran on Semrush's AI visibility tool
We ran three tests on Semrush's AI visibility toolkit to examine prompt types, prompt accuracy, and competitor accuracy for software products.
Test 1
What type of prompts are suggested by Semrush?
Test 1 verdict Semrush prompts mostly are keywords.
The test: are the prompts suggested by Semrush useful for understanding AI visibility?
Searching CMMS and facility management software in Semrush's Prompt Research returns 43.6K prompts. Among the top results by relevance:
- computer aided maintenance
- facility works software
- CMMS and Facility Management Software
- top 10 cmms software
- cmms software australia
Those are search queries. They're the terms someone types into Google, and they're genuinely useful for SEO. But nobody opens ChatGPT and types "cmms software australia."
A handful of conversational prompts do appear alongside them, such as "Can you recommend some top-rated facility management software options?" The problem is the mix. A prompt corpus built mostly from keyword data measures your keyword visibility, restated through an AI engine. It doesn't measure how you perform when a maintenance manager describes a problem and asks what to do about it.
What Kradeos returns for Pemac: "Best CMMS for asset tracking," "Integration with ERP systems," "Compliance and regulatory reporting," "Multi-site facility management solution." Each carries the engine that answered it, the buyer stage it belongs to, whether Pemac was mentioned, and which competitors appeared in that specific answer.
Test 2
How specific are Semrush's prompts for software buyers and software vendors?
Test 2 verdict Semrush global database is for multiple industries so its accuracy is 40% at best. Prompts from Kradeos are 70% to 90% more accurate than Semrush.
The test: how accurate are Semrush's prompts for software buyers?
We asked Semrush for the prompts tracked for Pemac, a niche CMMS software product
Semrush maintains a global prompt database and matches your domain against it. For Pemac, that surfaced 28 tracked prompts, including:
- asset management courses
- What are the best online courses for asset management certification?
- Contractor and Installer Connection Platforms
- Eleco and Elecorp Investment & Business
Three of those four have nothing to do with buying maintenance software. Asset management certification courses are a training product. Contractor connection platforms are a different category entirely. Pemac was marked as "mentioned" on several of them, which inflates a visibility score with prompts that will never produce a customer.
The underlying cause is a matching problem. "Asset management" resolves to the financial sense far more often than the industrial one, because financial asset management dominates the web. A generic database has no way to know which sense applies to your business.
What Kradeos returns for Pemac: every prompt is generated from Pemac's own site and industry, so "Compliance and regulatory reporting" arrives tagged Shortlisting, answered by Gemini, marked Critical for pipeline importance, scoring 54%. "Best CMMS for asset tracking" arrives tagged Awareness, answered by ChatGPT, scoring 18%. Same company, same category, but the prompts describe buying decisions rather than certification courses.
Test 3
Does Semrush identify the right competitors?
Test 3 verdict Semrush recommends competitors based on brand match/domain match and not product competitors so the results are inaccurate by up to 50%. Kradeos recommends competitors with 80% to 97% accuracy.
The test: how correct are the competitors, and how many competitors does Semrush suggest?
Identify Competitors of PEMAC (UK based Niche Software Company)
Semrush automatically suggested four comparison domains:
- caia.org (Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst Association)
- cfainstitute.org (CFA Institute)
- smrp.org (Society for Maintenance and Reliability Professionals)
- theiam.org (Institute of Asset Management)
Two financial certification bodies and two professional associations. None of them sell software. None of them appear on a shortlist alongside a CMMS vendor. Pemac's actual competitors, other maintenance and asset management software products, were not suggested at all.
What Kradeos returns for Pemac: MaintainX at 27.1%, Fiix at 26%, Limble at 23.7%, UpKeep at 22.3%, eMaint at 20.9%, with Pemac at 10.5%. IBM Maximo is flagged as the closest competitor on a 7.3% gap, MaintainX as the biggest mover at +84% over 60 days.
Those are the products Pemac actually loses deals to. The gap to the leader is 17%, which is a number a marketing team can work with, and the trend line shows whether it's closing.
Identify Competitors of ChatGPT
Pemac is a niche business, so we ran the same test where the competitive set is common knowledge.
Semrush suggested four competitors: openai.com, claude.ai, microsoft.com and apple.com.
OpenAI owns ChatGPT, so openai.com is the same company rather than a competitor. Microsoft is OpenAI's largest investor and commercial partner. Apple has an OpenAI partnership for Apple Intelligence. Only claude.ai is a genuine competitor.
The competitors a buyer would actually name, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, Meta AI and DeepSeek, aren't suggested at all.
The scores make the mismatch clearer. Microsoft scores 89 and Apple 78 against ChatGPT's 70, which is what happens when a single product is measured against two of the largest companies in the world. The comparison is measuring corporate scale, not competitive position.
The recommendation that follows is the tell. Semrush's Competitor Insights panel advises ChatGPT to create content about NFL and College Football schedules and scores, on the basis that it could grow its audience by 11.5%. The report also marks 4,059,447 of 4,136,986 topics as missing.
This isn't a problem with obscure verticals. It happens with the most recognisable AI product in the world, for the same reason it happened with the CMMS vendor: topics ranked by search volume, and competitors matched on domain similarity rather than on what a buyer would actually shortlist.
Competitor accuracy across both tests
| Semrush | Kradeos | |
|---|---|---|
| Identify Competitors of PEMAC (UK based Niche Software Company) | 0/4 (no direct competitors suggested) | 5/5 (all direct CMMS competitors) |
| Identify Competitors of ChatGPT | 1/4 (only Claude was correct) | 4/4 (Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok) |
| Competitors identified | 4 by default | 20 tracked, top five shown by default |
A focused product at a focused price
Semrush vs Kradeos pricing
Kradeos starts at $65 per month for 50 prompts. Semrush's AI visibility toolkit sits within their broader platform, starting around $199 per month.
The comparison isn't quite like for like, and we'd rather say so. Semrush's price covers a full SEO suite that Kradeos doesn't attempt. If you need that suite, the extra cost buys you a lot. If you need AI visibility specifically, you're paying for a platform to get one part of it.
The practical answer
Which AI visibility tool should software vendors choose?
| Choose Semrush if | Choose Kradeos if |
|---|---|
| If you need strong SEO capabilities, with AI visibility as a bolt-on. | You need to track and improve your AI visibility. |
| You already know which prompts your buyers use. | You don't know which prompts your buyers use, and want them worked out for you. |
| Directional AI monitoring is enough. | You want to improve your AI visibility. |
See the difference for your software product
Find out what AI says about your software.
Get your free AI visibility score and see which buyer prompts matter to your pipeline.