Semrush at 18th Annual Emerging Technology Summit: Expanding Market Horizons

On Wednesday, 05 March 2025, Semrush Holdings (NYSE: SEMR) presented at the 18th Annual Emerging Technology Summit, providing a strategic overview of its growth trajectory and market position. The company highlighted its robust financial performance and ambitious future plans, while also addressing challenges in a competitive landscape.

Key Takeaways

• Semrush achieved over $400 million in annual recurring revenue in 2024, marking a 22% year-over-year increase.
• The company targets a $40 billion total addressable market, significantly up from $13 billion at its IPO in 2021.
• Semrush’s long-term model aims for 85% gross margins, 22% non-GAAP operating margin, and 25% free cash flow margin.
• The company’s diversified customer base includes over 1 million free users and 117,000 paying customers across 150 countries.
• Semrush is investing in AI to enhance product features and improve internal efficiencies.

Financial Results

• Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR): Surpassed $400 million in 2024, a 22% increase from the previous year.
• Non-GAAP Operating Margin: Improved to 11.5% in 2024, up 2,700 basis points since Q4 2022.
• Free Cash Flow Margin: Rose to 9.4% in 2024, with plans for an additional 260 basis points improvement in 2025.
• Cash Reserves: $235 million as of December 31st.
• Growth Rate: Achieved a 34% compound annual growth rate since 2018, with a near-term target of 20% CAGR for 2024-2026.
• Enterprise SEO: Generated $9 million of ARR since its launch in June.

Operational Updates

• Customer Base: Over 1 million free customers and 117,000 paying customers across approximately 150 countries.
• Market Opportunity: Expanded total addressable market to $40 billion, up from $13 billion at IPO.
• AI Integration: 40% of customer interactions are fully automated with AI, enhancing efficiency and product features.
• Go-to-Market Strategy: Expanded sales organization targeting digital marketing leaders and CMOs.
• Data Assets: Customer data sharing has enhanced algorithms, creating a flywheel effect.

Future Outlook

• Growth Target: Aims for a 20% compound annual growth rate in the near term (2024-2026).
• Margin Expansion: Plans to continue free cash flow margin expansion.
• Long-Term Model: Targets 85% gross margins, 22% non-GAAP operating margin, and 25% free cash flow margin.
• Growth Drivers: Focus on increasing paying customers, cross-selling, upselling, and enterprise investments.

Q&A Highlights

• Diversification: Semrush has a well-diversified customer base including enterprises, agencies, mid-market companies, and SMBs.
• Enterprise Opportunity: Positioned to capitalize on the enterprise market, with 8,000 enterprise clients contributing about 20% of ARR.
• PLG Motion: Strong unit economics with payback in less than six months and a 5x return on investment in CAC to LTV.
• SMB Market: Represents 45% of the business, highlighting the importance of solopreneurs and freelancers.

For a detailed understanding of Semrush’s strategic insights and financial performance, refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - 18th Annual Emerging Technology Summit:

Operator: It gives me great pleasure to introduce Brian Mulroy from SEMrush, and he’s going to share a bit about the company and the platform. Brian? All

Brian Mulroy, CFO, Semrush: right. Let’s dive into it. This presentation is a subset of Analyst Day presentation we did on October 1. It took us about two point five hours to go through. I’ll try to do it in two hours, see how it goes, get you guys out of here.

I know I’m going to basically just talk about my favorite topic for about twenty minutes here and give you guys an opportunity to ask some questions. I’m the CFO at Semrush. I’ve been here for two years, was at Microsoft prior to that and at Nuance and was very intrigued by the management team, the founder, Oleg, who’s now our chief technology officer, and the market opportunity and had to be part of it and have been enjoying the ride for the last two years. So I want to get you guys just as excited and up to speed on what we’re all about. So let’s dive into product.

First of all, our product journey has started in 02/2008. We’re a digital marketing SaaS technology company, all recurring revenue, just achieved about $400,000,000 in annual recurring revenue. We started out with a single product focused on search engine optimization. And the reason why we started there is because that’s what marketers were interested in to enhance their online visibility. And over the years, we continue to innovate and respond to the ever evolving digital marketing landscape and the increasing demands and sophistication of marketers to create a fully integrated, interconnected AI powered digital marketing platform that now incorporates, quite a few digital marketing channels.

I want to dive into a few of those. Search engine optimization obviously remains, but we now focus also on paid advertising, social media marketing, brand marketing, content marketing, and local marketing with data and intelligence at the core. And the key focus area for us is, with these channels is to make sure companies can enhance their online visibility and presence and ensure that they’re generating traffic and ultimately converting that traffic into paying customers. The areas we focus on are things that you’re involved in every day. All of us are searching for information, what’s the best car, what’s the best place to live, asking information about different experiences that we’re having in life.

And it’s important for companies to make sure that their content is visible and present in the places where consumers are residing and spending their time. We focus on brand marketing, which is all about improving the perception of your business throughout all the different channels local marketing, which is about optimizing your business inside of all the GPSs. The president of Semrush sitting here, Eugene, and I went to a Japanese restaurant last night. So I was busy searching what’s the best place to go in San Francisco while I’m here for a couple of days. All the GPS maps come on Google Maps, Apple Maps, and it’s important for you to be listed there in addition to having a website.

And in content marketing, about creating the right marketing with the right voice that establishes relevance and authority for your product and your brands. Social media management, of course, just like individuals, everybody wants to be an influencer. Businesses want to go viral just as much as an individual. And it’s important to be present there, to be posting things that are relevant, getting shares and likes and, of course, favorable comments. Our focus is on making sure that companies have data and intelligence and the tools to be able to operate and enhance their visibility across all those digital marketing channels.

In terms of size, we just closed out our 2024. We’re up 22% year over year, just over $400,000,000 in annual recurring revenue, 11.5% non GAAP operating margin, and 9.4% free cash flow margin. Both of those numbers are up significantly. Since the fourth quarter of twenty twenty two, our non GAAP operating margin is up 2,700 basis points, and our free cash flow margin is up 2,500, and we’re committing to another two sixty basis points of free cash flow margin improvement in 2025. Overall cash, very healthy balance sheet that we can put to work for strategic assets.

We have $235,000,000 as of the twelvethirty one. In terms of diversity, our business is very well diversified. We’re not dependent on a high concentration of large customers, a specific geography or industry. We’re well diversified and balanced across a number of different industries, geographies, and company sizes. So we’re pretty much in every industry, have business in about 150 countries, and over a million free customers and 117,000 paying customers, and well diversification across market segments like enterprises, big sophisticated brands, the Fortune 500, all the way down to very small, early businesses that are looking to establish their brand as opposed to enhancing it when they’re early on in their journey.

Our market opportunity is massive. We believe we have a $40,000,000,000 market opportunity. The way we get to this number is we talk about three different segments. We have an enterprise market segment. Those are businesses that are very sophisticated and high reliance on their brands through digital channels, that are willing to spend a lot of money across all the different marketing hubs and digital marketing hubs to make sure they’re successful in that endeavor.

There’s about 90,000 enterprise sized companies out there, and we believe, on average, we can get about 100,000 footprint within those accounts. So about $9,000,000,000 of this TAM is specifically in the enterprise. There’s also tens of millions of small businesses, and they have just as much of an interest to make sure that their brands are found, that their reputation is favorable and that they’re establishing a strong presence and a better presence than their competitors in all these digital marketing channels. There’s tens of millions, so that part of the market segment is about volume but at a little bit lower value. So we believe on average, those SMBs will pay 5,000.

So there’s a significant part of this TAM that’s related to the SMB market. Our TAM has grown significantly from 13,000,000,000 when we first IPOed, now almost four years ago in 2021, to now 40,000,000,000. And there’s a number of reasons why, but there’s two I want to point out. One is we’ve continued to expand our portfolio. That first slide that showed the progression from 02/2008 as we expanded our digital marketing platform, that’s contributed quite a bit and give us given us an opportunity to expand our footprint within all the accounts.

But recently, we’ve invested a lot in enterprise grade features and AI powered features that command a significantly higher price point. Our enterprise SEO product that we just launched in June has a price point that’s about 10 to 15 times what our average ARR per paying customer is and is giving us a significant opportunity to expand our potential. The second piece is we’ve started to evolve, and we’ve been doing this for about two years, our go to market function. Early on, our strategy was very simple. It was about attracting and generating awareness for our brand online, basically practicing what we preached and doing it in an automated way.

That allowed us to grow to 117,000 paying customers almost entirely without a sales organization by doing it digitally through e commerce. Now that we have an expanded portfolio, enterprise grade features, AI based features with a much higher price point. We’re engaging with digital marketing leaders and CMOs with budgets and a need to be able to negotiate a much more sophisticated contract. So we’ve expanded our sales organization, and it’s opened us up to a much more significant TAM as a result. In terms of moat, we believe it’s extensive.

We’re globally diversified with 117,000 customers. Our brand is very well recognized and trusted. Since 2018, we’ve also been investing in our data assets that that allows us to have an enhanced algorithm that’s unmatched in the market, and datasets that now our customers are sharing with us. And we get this flywheel effect that happens where the more data we have, the more accurate our models become, the more our customers trust us, the more customers start to adopt Semrush and then share their data, and it creates an ongoing flywheel that continues to expand our moat. It’s our history and how far back we can go to show different algorithmic algorithm changes that Google and other search engines are making and competitive investments that might be impacting brands that they can go back and assess and understand what happens and what changes they might need to make in the future to make sure that they can stay ahead of that.

So our brand is very strong, with a significant competitive mode as well. In terms of reviews, I’d encourage you to go on to g2.com. We won and continue to win a number of awards and get recognized as one of the top digital marketing tools across a number of those categories that we talked about. We’re a leader there. So let me just spend a second here, ten minutes left, just to go through what exactly we solve.

And I hope this hits home because all of us are engaged in these activities every day. On average, consumers are spending about six and a half hours online through different digital assets. They’re watching videos. They’re reading blogs. They’re spending time on social media.

They’re sharing posts. The amount the volume of data that’s online continues to increase, and the options that are available and the diversity of options continues to expand. And it’s becoming increasingly harder for marketers and brands, to be found and present in those moments when it matters with an opportunity to convert that into a paying customer and revenue. The digital marketing channels have continued to expand. We talked when I first started about websites and search engine optimization being the only thing that matters.

Every year that goes by, there’s something new that increases the complexity and the diversity of what marketers need to focus on. And there’s no it’s no different today with ChatGPT, now sort of disrupting the market and expanding the opportunity for consumers to operate in an entirely new environment that’s changing the way marketers need to be thinking about their online presence. The challenge with all of that is that’s our that’s the foundation, that’s the world that marketers wake up to every single day. And the options for them to solve it are gathering together all of their marketers, these trained professionals, each subscribing independently to tools that they prefer, and it just keeps growing and the complexity and the fragmentation continues to grow. There’s now 14,000 tools available.

So when we talk to CMOs and digital marketing leaders, we say, look, this isn’t ideal. Your options are either to use the simple basic tools that Meta, Google, and other digital marketing providers provide, but they’re biased. They’re only telling you what the specific options you have and the performance within that one particular channel. Your options are to go ahead and subscribe to those 14,000 tools, but it’s going to be incredibly fragmented. That’s a second option.

Or a third thing is build your own thing. Try to bring in the best dataset and workflows that work for your company. And many companies have opted for this last one. What we see is companies spending about $300,000 a year on digital marketing subscriptions and another $700,000 a year on resources, both technical and creative, to be able to create and manage the environment that’s necessary for them to enhance their online visibility. Not ideal.

Semrush is the answer here. We have comprehensive digital marketing platform. It brings together the data and intelligence that you need across all those digital marketing channels, and it provides workflow and reporting and has an it’s all interconnected so leaders can see how things are performing cross channel to make sure that they’re optimizing their investments. Our platform, as we talked about, our strength and our competitive moat is first in our data and intelligence. Before marketers can engage in investing, they need to understand what’s going on, why things are impacting your business.

They need to, in a sense, reverse engineer the algorithms so they can understand what assets their competitors or even their own teams are pushing out there on the web that are influencing, the things that matter online. We have one of the strongest and most comprehensive data and intelligence platforms, and it’s at the core of our platform. We talked about, the flywheel effect. Hang on. Let me go back one here.

Then surrounding that data and intelligence is all the six interconnected hubs that we talked about, six core areas that are incredibly important for marketers to focus on and invest in and make sure that they’re fully optimized and then able to track and report what, what’s actually working or not to be able to optimize their investments going forward. This is online too. I see a couple of people taking pictures on our website, semrush.com. You can go to the investor portion of it. This whole presentation is up there, plus our Analyst Day, which is two and a half hours, a little bit longer.

Alright. I’m not gonna have time to get into AI, in in-depth, but really quick, we are monetizing it in a number of different ways. We’re actually using AI in three different ways. First, internally to make our own operations more efficient. At this point, 40% of our interactions with our customers are fully automated with AI chat and AI, integrations, interactions, and we’re going to continue to leverage that with AI agents to make sure we can process orders, handle tech support tickets and do as much in an automated way as possible.

And it’s part of the reason why our margins continue to expand, and we continue to drive free cash flow into the business. We’ve also integrated it with our product to make sure we’re leveraging the best of what AI has to offer by creating co piloting features that allow small business owners and new marketers to very quickly figure out where there are challenges and what they should focus on. We have AI content generation tools that brings the best of our data and intelligence platform combined with the power of the LLMs to create content that that’s specific, relevant, and authoritative for marketers and businesses to be able to place in their digital marketing channels so that they can they can rank and increase their online awareness. There’s a third component of AI because what we do is online awareness and digital marketing. As everybody knows, AI is starting to disrupt that and change how things are working.

So we just launched a new tool, which is about understanding how your brand is being perceived inside these LLMs. What are they saying about my brand? Is it positive, negative? Where are they getting the information from? And how can I start to optimize and refine our content to make sure AI is picking up the right things and continuing to disclose to people who are searching and navigating through these AI chats the right perception about our brand and our products?

So there’s a number of different ways we’re using it, and it creates a lot of opportunity for Semrush. All right. Quick run through the financials, and then we can open it up to questions. Overall, since 2018, we’ve seen very strong growth, 34% compound annual growth, and we continue to believe that our growth will be strong and durable. In terms of customers, our growth comes from I’ll talk a little bit more about our growth drivers, but one of the key ones is, of course, expanding the number of paying customers and our reach overall.

Since 2018, we’ve tripled the number of customers, and we continue to see strong growth in the number of paying customers every year. Second way we do it is continue and expand average ARR, the whole P times Q model. We want our price and our footprint to continue to go up, and then we want to continue to expand the number of customers that are subscribed to Semrush. We’ve increased the paying customers by 3x and the average ARR per customer since 2018 by 2x, and we believe we can do that again. The key driver for ARR expansion going forward is this enterprise investment we’ve been making.

It’s both a go to market play and a product play. We have more sophisticated features and now more sophisticated sellers that are getting us 10 to 15 times the average ARR when those two are combined together. We launched it about two years ago, have continued to ramp it up. We started to launch enterprise capabilities and features in 2024 and launched a new product called enterprise SEO in June. And just a few short months, we already have 9,000,000 of ARR from that one product alone and have expanded the ARR for the customers that have subscribed to that product by 6x from about an average of $10,000 up to now $62,500 So our enterprise investments and go to market and product are working and will be a key driver of growth for us going forward that will allow this expansion to continue.

In terms of profitability, we’re all about efficiency and making sure our investments are focused on the areas where we feel like we can win, where we’re well positioned in the market with strong competitive moats and an opportunity to capitalize on the market opportunity ahead. Since 2022, we’ve seen an 1,800 basis point improvement in margin, and we’re committed in our long term model that I’ll share in a second to continue driving it up over 20%. I’m going to skip that just so we can get to questions. In terms of growth, just real quick, I already hinted at this before. There’s millions of companies that can benefit from Semrush.

We believe there’s a long runway of growth in terms of adding paying customers, and we’re going to continue to prioritize that as our main growth driver going forward. We have an extensive platform as we talked about. Most of our customers are not using the entire thing yet, but we believe we can get them there. Therefore, there’s cross sell and upsell potential. We’ve invested in the enterprise over the last couple of years, both product and go to market.

That’s going to be a huge growth driver. And because we continue to have strong profitability with 83% gross margins and expanding non GAAP operating margin and free cash flow, plus $235,000,000 on the balance sheet, we believe we have a significant opportunity to keep investing, keep innovating and launching new products that will repeat this process over and continue to expand our average AR per paying customer. In the near term, we just guided 2025, but just to give you an outlook that includes ’24, ’5 and ’6. We’re committing to a 20% near term compound annual growth rate and continued free cash flow margin expansion that gets us to ultimately a long term model all the way on the right where our gross margins will approach 85%, non GAAP operating margin 22% and free cash flow margin 25%. We’re about halfway to those two numbers on the bottom and committed to continuing to drive growth, scale and efficiency with our business to achieve this long term outlook.

So I’ll pause there. I think I got five minutes and eighteen seconds left here for some questions, if there aren’t any. It’s a great question. We’re anytime this question comes up, I always feel like I have to say we love all our kids. And PLG, the S and B market is a core part of our success and growth going forward, and it’s something that we’ll continue to invest in and rely on.

One of the key reasons is there’s two reasons. One, the unit economics are fantastic for PLG. We end up getting payback within less than six months. There’s about a 5x return on that investment in terms of CAC to LTV. So it’s a very healthy business, one that we’ll continue to invest in and rely on and assure that our core business, which is very profitable, will continue to sustain and grow.

The second key thing is our data. One of the core components of our success is having strong data and intelligence at the core, and it gets enhanced because our 117,000 paying and over a million free users are sharing their data across their digital marketing channels with us, and it allows us to optimize and fine tune our models to make sure our data is even more accurate. So we’ll always invest in them. We’ll always need them. And our upmarket play isn’t new for us.

So a lot of companies move from SMB into the enterprise. Over the years, we’ve actually acquired 8,000 enterprise customers before we even had an enterprise go to market, before we had an enterprise product that was more geared towards the sophisticated users within the enterprise. So we’ve had wide appeal across a very broad spectrum of the market segments and have built that with our PLG motion. This enterprise play is supplemental to that. It doesn’t replace it.

It doesn’t distract us from it. They all build on each other, and it’s more about cross sell and up sell as opposed to pivoting and doing something that’s new for Semrush. And I think because of that foundation, because of the reasons and the circumstances that led up to it, we’re in a much better position to be able to capitalize in a way that’s more consistent and least disruptive to the company and our success.

Operator: I have a question. So number of investors are in the room and you’re having one on ones with a number of investors. What don’t they understand about Semrush, right? And what do you want them to understand? What are they missing?

And what should they take away from this conversation to

Brian Mulroy, CFO, Semrush: buy the stock? Sure. Yes. Every we were at a couple of conferences this week. Without fail, every investment is actually pretty deep into the model and the business, understands our backgrounds, our market opportunity.

I think since Analyst Day, I think the understanding about the business has expanded quite a bit. I’d say prior to that, there was thinking that Semrush, because we grew up with a PLG motion, more automated, that we were entirely SMB, that 80%, ninety % of our business was down market low end, which could be disrupted by macro. The reality is we’re well diversified with 8,000 enterprises that comprise about 20% of our ARR. We have 27,000 agencies, also about 20% of ARR. Almost 20,000 mid market companies as a company with about 50 to 500 employees, and then about 45% of the business is SMB, solopreneur and freelancer, but incredibly well diversified.

That’s something that’s not always understood. And then I think it’s key because it’s newer for investors to really dig in and understand the enterprise opportunity and why Semrush is so well positioned to be able to capitalize on that.

Operator: Very impressive. Thank you, Brian.

Brian Mulroy, CFO, Semrush: You got it.

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