Ahrefs' $2B opportunity

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About a year ago Adobe acquired Semrush for $2 billion. Within days, Semrush’s biggest competitor, Ahrefs, had a landing page live at ahrefs.com/goodbye-semrush.

The headline read: "Semrush got their exit. Maybe it's time for yours."

That single line of copy did more competitive marketing work than most brands manage in a full campaign. And it cost almost nothing to produce.

When a major acquisition gets announced, the coverage follows a familiar script. Deal size. Strategic rationale. Quotes from both CEOs about "exciting new chapters."

What that coverage never addresses is what the platforms's actual users are thinking.

These aren't paranoid questions. They're the completely rational response of a marketer who relies on a tool every day and just watched it get swallowed up by a global behemoth.

Ahrefs saw that anxiety before it had a chance to settle. Rather than waiting for Semrush customers to start quietly evaluating options, they walked into that moment and said “we see you, we get it, and here's where to go”.

The "Goodbye Semrush" landing page is worth breaking down, because every element of it was doing something very deliberate.

The URL itself was the first signal. Not "why-ahrefs-beats-semrush" or "switch-to-ahrefs". “Goodbye Semrush”. It adopted the customer's own emotional framing before they'd even arrived on the page.

The headline mirrored exactly what Semrush customers were feeling. The word "exit" pulls double duty, acknowledging the acquisition (Semrush's founders got their payday) and suggesting that maybe customers should be thinking about their own exit too. It's wordplay, but it also actually means something.

Then there's the comparison table. Standard fare for any competitor page, but with one entry that made the whole thing virally shareable: the only category where Semrush beats Ahrefs is "will upsell you Photoshop”.

That line works because it names the fear directly. Not vaguely ("may prioritise other products") but specifically and with humour. Anyone who's ever been cross-sold by a large software suite immediately recognises the joke. And once something makes you laugh, you forward it. It deliberately steers away from trying to out-feature Semrush. It's trying to out-understand their customers.

The final section of the page has a closing CTA that does a perfect job of completing the user’s narrative journey. The whole page uses wordplay and humour to articulate very real fears and uncertainties about what will happen now Semrush is part of Adobe. So the final section focuses exclusively on providing certainty and assurance, credibility and safety. They use social proof, calling out 4 million marketers and SEOs (aka people just like you) use Ahrefs daily. Then they double down and add that over 20k people joined Ahrefs in the past week. They’re saying “everyone’s already using us, and a bunch of people who are just like you and thinking about switching have already done so”. To top it off they include a special offer of 6 months free to make the whole thing a real ‘no-brainer’.

This is the thing that separates genuinely clever competitive marketing from the kind that just feels opportunistic.

Most brands, when a competitor has a bad moment, respond with features. "Here's why we're better. Here's our comparison table. Here's a migration offer." All rational. All forgettable.

Ahrefs led with empathy. They proved they understood what Semrush customers were actually experiencing (uncertainty/fear), not just what their product does better. That shift in approach matters because people don't switch tools because they've been presented with superior feature documentation. They switch because they feel like another brand understands them, and their current one has just made them feel uncertain.

I write a lot about how the best marketing works by proving you understand your audience before you ask anything of them. This campaign is one of the cleanest examples I've seen of that principle applied competitively. Ahrefs didn't position themselves against Semrush's features. They positioned themselves against the feeling of being a small fish inside a very large, acquisition-hungry enterprise.

That's a much more interesting place to compete.

Reactive marketing gets a bad reputation because most of it is pretty crass. A brand jumps on a news moment that has nothing to do with them, the connection feels strained, and the whole thing reads as attention-seeking.

Ahrefs avoided this because the moment was directly relevant to their business and their audience. They weren't newsjacking a cultural moment for exposure. They were responding to something that materially affected their potential customers and their own competitive position.

beehiiv did something similar when their main competitor ConvertKit rebranded to Kit. beehiiv CEO Tyler Denk posted publicly about it almost immediately, and the brand launched a "Convert to beehiiv kit” (one of the most brilliant pieces of wordplay I’ve seen). The offer was generous. Free migration, six months free, credits and early beta access. The tone was bit sharper than Ahrefs', more direct, more aggressive, but the underlying mechanic was the same. A competitor's moment of identity change created confusion and uncertainty for their customers, and beehiiv showed up with clarity.

Both campaigns work because the triggering event was genuinely relevant to their audience. Neither brand was reaching for a tangential connection.

There are a few things that separate reactive marketing that lands from reactive marketing that doesn't:

The moment has to actually affect your audience. Ahrefs' audience uses SEO tools. An acquisition in the SEO tool category is directly relevant to them. The sharper your understanding of who your audience is, the easier it becomes to identify which moments are genuinely worth responding to.

You need to show up with something real. The page works partly because Ahrefs is a credible alternative. If the product wasn't genuinely competitive, the humour would feel hollow. The empathy gets you in the door, but the product still has to do its job.

Timing is everything. The anxiety of an acquisition peaks in the days after announcement, before customers settle into acceptance. Showing up in that window is the whole game. Showing up six months later is practically useless.

Acquisitions are the obvious trigger, but the same principle extends further than most marketers realise.

Pricing changes are one. When a competitor increases prices (especially abruptly), their customers go through the same cycle of concern, evaluation, openness. If you're already in that conversation with messaging that shows you understand why they're frustrated, you're positioned far better than a brand that waits for them to come looking.

Product outages are another. When a tool goes down during crunch time, the customers affected are not in a neutral frame of mind. A well-timed, empathetic response from a competitor isn't predatory. It's just showing up.

One of the most overlooked versions of this is executive role changes. When a new marketing leader joins a company, they typically arrive with a mandate to audit, improve and implement changes. They're not yet locked into existing vendor relationships. They're actively evaluating. They're also, frequently, anxious about proving themselves quickly. It’s an audience of one, but a very powerful and high value audience when executed well.

A brand that reaches a new CMO or VP of Marketing in their first few weeks, with messaging that speaks directly to that moment ("starting fresh, here's how to build something that lasts"), is doing the same thing Ahrefs did. Meeting someone in their moment of maximum receptivity, with proof that you understand their situation.

Most marketers understand the Ahrefs campaign intuitively. Of course it’s funny. Of course it works. The harder question is how you build the habit of thinking this way so you’re ready before the moment arrives.

A few things that help:

Know your competitor's customers as well as your own. What are they afraid of? What would make them question their loyalty? Where does the product fall short of what they need? If you can't answer those questions, you're not ready to respond when an opportunity opens.

Map the moments that create switching intent. Acquisitions, price hikes, outages, leadership changes, product pivots. What are the recurring events in your category that make a competitor's customers suddenly open to alternatives? Having a short list of those moments means you're not scrambling to respond when they happen.

Lead with the feeling, not the feature. When you do show up, the first job is to demonstrate that you understand what's happening for that customer. The product case comes second. Ahrefs didn't open with a feature comparison. They opened with a line that made Semrush's customers feel seen, heard and understood.

Adobe got a $2 billion SEO tool. Ahrefs got a masterclass in competitive marketing.

Whether it drove significant customer acquisition is almost beside the point. What the campaign actually demonstrated was something more durable: that Ahrefs understands the people they're trying to win better than the company that just paid billions for them.

In a category where most competitive marketing is just louder feature comparisons, that understanding is the real differentiator.

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