Tilly vs Semrush

Semrush tells you what people search for and what is broken on your site. It does not write or publish anything.

Pick Semrush if you or an agency already write and need deep data. Pick Tilly if the posts never get written. Tilly reads your product pages, reviews and customer questions, picks the searches your buyers make, writes the posts in your voice and publishes them to your Shopify blog when you approve. It writes your title, description and alt text fixes and checks every week whether AI assistants recommend you, for $79 a month against Semrush's $139. Try the free audit: paste your store URL and see in about a minute what Tilly would fix first.

Semrush is an SEO research platform: keyword research, site audits, rank tracking and competitor insight. source, checked 25 September 2026

You research keywords and competitors, audit your site and track your positions, then do the writing and fixing yourself or with a team. Its higher plans add AI search tracking. The SEO plan monitors 5 websites and 500 keywords, and a free plan gives 1 demo project and 10 reports a day.

Each app’s cells come from its own Shopify listing or pricing page, linked beside the words. “Not listed” means we did not find it there, not that the app cannot do it. Tilly’s column is our own product.

Semrush does not have a Shopify App Store listing we could read, so its column comes from its own pricing page only. Prices shown are the monthly-billing figures Semrush publishes; annual billing is lower.

Semrush's pricing page lists a free plan with 1 demo project and 10 reports a day, then paid SEO plans billed monthly at $139 for the SEO plan, $199 for Starter, $299 for Pro+ and $549 for Advanced, with the latter three bundling its AI search tracking. The SEO plan monitors 5 websites and tracks 500 keywords.

Tilly does not price by sites or keywords. After 100 free credits, the Store plan is $49 a month for 500 credits; a blog post with its cover image costs 15 credits and the SEO audit is free. On the Store plan that is enough credits for a post a week with plenty left for email.

The two bills buy different things, so the useful comparison is not $139 against $49. It is whether you would rather pay for data and write yourself, or pay for writing and publishing and accept less data.

The last table prices the same store on both. Semrush and Alli AI do not write the posts: they research and fix, and the writing stays with you or a writer. Surfer helps you write and optimise; Enrich Labs and Tilly write the posts themselves. Surfer’s prices are billed yearly.

Semrush's strengths come first. On research, it is in a different league from what Tilly offers. source, checked 25 September 2026

• Research depth. Semrush's plans include keyword research and optimisation tools and competitor insight tools; Tilly's research is focused on one store's own customers and does not replace a research suite.
• Tracking at scale. The SEO plan tracks 500 keywords across 5 websites, and Pro+ raises that to 1,500 keywords across 15 sites with historical data, which suits agencies and multi-brand teams.
• Site Audit and Position Tracking are included in its SEO plan, so finding what is broken and watching rankings move sit in the same account as the research.
• AI search visibility reporting is built into its SEO and AI search plans, so you can see how a brand appears in AI answers as well as in Google.

Tilly writes and publishes. The SEO agent picks one keyword cluster and one persona question, outlines from what the top results cover and what they miss, writes the post in your voice with links to the right products and to your other posts, makes a cover image in your brand's style, adds article and FAQ schema, and publishes to your Shopify blog when you approve it.

It learns from your own results. Every night it reads what each email, ad, post and page change earned, keeps the patterns your numbers back up, and writes the next piece with them, so a winning ad angle can become an email subject line and a product-page headline. Semrush shows where you rank; Tilly learns which posts bring buyers and writes the next post, email and ad around the same questions. (How the loop works.)

Two more things sit in the same place: Tilly asks AI assistants the questions your buyers ask and shows whether they name your store or a competitor (more on AI search), and it keeps a record of every edit to your theme, products, pages and menus, so a change in sales can be read against what changed.

Its keywords start with your customers. Instead of a list sorted by volume, Tilly groups searches by the questions your personas ask, found from your reviews and store. A skincare store's cautious first-timer and its ingredient reader search differently, and get different posts.

It follows up. Every published post is tracked for impressions, clicks and position, a slipping post gets a refresh suggested, and new posts go to the email calendar so your list hears about them. The technical audit, with a written fix for each finding, costs nothing.

It is one of eight agents on the same brand profile, so the blog, the emails, the ads and the product pages make the same claims in the same voice.

There is little to switch. If you keep Semrush for research, Tilly can write and publish from its own keyword work alongside it; nothing in Semrush needs to move.

If you are dropping Semrush to save money, export the keyword lists and rank history you care about first, because they will not come with you. Connecting Google Search Console to Tilly gives it your real queries and near-miss pages, which covers the most useful part of rank tracking for a single store.

Start with the free SEO audit on your store, read the fixes it proposes, then approve one post and watch how it is tracked before deciding how many to publish.

Give it a month before judging. A new post takes time to be indexed and to settle in the results, so compare impressions and clicks for Tilly's posts after a few weeks, in Search Console, not on the day they go live.