What happened to Searchmetrics? The Conductor acquisition, and what to move to

Searchmetrics was acquired by Conductor in a deal that closed on 2 February 2023, and the brand has since been retired. As of 3 August 2026, searchmetrics.com issues a 301 redirect to conductor.com and the Conductor pricing page does not mention the Searchmetrics name anywhere. The platforms were merged, the SEO Visibility metric went with the brand, and there is no version of Searchmetrics you can sign up for today.

That is the short answer, and it is worth stating plainly because a lot of the material still ranking for this question was written before the merge finished and never revisited. If you are here because a bookmark stopped working, a colleague mentioned Visibility scores, or a comparison post told you to evaluate Searchmetrics against Semrush, this is what actually happened and what to do instead.

The timeline

Searchmetrics was founded in Berlin and spent most of the 2010s as the dominant European enterprise SEO platform, best known outside its own customer base for the SEO Visibility index that German and wider European agencies quoted in reports and press coverage. Conductor, headquartered in New York, occupied roughly the same position in North America. They were direct competitors in the enterprise organic marketing category.

Conductor announced the acquisition in early February 2023, with the transaction closing on 2 February. The deal brought Searchmetrics' development and European support teams into Conductor, along with more than ten years of accumulated data indexes, roughly 500 global customers and around 70 employees. The stated intention at the time was to combine the two platforms into a single product over approximately 18 months.

That window closed in the second half of 2024, and the consolidation followed the pattern these things usually follow. The acquired brand stops being marketed, then stops being a separate product, then stops being a domain. Today the redirect is the whole answer: type the old address and you land on Conductor's homepage with no interstitial, no migration notice and no mention of the name you typed.

What Searchmetrics customers actually lost

Not the software, in most cases. Enterprise acquisitions of this kind generally migrate customers onto the acquiring platform, and the useful capabilities of Searchmetrics were absorbed rather than switched off. What genuinely disappeared is narrower and more annoying than a feature list suggests.

The Visibility score, and every trend line built on it. SEO Visibility was a proprietary index: a single number derived from a domain's rankings across a large keyword set, weighted by search volume and position. Because the formula and the underlying keyword set belonged to Searchmetrics, no other tool can recreate your historical Visibility curve. A team with four years of board slides tracking that number cannot continue the chart. They can start a new one on somebody else's proprietary index, which is the same bet again.

Price transparency. Conductor does not publish list prices. Its three tiers are Essentials, Growth and Enterprise, and each one leads to a free trial, a demo request or a sales conversation rather than a number. The model is described as usage based. That is a normal enterprise posture and not a criticism, but it does mean that anyone renewing out of a Searchmetrics contract is entering a procurement process rather than clicking upgrade.

The European specificity. Searchmetrics was built around European search markets and had support to match. Conductor has kept that team, and its own emphasis is global enterprise. Whether the local depth survived the merge is something to ask directly in a demo rather than to assume from a press release.

The lesson worth taking from this

Every SEO platform you buy invents at least one number and encourages you to report on it. Domain Authority, Domain Rating, Authority Score, Visibility. None of them are search engine metrics and none of them are portable. The moment the vendor is acquired, repriced or shut down, the metric leaves with them and the history you built on it becomes an orphan chart.

The practical defense is unglamorous: keep your own copy of the underlying data rather than the vendor's derived score. Rankings, impressions, clicks and positions from Search Console are yours, they are exportable, and they mean the same thing in five years. Most tools have an API or a scheduled export, and pushing those rows into a warehouse you control through a data integration layer takes an afternoon and survives any acquisition. Teams that did this before 2023 kept their Searchmetrics era reporting. Teams that screenshotted the Visibility chart did not.

What to move to, honestly

The right replacement depends entirely on what the Searchmetrics seat was being used for, and in our experience the answer is usually smaller than the contract implied.

If you need the enterprise platform. Conductor is the direct continuation. It holds the Searchmetrics indexes and team, and if you were using enterprise workflow, multi market reporting and stakeholder dashboards, nothing else is a like for like swap. Go in expecting a demo and a quote.

If you were really using it for research. This is the common case. Someone logs in to check what competitors rank for, pull keyword ideas and look at a visibility trend. That work is what Ahrefs at $129 a month and Semrush SEO at $139 a month are built for, and both have deeper link data than Searchmetrics ever did. Moz Pro Standard at $99 is the cheapest complete suite if budget is the binding constraint. We compared the whole field, including the tools that no longer exist, on Semrush vs its competitors.

If you need a visibility style single number again. Think carefully before you commit to another one. If reporting demands it, Semrush's Authority Score and Ahrefs' Domain Rating both serve the purpose, and both carry exactly the same portability problem. A more durable choice is to report on share of impressions for a fixed keyword set from Search Console, which is a real Google number and cannot be discontinued by a vendor.

If the bottleneck was never research at all. Also common. Plenty of Searchmetrics seats existed to produce a list of problems that nobody had time to fix. If the last four quarterly reports identified the same title tags and thin category pages, a research platform is not what is missing. That is the gap our own tool addresses, and it is why the pricing sits at $49 rather than at enterprise level.

Should you still compare Semrush and Searchmetrics?

There is nothing to compare. If a listicle, a review site or an AI assistant offers you Searchmetrics as a live option in 2026, that is a signal about how fresh the rest of its information is. The same applies to any comparison that still quotes Semrush Pro at $139.95: those plan names were retired and the current lineup is SEO at $139, Starter at $199, Pro+ at $299 and Advanced at $549 as of July 2026.

Tool comparison content rots faster than almost any other category, because acquisitions and repricing happen quietly and nobody sends an update. Checking the vendor's own page, and checking whether the domain still resolves to the vendor at all, takes thirty seconds and catches most of it. That is literally how the redirect in the first paragraph of this article was found.

Frequently asked questions

Is Searchmetrics still available?

No. Searchmetrics is not sold as its own product any more. Conductor acquired the company in a deal that closed on 2 February 2023 and merged the platforms. As of 3 August 2026 the searchmetrics.com domain issues a 301 redirect to conductor.com, and the Conductor pricing page does not mention the name.

Who bought Searchmetrics?

Conductor, the New York based enterprise organic marketing platform, which was until then a direct competitor. The transaction closed on 2 February 2023. It brought Searchmetrics' European support team, more than ten years of data indexes, around 500 customers and roughly 70 employees into Conductor.

Why did Conductor acquire Searchmetrics?

European expansion, mostly. Conductor was strong in North America and Searchmetrics was the established European player with local support and its own data assets. The stated plan was to combine both platforms into one product over roughly 18 months and to accelerate Conductor's product roadmap using the Searchmetrics team.

What was the Searchmetrics SEO Visibility score?

A proprietary index that scored a domain's overall organic presence from its rankings across a large keyword set, weighted by search volume and position. It was widely cited in European SEO reporting. Because it was proprietary, no other tool can reconstruct a historical Visibility trend line for you.

What is the best alternative to Searchmetrics?

Conductor is the direct continuation if you need enterprise reporting, though it publishes no list prices. For a normal sized site, Ahrefs at $129 a month or Semrush SEO at $139 does the research work that most Searchmetrics seats were really being used for, at a fraction of an enterprise contract.

Does Conductor publish pricing?

No. Conductor lists three tiers, Essentials, Growth and Enterprise, and each one routes you to a free trial, a demo request or a sales conversation rather than a price. Budget for a procurement cycle rather than a checkout, and ask specifically about usage based billing, which is how the model is described.