Semrush Advertising Research, the one thing Ahrefs cannot do

If you are choosing between Semrush and Ahrefs, this is the module that decides it. Everything else in both platforms is a matter of degree. This one has no real equivalent.

And most people who pay for it never open it, because it sits under Advertising and they came for SEO.

Paid copy is the most honest document a competitor publishes

Their blog is what they wish were true. Their homepage went through six rounds of committee. Their ad copy is thirty characters that somebody paid real money to test against a live audience, and kept running because it worked.

That makes Advertising Research a shortcut past your own positioning guesswork. You get, per competitor: the keywords they bid on, the actual headlines and descriptions, the landing page each ad points to, and how all of that has shifted over time.

Three things to do with that, none of which need a PPC budget:

Steal the promise, not the phrasing. If three competitors all lead with a time saving rather than a feature, that’s a tested finding about your shared audience. Put it in your title tags and your first sentence.

Read the landing pages. Where they send paid traffic is where they believe conversion happens. That tells you which page type deserves your effort, and it is frequently not the one you assumed.

Watch what they stop bidding on. A keyword a competitor abandons after months of spending is a keyword that did not pay back. That’s a negative result somebody else funded, and it’s the cheapest research on this page.

The money is modelled, the copy is not

Worth separating clearly, because the interface presents both at the same confidence.

Observations, reliable. Which keywords they bid on. What the ad said. Which page it pointed at. When it started and stopped. Semrush saw these things.

Estimates, treat with suspicion. Spend, traffic from ads, cost per click. All inferred from observed appearances and modelled click costs. In the recording the tool reports a domain’s paid keyword count, estimated traffic and estimated cost together, and only the first of those three is counted rather than calculated.

So use the spend figure to answer “are they spending a lot or a little”, never to answer “what is their budget”. Anyone quoting a competitor’s exact ad spend from this tool is quoting a model.

Three tools, one workflow

Advertising Research is the front door. Two others finish the job.

PLA Research does the same thing for Google Shopping: which products competitors advertise, which queries surface them, how the strategy shifts. Only relevant if you sell products, and completely relevant if you do.

The PPC Keyword Tool is where research becomes structure. It turns a flat keyword list into campaigns and keyword groups, with negatives, which is the difference between a spreadsheet and something you can actually launch.

Ads History shows who has bid on a term over time. Four minutes of it tells you whether a keyword is contested and stable or contested and churning, which changes how much you should pay to enter.

Why this matters even with no ad budget

Everything above works if you never spend a cent on Google Ads.

You are reading a paid market as free research: which promises convert, which pages convert, which terms were abandoned. Then you build organic pages against the terms your competitors are still paying for, because a keyword somebody has bid on continuously for two years is a keyword that makes money.

That is the argument for keeping Semrush when a cheaper tool would cover your keyword and link work, and it’s why the alternatives question usually resolves back to this one module.