Noma vs Semrush
A tool built only for AI search visibility, against the same capability inside a full SEO suite. What each one tracks, what it costs, and when buying both is the right answer.
- Semrush tracks AI search on every plan, so this is a real overlap and not a category difference. Their pricing page includes AI search tracking on all four tiers across Google Search, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and more. Anyone telling you their AI features are a thin bolt-on has not looked recently, and this page does not say it.
- The differences are the engine list, the prompt allowance and the citation source. Noma names all five engines it covers, including Claude and Grok, polls them daily and records which page each engine cited. Semrush publishes four engines plus “and more”, meters prompts at 50, 100 and 200 a day by tier, and does not publish whether it records the source page.
- Seats are the other practical difference. Noma includes unlimited seats on every plan. Semrush publishes additional users from $45 a month, so the cost of letting content, SEO, brand and leadership all see the data scales with the size of the team.
- For many teams the right answer is both, and that is not a cop-out. Semrush at $117.33 a month is an entire SEO suite, and Noma is not one — no keyword research, no backlink index, no site auditor, no rank tracker. If AI visibility is a checkbox for you, the tracking inside Semrush is probably enough. If it is the problem you are trying to solve, a tool built only for it goes deeper.
One feature of a suite, or a tool built for the job
When someone asks an assistant for a recommendation in your category, the answer names two or three brands and stops. There is no second page and usually no click. Measuring that is a different job from rank tracking, and two kinds of product now do it: tools built only for AI search visibility, and SEO suites that have added it alongside everything else.
Noma is the first kind and Semrush is the second, which makes this a more interesting comparison than the usual one. It is not whether Semrush covers AI search — it does, on every published plan, and pretending otherwise would be false and easy to check. It is whether AI visibility as one feature of a large suite goes deep enough for what you are trying to do.
What follows uses Semrush’s published pricing page as checked on the date above, and says so plainly wherever their documentation does not state something. It also spends time on what Noma does not do, because Semrush is an entire SEO platform and Noma is not one, and that matters more to the decision than any feature row.
What to look for in an AI visibility tool
Four questions separate tools that change what a team does from tools that add a dashboard. They are worth asking of both products below, and of whatever you are using today.
Engine coverage and cadence
A tool that watches four engines cannot tell you about the fifth, and an infrequent reading cannot separate a real shift from noise. Ask which engines are covered and how often each is polled before anything else.
Mentions versus citations
Knowing you were mentioned is a score. Knowing which page the engine drew on is a task list. If a marketplace listing is cited instead of your own product page, that is a fixable problem you cannot see from mention counts alone.
Prompts, not keywords
Nobody types "best sunscreen oily skin india" into an assistant; they ask a question. A prompt set assembled from real customer questions gives a different — and more honest — visibility picture than one derived from a keyword export.
Recommendations you can action
Most tools in this category are good at telling you that you are absent. The useful ones tell you why, and rank the fixes by expected impact so a content team knows what to write first.
Noma vs Semrush, feature by feature
| Capability | Noma | Semrush |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A tool built only for AI search visibility | An SEO suite that includes AI search tracking |
| Entry price | 14-day free trial, no card; paid plans after | $117.33/month on the SEO plan, billed annually |
| Top published tier | Custom | $455.67/month on Advanced, billed annually |
| AI engines named | Five — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Grok | Google Search, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini “and more” — full list not published |
| Prompt allowance | Not metered by plan | 50/day Starter, 100/day Pro+, 200/day Advanced |
| Polling cadence | Daily | Daily, within the plan’s prompt allowance |
| Citation source tracking | Records which page each engine cited | Not published |
| Share of voice | Measured per prompt against named competitors | Not published |
| Extra team seats | Unlimited, included | Additional users from $45/month |
| Keyword research, backlinks, site audit, rank tracking | Not offered, and not planned | The core product |
| Creator marketing | Included via Nia — free, 10M+ profiles | Not offered |
| Paid media analysis | Included via Pulse — Google and Meta Ads | Not published on the pricing page |
Rows come from Semrush’s public pricing and product pages as checked at publication. “Not published” means their documentation does not state a position, not that the answer is bad. “Not offered” means outside the product’s stated scope, and a row saying so is a note about what each one sets out to do rather than a criticism.
Where Noma fits
Noma runs your category prompts against ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Grok on a schedule and records whether your brand is named in the answer each one generates. Five engines, polled daily — the fifth being Grok, which most tools in this category do not cover.
Being mentioned is only half the reading. When an engine cites a page, Noma records which page: your own site, a marketplace listing, a review roundup, or a competitor’s blog. That is the difference between knowing you are invisible and knowing what to do about it. Alongside the mention it captures the wording used to describe you, because being named as a budget option is a different outcome to being named as the category leader.
Share of voice is measured per prompt rather than as one site-wide number, because visibility is never uniform across a category — most brands are strong on a handful of questions and absent on the rest. The prompt set is built from questions customers actually ask rather than from a keyword list, and the recommendations that come back are ranked by expected impact: the pages to write, the wording to fix, the structured data to add.
Noma also sits on one platform with Nia for creator marketing and Pulse for paid media, so AI visibility can be read next to the channels competing with it for budget. Whether that matters depends entirely on whether you have those problems too.
What Noma actually measures
The rest of the platform: Noma for AI search visibility, Nia for creator marketing and attribution, Pulse for Google and Meta Ads — or how the three apply in your category.
Where Semrush fits
Semrush is the better product for the job it was built for, and it is not close. Two decades of keyword and backlink data, a site auditor, rank tracking, competitive research, and a market full of people who already know how to use all of it. Noma offers none of that and is not trying to. Their AI search tracking is genuinely included rather than gated behind an upgrade, from $117.33 a month on the entry plan, so a team already paying them gets a reasonable view of AI answers at no extra cost. For a lot of teams that is the correct amount of AI visibility to buy.
What it does not cover
- Prompt tracking is metered by tier at 50, 100 and 200 a day, so how much of your category you can watch is a function of your plan rather than of the category.
- The full engine list is not published beyond Google Search, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, so whether Claude and Grok are covered cannot be confirmed before buying.
- Whether the source page behind a citation is recorded is not published, and that is the difference between a visibility score and a list of pages to fix.
- Share of voice per prompt against named competitors is not published, so it is unclear whether visibility can be read question by question rather than as one number.
- Additional users start at $45 a month, so the cost of giving content, SEO, brand and leadership the same view scales with the team.
Which one your team actually needs
Category presence, before it is gone
AI answers name two or three brands and stop. There is no tenth position to occupy and no long tail to fall back on — you are in the answer or you are not in the consideration set at all. The number worth reporting upward is share of voice across the questions customers actually ask, tracked over time, because it moves slowly and then all at once.
A discipline that diverges from ranking
AEO shares fundamentals with SEO — crawlability, structured data, credible sources — then parts company on what counts as success. A page can rank third for a keyword and never be named by an engine answering the same question. Measuring the two with one tool produces a confident answer to the wrong question.
What to write, in what order
Citation source data turns AEO from a theory into a queue. If engines are quoting a review roundup for your category, the work is getting into that roundup. If they are quoting a competitor’s comparison page, the work is writing a better one. Both are concrete; a visibility score is not.
The cost of finding out
For a brand that has not yet established whether AI search matters in its category, the first question is what it costs to find out. A trial that needs no card answers that in a fortnight. A monthly commitment answers it in a procurement cycle.
What a rollout looks like
AI visibility is not a switch. This is the sequence that gets a team from “we think we are missing from these answers” to a trend a content team can work against.
Phase 1 — Baseline
Week 1–2- Build the prompt set
Start from the questions customers ask in your category rather than from a keyword export. Twenty good prompts beat two hundred derived ones.
- Name the competitors you care about
Share of voice is only meaningful against a defined set. Pick the brands you actually lose to.
- Take the first reading
Establish where you appear, where you do not, and which sources engines cite instead of you. This is the number everything after is measured against.
Phase 2 — Fix the sources
Week 3–8- Answer the question in the first two sentences
Engines quote what is quotable. A page that opens with positioning and reaches the answer in paragraph six will not be cited.
- State facts that can be verified and attributed
Add the structured data that lets an engine attribute a claim to your brand rather than to whoever restated it.
- Get into the roundups engines already cite
If a third-party comparison is the source for your category, being absent from it is the whole problem. That is outreach work, not on-page work.
Phase 3 — Hold and widen
Ongoing- Read the trend weekly, not daily
Answers move as models and their sources update. Weekly is enough to tell a shift from noise in most categories.
- Widen the prompt set as the category moves
New questions appear. A prompt set fixed at launch slowly stops describing the category it was built for.
- Judge it against the rest of the budget
Nia for creator and Pulse for paid sit on the same platform, so AI visibility can be read next to the channels competing with it for spend.
The verdict
If AI search visibility is one of several things you track and you already pay for Semrush, the tracking inside it is probably the right amount of tool and this page is not going to argue you out of it. If it is the problem you are actually trying to solve, the differences start to matter: five named engines rather than four plus “and more”, no prompt ceiling tied to your plan, the source page behind each citation, share of voice question by question, and a seat for everyone who needs one. And if you need keyword research or a site audit, Noma does not do those and Semrush is not the thing you replace. Running both is a normal answer here.
Choose Noma if
- AI search visibility is the problem you are solving, not a checkbox
- You want the engine list stated up front, including Claude and Grok
- A prompt ceiling tied to your plan would cut off part of your category
- You need the page behind each citation, not only a mention count
- Content, SEO, brand and leadership all need access without paying per seat
Choose Semrush if
- You need keyword research, backlinks, site audits or rank tracking, which Noma does not do
- You already pay for Semrush and its included AI tracking covers your needs
- A prompt allowance of 50 to 200 a day is enough for your category
- One vendor for search and AI visibility matters more than depth in either
Common questions
Does Semrush track AI search visibility?
Yes, on all four published plans. Their pricing page lists AI search tracking across Google Search, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and more, with daily prompt allowances of 50 on Starter, 100 on Pro+ and 200 on Advanced. The common claim that their AI features are a thin add-on is out of date, and this page does not make it.
How is Noma different from Semrush’s AI search tracking?
Noma names all five engines it covers — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Grok — polls them daily without a prompt ceiling tied to your plan, records which page each engine cited, and measures share of voice per prompt against competitors you name. Semrush publishes four engines plus "and more", meters prompts by tier, and does not publish whether it records the source page or measures share of voice per prompt. The source page is the difference between knowing you are absent and knowing what to fix.
Can Noma replace Semrush?
Only if AI search visibility was the only thing you used Semrush for. Noma has no keyword research, no backlink index, no site auditor and no rank tracker, and none are planned. If your team relies on those, Semrush is not the thing you replace, and running both is the normal outcome rather than a failure of one of them.
What does each one cost?
Semrush publishes four plans billed annually: SEO at $117.33 a month, Starter at $165.17, Pro+ at $248.17 and Advanced at $455.67, with additional users from $45 a month. Noma has a 14-day trial with no card and paid plans after, with unlimited seats included. The comparison worth making is what a plan covers and who is allowed to use it, not the headline figure.
Why does the prompt allowance matter?
A prompt set is how you describe your category to the tool. Twenty prompts describe a narrow product; a hundred describe a real category with its variations, comparisons and objections. When the allowance is tied to your plan, the completeness of the picture is a budget decision rather than a research one, and the questions you drop are the ones you never find out you were absent from.
Is AI search visibility different from SEO?
They share fundamentals — crawlability, structured data, credible sources — and diverge on what counts as success. SEO measures where a page sits in a ranked list of links. AI search visibility measures whether your brand is named inside a generated answer, where there is no list and often no click. A page can rank third for a keyword and never be mentioned by an engine answering the same question, which is exactly the gap worth watching.
Does Noma have a browser extension?
It is in development. The plan is a Chrome extension that scans ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini pages as you browse and highlights brand mentions in place. It is not shipped, so it is not a reason to choose Noma today and it does not appear in the comparison table above.
What if we also need creator marketing or paid media reporting?
Noma sits on one platform with Nia and Pulse. Nia covers creator discovery, audience-quality vetting, campaign management and first-party conversion attribution across six SDK platforms, and it is free. Pulse reads Google and Meta Ads performance. Semrush does not offer creator marketing at all, so a team needing it would be buying a second product either way.
Semrush is a trademark of its respective owner. Nurdd is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Semrush. Marks and product names are used only to identify the products being compared, and every claim about Semrush was taken from their own public pages on the date shown above.
Other comparisons
Find out whether AI engines name you
Build your prompt set and see your first visibility report inside the trial. Fourteen days, no credit card.