Reading up on Semrush
4 deep · digging since feb 10
- Ask HN: How did you land your first projects as a solo engineer/consultant?
Solo consultants overwhelmingly land their first projects through former colleagues and professional network referrals, not cold outreach or content marketing.
- Reddit says 80 million people now use its search weekly
Reddit reported 80 million weekly search users after merging its core search with AI-powered Reddit Answers, positioning itself as an end-to-end discovery engine.
Takes
Semrush charges $139.95/month. Ahrefs charges $129/month. A guy named Ben built the open-source alternative that you can run on your computer. It is called OpenSEO. Enter a competitor's website and it reveals the keywords bringing them traffic, the pages winning those searches, and the backlinks helping them rank. And enter your own site and it tracks rankings, crawls technical problems, reads Search Console, and shows whether ChatGPT or Google AI Overviews mention your brand. Then connect Claude or Codex. Your agent can pull the real numbers, compare opportunities, cluster keywords, and save a strategy back into the dashboard instead of guessing from a prompt. The hosted version starts at $10 a month. The entire codebase is MIT licensed, so you can also self-host it and pay DataForSEO directly for only the data you use. No, it does not magically reproduce every database and advanced feature Ahrefs built over a decade. But it breaks the most important rule of the old SEO market: You no longer need their permission to own the tool.
@ihteshamali
Introducing OpenSEO, the open source alternative to Semrush and Ahrefs. I started building it out of spite because the existing tools were too expensive, bloated or scammy. Since then, we've gotten 4k stars on Github and are launching on Product Hunt today. Hope you support!
@bensenescu