AuditLamp vs Semrush.
Semrush is an all-in-one marketing suite: keyword research, advertising intelligence, content tools, social tools, and a site audit among them. AuditLamp is one tool doing one job: an honest, plain-language audit of whether machines, search engines and AI answer engines, can find, read and cite your site. The fair comparison is scope versus focus.
Breadth, for teams that use it.
If your company runs paid search, tracks large keyword portfolios, plans content calendars and manages social from one login, Semrush's breadth is real value. Its advertising and keyword databases are professional-grade, and no single-purpose tool, ours included, replaces that scope. If several seats in your business live inside those workflows daily, the suite subscription can earn its cost.
Focus, honesty, and a bill you can predict.
One question, answered completely. "Can Google and AI assistants see my site, and what do I fix first?" A scan reads your real site, up to 150 pages free, and grades it against 164 documented checks: crawl access by named AI agent (core.ai_bot_matrix), citability of your actual paragraphs (amp.citable_facts, core.answer_block), structured data checked against the visible page (core.schema_visible_parity), plus the 48-check security, accessibility and privacy Vibe Audit.
Plain language, worst first. Reports are written for the person who owns the site, not the analyst reading dashboards. Every finding names the page, the evidence and the fix, ranked by damage.
Flat pricing, no credit meters. Free whole-site diagnosis with no email wall; $10 once for the export pack you keep; $29 a month to watch one site; $99 for five. Credit-based suite pricing is a well-documented frustration in the SEO community; our notes live in the learn library: on suite pricing and on flat pricing.
Fetched, not estimated. We audit the site you actually serve: real robots.txt, real headers, real TLS, real DNS. Where suite tools estimate from sampled indexes, our report states what was fetched and when, and our authority index formula is disclosed.
Buy scope if you use scope. Buy the answer if you need the answer.
A marketing team living in ads and content workflows should keep its suite. An owner or small team that opens a suite once a month to squint at a site-health widget is paying for scope they do not use; the free scan plus a flat $29 Monitor covers the actual need. Agencies often run both: suite for research, AuditLamp for the client-facing diagnosis and before/after proof.