SEMrush API: Automating Site Audits, Keyword Research, and Competitive Intelligence in 2025

SEMrush provides a comprehensive API suite that complements its web-based SEO toolkit. The SEMrush API (Project API) and the SEMrush App Center give developers programmatic access to site audit results, keyword analytics, position tracking data, and competitive research. For SEO teams already using SEMrush for manual analysis, the API unlocks automation that reduces repetitive reporting work and surfaces data in the tools your engineering team already uses.

The SEMrush Project API exposes data from projects you create in the SEMrush web interface. Key endpoints include:

Site Audit. The site_audit endpoint returns the latest crawl results for a project, including issue counts by type and severity, crawl status information, and a list of affected URLs for each issue. Pull this data after each scheduled crawl to track technical debt trends over time. The response includes issue categories such as crawlability, indexability, Core Web Vitals, and HTTPS (SEMrush, 2025, "Project API: Site Audit").

Position Tracking. The position_tracking endpoint returns keyword ranking data for campaigns configured in SEMrush. You can filter by date range, device, location, and domain. The response includes rank position, SERP features detected (featured snippets, knowledge panels, video carousels), and estimated traffic for each keyword. Use this data to build a rank tracking dashboard that updates automatically without manual CSV exports (SEMrush, 2025, "Project API: Position Tracking").

On-Page SEO Checker. The on_page_seo endpoint returns optimization recommendations for specific URLs, including missing meta tags, schema markup gaps, content length comparisons, and internal linking suggestions. Automating this check for your top organic landing pages weekly surfaces content optimization opportunities before they impact rankings.

The SEMrush API uses OAuth 2.0 for authentication. Register an application in the SEMrush Developer Portal to obtain client ID and client secret. The authorization code flow is required for production applications. For server-to-server pipelines, use the refresh token grant to maintain long-lived access without user interaction (SEMrush, 2025, "SEMrush API Authentication Guide").

Rate limits depend on your plan tier. Business plan accounts receive 500 requests per minute. Guru and Pro plans have lower limits. Implement a queue with backoff handling for multi-minute automation runs. The API returns standard HTTP status codes including 429 for rate limit exceeded, with a Retry-After header specifying the cooldown period in seconds.

The SEMrush API supports competitive analysis through several domain-level endpoints that do not require a project to be created first. The domain_organic endpoint returns top organic keywords for any domain with estimated traffic, position, and URL. The domain_backlinks endpoint returns referring domains and total backlink counts. The domain_competitors endpoint identifies domains competing for the same keywords and ranks them by competitive relevance (SEMrush, 2025, "SEMrush API: Domain Analytics").

Automate a weekly competitive intelligence report by querying these endpoints for your domain and up to five competitors. Track changes in keyword overlap, backlink velocity, and estimated traffic share. Store the data in a time-series database and build a dashboard showing competitive position changes over the trailing 12 weeks. When a competitor gains significant keyword share, investigate their newly ranking pages through the API to identify their content strategy.

The SEMrush API returns JSON responses by default. For high-volume data extraction, paginate results using the offset and limit parameters. The API supports CSV export for some endpoints, which can reduce response size for large backlink datasets. Archive raw API responses in object storage before transformation to enable replay and schema evolution.

Integrate SEMrush data into your monitoring stack by connecting the API to a serverless function that runs on a cron trigger. Use SEMrush site audit data to populate a "technical health score" metric in your Grafana dashboard, and configure alerts when the score drops below a configurable threshold.

The SEMrush API enables automation of site audits, rank tracking, and competitive analysis. Start by pulling site audit results into your data warehouse daily to track technical issue resolution. Set up position tracking monitoring for your top 500 keywords with weekly snapshots. Run competitive intelligence queries monthly to track market share changes. Integrating SEMrush API data with GSC and GA4 data gives your SEO pipeline complete coverage across technical health, search performance, and competitive positioning.

SEMrush. (2025). "Project API: Site Audit." SEMrush API Documentation. https://www.semrush.com/api/documentation/project-api/site-audit/

SEMrush. (2025). "Project API: Position Tracking." SEMrush API Documentation. https://www.semrush.com/api/documentation/project-api/position-tracking/

SEMrush. (2025). "SEMrush API Authentication Guide." SEMrush Developer Portal. https://developer.semrush.com/

SEMrush. (2025). "SEMrush API: Domain Analytics." SEMrush API Documentation. https://www.semrush.com/api/documentation/domain-analytics/