Where does SEMRush get its keyword data from?

It’s a combination of google Adwords and their clickstream data.

Before we dive into detail, let’s recap the main ideas and arguments concerning keyword search volumes and why they are important for digital marketers.

Volume indicates keywords’ popularity through the number of searches and is a very valuable metric for SEOs. Here it gets interesting: how do we get this data?

Google is the only official source of keyword search volumes, but over the years it grew less and less enthusiastic about sharing the information. And this is where clickstream data comes into play.

Clickstream is an anonymous record of users’ activities in web browsers and on various apps. This information is aggregated by data-providing companies and sold to all kinds of analytical platforms. Collecting this information is the easy part, processing it to get valuable results is much trickier. False volume estimation leads to faulty keyword targeting, which eventually ruins your SEO and PPC campaigns.

To ensure that you get the most relevant and precise data, SEMrush is implementing a new machine learning algorithm for search volume forecasting and validation.