Subscription trap / hidden billing
Official Semrush marketing platform with 17-year-old domain but repeated complaints about hidden subscription charges and refund blocks. A "free trial" or "$1 trial" combined with auto-renew language means your card will be charged repeatedly. Call your bank to block the merchant if you signed up.
Is semrush.com legit or a scam?
Official Semrush marketing platform with 17-year-old domain but repeated complaints about hidden subscription charges and refund blocks.
These checks passed — but they don't clear the site. A clean antivirus result, valid SSL, and a calm server only mean it isn't hosting malware; they say nothing about whether the business is real. This verdict is based on the site's conduct and content, not a malware detection.
Analysis Summary
MT Intelligence
The domain is over 17 years old and belongs to a publicly traded US company with active business registration. Our antivirus network returned only a single flag while browser blocklists stayed clean. The page itself triggered a subscription-trap pattern because of missing contact details and reports of auto-renewal issues. Evidence from independent review aggregator, Reddit, and BBB shows dozens of complaints focused on billing practices rather than outright fraud. Positive independent reviews confirm the tool works for many users, yet the volume of billing disputes lowers overall trust.
Website Preview
Automated page render — captured in a safe sandbox. What an ordinary visitor would see when loading the site. See full visual analysis →
Visual Screenshot Analysis
We capture a fresh screenshot of the live page and ask a vision model to look for scam visual patterns — fake trust badges, countdown timers, overlay pop-ups, and visual clones of legitimate brands.
Visual red flags detected in the screenshot
We could not capture a fully-rendered screenshot of this page; visual analysis is inconclusive.
What our vision model saw
1 signalScreenshot incomplete — site may be slow to render
Brand Impersonation
medium confidenceThe page mentions or styles itself as Capital One, but is hosted on a domain that is not an official Capital One property.
Web Research Findings
Our live research agent queries scam-report databases, consumer-review sites, news coverage, and general web search for semrush.com, then cross-checks business-registration records and look-alike domain patterns. Everything below is pulled from what it actually found.
- - semrush.com is the official site of Semrush Holdings, Inc., a US public SaaS company offering SEO, PPC, and visibility tools (domain age ~17+ years).
- - BBB lists 55 complaints in the last 3 years, primarily about unauthorized charges, auto-renewals after trials, and denied refunds.
- - Trustpilot and Reddit users report 'subscription trap' issues with tricky trial-to-paid flows and refund refusals (multiple 2026 posts).
- - Malwarebytes (Mar 2025) documented phishing campaigns impersonating Semrush via malicious Google Ads to steal Google account credentials.
- - Positive reviews on independent sites praise it as a comprehensive (if expensive) marketing tool with strong data features.
- - Company recently acquired by Adobe (announced/completed ~2025-2026 per official site and news).
- Trustpilotopen
"Scam company using tricky flow for subscription trial. Edit: I was charged and I'm unable to get a refund for a service that I didn't use."
- Redditopen
"WARNING! SEMRUSH ARE DELIBERATE SCAMMERS THAT STEAL YOUR MONEY !!! ... I've reached out to them through email, Twitter, and even their support chat ..."
- BBBopen
"I am filing this complaint against Semrush for deceptive billing and refusal to honor their refund policy. On April 8, 2026, my 7-day free trial converted to a paid subscription, and I was immediately charged $216.91."
- Location Rebelopen
"Semrush is 100% worth the price. It's not cheap with their basic plan coming in at $99/month, but if you have a monetized site, and you actually use the service I have no doubt you’d be able to make far more than $1200 from it after using i"
- Style Factoryopen
"Semrush is an excellent tool which, while expensive, offers a lot of value for money."
Semrush Holdings, Inc. is a publicly traded American company; recently acquired by Adobe.
Our research found three scam-related reports on independent review aggregator, Reddit, and BBB describing deceptive trial conversions and refund refusals. Fifty-five complaints appear on BBB in the last three years, mostly about billing. Two independent review sites published positive assessments of the platform's features and data quality. The company maintains active US business registration and was recently acquired by Adobe.
Antivirus Engines
Security Scans
Checked against the major public blocklists used by browsers and security tools — no hits.
Contact Verification
We fetched the page and looked for real-world contact details. Legitimate businesses almost always publish an email on their own domain, a phone number, and a postal address. Scam shops usually don't.
- No contact email found anywhere on the page.
- No phone number listed on the page.
- No postal address visible on the page.
- Page impersonates Capital One on a non-official domain.
- Scam family match: Subscription Trap.
- Links to 9 social profiles.
Domain & Encryption
Redirect Chain
- 1301http://semrush.com/
- 2200https://www.semrush.com/cross-domain
Server Reputation
Scam-Type Likelihood
2 scam-type patterns detected
0 of 13 categories showed signals
We check every URL against 13 distinct scam categories so the verdict tells you not just how risky the page is, but what kind of risk it carries. Each meter pulls from page signals, web reports, our AI analyst, vision, and the scam-network cluster — not from raw AV labels.
- Free-trial / $1-trial pitch combined with auto-renew / rebill language.
- Primary scraped category: subscription trap / negative-option billing.
- AI analyst tagged this as a subscription trap.
- Page mentions Capital One (non-official domain).
0 of 13 categories showed signals
We check every URL against 13 distinct scam categories so the verdict tells you not just how risky the page is, but what kind of risk it carries. Each meter pulls from page signals, web reports, our AI analyst, vision, and the scam-network cluster — not from raw AV labels.
- Free-trial / $1-trial pitch combined with auto-renew / rebill language.
- Primary scraped category: subscription trap / negative-option billing.
- AI analyst tagged this as a subscription trap.
- Page mentions Capital One (non-official domain).
Subscription trap / negative-option billing
This page combines a "free trial" or "$1 trial" pitch with auto-renew / rebill language — a classic negative-option billing trap.
- Do not interact with semrush.com
Do not enter credentials, deposit money, download files, or install browser extensions from this site.
- Your card will be charged the full price after the trial
Most subscription traps bill the full amount ($49-$149) 14 days after sign-up, and every month thereafter. "Cancel anytime" often means you must call a foreign support line that's deliberately hard to reach.
- If you already signed up — call your bank today
Ask your bank to block future charges from the merchant and dispute any charges already made. Many banks will issue a new card number to prevent recurring billing. Save the confirmation email as evidence.
- OpenReport the billing scheme
Report to the FTC (reportfraud.ftc.gov) or your national consumer-protection body — subscription traps are specifically illegal in most jurisdictions when the auto-bill terms aren't clearly disclosed.
Trust History
Reputation Sources
How this domain rates across independent threat-intelligence and blocklist providers.
Referenced Domains
Outbound domains this page links to or loads resources from. Each links to its own security scan.
Safety FAQ
Common questions about this site, answered from the scan data on this page. These are auto-generated — not hand-written — so they always match the underlying report.
- Our automated security review flags semrush.com as dangerous. Multiple threat indicators were detected — treat the site as a scam until proven otherwise.
- No — semrush.com scored 25/100 on our trust scale. We detected active threat indicators, so we recommend avoiding the site entirely.
- Yes. semrush.com presents a valid TLSv1.3 certificate issued by Google Trust Services · WR3, expiring in 80 days. Note that SSL only encrypts the connection — it does not guarantee that the site itself is trustworthy.
- semrush.com is 17.7 years old, registered on 10/3/2008 through MarkMonitor Inc.. Scam domains are often freshly registered — a site under 6 months old warrants extra caution.
- 1 out of 92 antivirus engines in our malware network flagged semrush.com as malicious or suspicious (1 outright malicious). Even one detection is a meaningful signal.
- No. semrush.com is not currently listed on the major browser blocklist feeds that modern browsers use.
- semrush.com resolves to an IP operated by Google LLC in US (usage type: Content Delivery Network). Hosting location alone doesn't make a site good or bad, but unusual geography for a brand's claimed country is one of many signals we weigh.
- We cache results for 24 hours. Signed-in MalwareTips members can trigger a manual rescan at any time using the "Rescan" button on the report page, which re-runs every check from scratch and refreshes this page.
User reviews & comments(0)
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