Semrush Academy is what happens when a tool company decides that teaching people the discipline is cheaper customer acquisition than advertising, and it works because the teaching is mostly honest. The catalogue runs to a few dozen courses across SEO, content marketing, analytics, ecommerce, paid advertising and social, each broken into short lessons with a quiz at the end and a certificate if you pass. Getting Started with Semrush runs twenty one lessons in about an hour. Keyword Research Essentials is twenty four lessons, also about an hour.
On-Page SEO and AI Search Essentials is twenty three. None of it will eat your weekend. The interesting development is the AI block. AI Search Operating System is nine lessons in forty minutes and the AI PR Toolkit Crash Course is nine lessons in twenty seven, and they are dealing with the question that every marketing team is currently asking badly, which is what happens to your traffic when the answer appears above the results and nobody clicks.
This is genuinely new territory and structured teaching on it is scarce. Semrush has an obvious commercial interest in you believing that AI visibility is a measurable thing you should buy tools to measure, and you should hold that in mind, but the underlying observations about how models select and cite sources are sound and the material is more concrete than the average conference talk on the same subject. Where it gets thinner is the split between teaching a skill and teaching a product. A course called Keyword Research Essentials with Semrush is, in fairness, honestly named.
Perhaps half of it is keyword research as a discipline and the rest is which panel to click. If you do not use Semrush, that half is wasted, and if you do, you probably wanted the discipline half anyway. The older SEO courses have the opposite problem, having been recorded when the advice was current and left up since without a visible date on the front. Some of the link building and technical guidance is several algorithm generations behind, and nothing on the interface tells you which is which.
The certificates are free, which tells you what they are worth. I have never seen a Semrush Academy certificate change a hiring decision and I do not expect to. That is not a criticism of the teaching, it is a comment on what free credentials signal, and anybody selling you the idea that a badge from a tool vendor demonstrates expertise is selling something. Take the courses for the content and put the badge on LinkedIn if you like collecting them.
The webinars sitting alongside the courses are a mixed bag. Some are excellent working sessions with real screens and real data. Others are product launches with a learning label on them. There is no reliable way to tell in advance which you are getting, which is annoying when your time is the scarce resource.
Three point eight. The AI search material alone justifies the time, the core SEO teaching is solid where it is current, and the whole thing costs nothing. Marked down for the product training that masquerades as skills training and for leaving stale courses up without dating them.