Verified purchaser
Great tool, but KD scores need serious recalibration
Semdash is genuinely a great tool, intuitive and well-structured. The interface is clean, keyword research and backlink tools are solid, and the overall feature set is definitively competitive for the price. Customer support is also very responsive; after sending a question, I received a reply within the hour.
However, there's one significant issue that matters a lot for SEO: Keyword Difficulty scores are systematically underestimated. After comparing the same keywords across Semrush, Ubersuggest, and Keyword Surfer, Semdash consistently scores KD roughly half of what other tools report. On high-competition keywords (KD 77-80 on Semrush), Semdash shows 32-45. That's not a minor discrepancy, as it could lead you to target keywords that are actually out of reach for a new or mid-authority site.
I picked up Tier 5, so I'm committed to giving it a proper evaluation. I'll retest before the 60-day refund window closes and decide from there. Again, there's a lot of potential here, but the KD calibration just needs to be addressed to make this a truly trustworthy tool.
Adam_win
Jul 6, 2026How we calculate keyword difficulty:
1. The system first collects the top 10 sites ranking organically for the keyword in Google.
2 Then, it calculates the ranking score for the first domain and the score for its page ranking for the keyword. These scores are based on the number of backlinks pointing to the domain and its page. They range from 0 (no backlinks detected) to 1,000 (highest rank).
3 Once it’s done, the domain rank is multiplied by 0.1, and the page rank is multiplied by 0.9. The resulting values are added and then divided by 500.
((domain rank * 0.1) + (page rank * 0.9)) / 500
4 The same calculation is performed for each of the ten domains and their pages.
5 After that, the system sorts domains by rank value in ascending order, calculating both the median and average values.
6 The keyword difficulty score is calculated by using the greater of the two (the median or the average value), subtracting 0.2, and dividing the result by 0.8.
(max(median value, average value) – 0.2) / 0.8
7. The resulting value is multiplied by 100 to convert it to an integer (e.g., 0.6 * 100 = 60). If the value is greater than 1, it’s truncated to 1.
Note that keyword difficulty is a country-specific metric. SERPs may vary significantly depending on the location where the search session is initiated.