Semrush increased number of customers by 15% in 2022 – up to 95,000

Posted on March 17, 2023 | Luke Glassford |

SEO tool Semrush has announced that it finished 2022 with a total of 95,000 paying subscribers - up from 82,000 in 2021 - as it revealed strong results for the past year.

The rise in the number of customers lead to a yearly revenue increase of 35% in 2022 to $254.3 million, up from $188.0 million in 2021.

Although Semrush made a loss of $33.8 million in 2022, it announced it expects to break even or make a small profit in 2023 on the back of these promising numbers.

As well as adding 13,000 more customers and ending 2022 with 95,000 paying customers (up from 82,000 in 2021), Semrush also announced that the number of customers who pay over $10,000 per year increased by more than 50% year-on-year.

They also reported that the platform has more than 800,000 active users of its free SEO tools and saw "record levels of new customer registrations and trials" last year.

Why these results are important

These promising financial results from Semrush show that the demand for SEO, and SEO tools, remains strong and continues to grow - despite the ever-changing digital marketing landscape and the emergence of potentially disruptive tech like ChatGPT.

On the subject of generative AI, Bing Chat and Google Bard, Semrush said that they expect only 'minor fine tuning' will be needed for their customers to be found in chat-based search - likening 'AI optimisation' to the current practice of optimising for Featured Snippets.

Here's what Semrush president Eugene Levin said in response to an analyst's question during their earnings call:

"The outputs of (chat-interface search) are actually very similar to what happens if you try to produce (a) featured snippet based on a couple of top articles.

"So from a technical point of view, optimising for this is very similar to optimising for featured snippets, which [we have helped] people to do for a very long time. And actually, we’ve seen a lot of demand for those features and support of our tracking feature snippets, as well as proactive recommendations about how people can… be mentioned in those features snippets."

To see Semrush's 2022 results in full, visit: https://investors.semrush.com/news/news-details/2023/Semrush-Announces-Fourth-Quarter-and-Full-Year-2022-Financial-Results/default.aspx

Read our independent Semrush review.

About the Author

Luke Glassford is an SEO expert with over 15 years’ experience.

During his time working in SEO, Luke has set-up an SEO agency, worked as an in-house SEO for a major national company and managed his own successful SEO consultancy - using a lot of different SEO tools along the way!

Follow Luke on Twitter

Follow Luke on LinkedIn