In crypto and iGaming, a growing share of discovery happens before anyone reaches your site. Potential investors type their question into ChatGPT. Operators check Perplexity before picking an affiliate. AI Overviews answer casino comparison queries without a click ever reaching your domain.
At ICODA, we operate in these conditions every day. Our results depend on the data behind each campaign, and for a while now we’ve been looking for a platform that actually covers the full picture: traditional search, AI search, and competitive intelligence in one place.
Today we’re announcing a partnership with Semrush, the online visibility platform now owned by Adobe. Every audit, keyword strategy, and competitive analysis we run for clients draws from Semrush’s database: 26.2 billion keywords, 43 trillion backlinks, and 800 million domain profiles.
The SEO Intelligence Gap in Crypto & Web3
Ask any founder who’s tried to rank a DeFi protocol or a crypto exchange: standard SEO playbooks don’t hold up here.
The problems are specific:
- Keyword volatility. “Bitcoin price prediction” or “best altcoin 2026” can swing 10x in search volume within 48 hours after a market event. Without real-time data, you’re optimizing for last week.
- AI search displacement. A growing share of crypto queries now trigger AI Overviews or get answered directly in ChatGPT, meaning zero clicks reach your site even when you rank first on Google.
- Regulatory sensitivity in iGaming. One wrong keyword cluster on a casino landing page can trigger a manual penalty or compliance flag. Audit-level precision isn’t optional in this vertical.
- Backlink competition at scale. In Web3, your competitors include VC-backed protocols with eight-figure marketing budgets. Without knowing what they’re building, you’re guessing at your own strategy.
Most crypto and iGaming projects end up overspending on tactics that don’t convert, or missing high-intent traffic because they lack the data to find it. That’s what this partnership is for.
Meet Semrush: The Platform Behind the World’s Top Marketing Teams
Semrush has been around since 2008. Most people know it as a keyword tool. It’s grown well beyond that.
| Feature | What It Does for Your Project |
|---|---|
| Keyword Magic Tool | 26.2B+ keywords including crypto/DeFi/NFT long-tail with real search demand data |
| Organic Research | Shows which keywords drive traffic to your competitors and where you can compete for them |
| Site Audit | Identifies technical SEO issues blocking your rankings, from crawl errors to Core Web Vitals |
| Traffic Analytics | Estimates real traffic to any domain, including rival exchanges, casinos, and protocols |
| Semrush Copilot | AI-powered recommendations based on your account’s live data |
| Position Tracking | Monitors your rankings daily across multiple GEOs simultaneously |
Semrush went public on the NYSE in 2021 and was acquired by Adobe in 2026 for approximately $1.9 billion. The platform has 117,000 paying customers. In October 2025, Semrush launched an Enterprise Partner Program with Dentsu as its first premier partner. ICODA is now part of that program.
3 Reasons To Become Partners
Semrush indexes the long-tail of Web3 search (DeFi protocols, token presales, NFT collections, blockchain infrastructure) with a granularity that generic tools miss. When a client launches a new chain or a new game, we need to find demand before it peaks. Semrush handles that.
ICODA’s services include ChatGPT SEO, Gemini SEO, Perplexity SEO, and AI Overviews optimization. Semrush is one of the few platforms that lets us measure what we optimize: how often a client’s brand appears in LLM-generated answers and how their AI Share of Voice compares to direct competitors. For a Web3 project in 2026, that’s not optional.
As a certified Semrush Agency Partner, ICODA has access to advanced reporting tools, co-marketing support, and a partner status clients can verify directly on Semrush’s platform. Every audit uses the same dataset.
We don’t recommend tools we don’t use. Semrush is what helps us to deliver, from the first audit to monthly reporting.
What This Partnership Unlocks for Your Project
Keyword Intelligence at Enterprise Scale
Semrush’s Personalized Keyword Difficulty (PKD) metric calculates how hard a keyword is for your specific domain to rank, based on your topical authority and backlink profile rather than global difficulty scores alone.
For a new DeFi protocol with a six-month-old domain, we target keywords where ranking is actually within reach. For an established crypto exchange, we identify authority gaps where focused content can move rankings from page 2 to position 3 within weeks. Either way, we’re not wasting budget on keywords the domain isn’t ready for.
AI Search Visibility: Where Your Audience Actually Searches
ICODA’s own research found that 38% of esports betting providers are invisible to AI search engines. That pattern holds across crypto and iGaming more broadly.
With Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit in our campaigns, we track:
- Which prompts trigger mentions of your brand in ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity
- Your AI Share of Voice vs. direct competitors
- Which topics and entities to strengthen for better AI search presence
- How your brand appears in ChatGPT’s shopping and recommendation features
For Web3 projects, potential investors often start their research with a question to ChatGPT, not a Google search. If your brand doesn’t appear in those answers, a portion of your audience never finds you.
Competitive Intelligence for iGaming SEO
iGaming is one of the most aggressively optimized niches in digital marketing. Operators like Bet365 and 1xBet run content and backlink programs that most challenger brands can’t see without the right tools.
Through Semrush’s Traffic Analytics and Organic Research, ICODA can now:
- Estimate real traffic to competitor casino and sportsbook domains
- Map the keyword clusters driving their organic growth
- Identify the affiliate and backlink sources they’re using
- Audit their technical SEO footprint for weaknesses
Combined with ICODA’s work on iGaming compliance and GEO-specific content, this produces campaigns grounded in what competitors are actually doing, not assumptions about it.
How to Get Started with Semrush Through ICODA
Path 1: Work with ICODA directly
Every new ICODA engagement starts with a Semrush-powered SEO audit. We map your current keyword positions, review your top 5 competitors, identify technical blockers, and establish your AI visibility baseline. All of that happens before we write a single piece of content.
Path 2: Explore Semrush yourself
If you want to run your own research alongside our campaigns, here’s where to start:
| Plan | Best For | Key Features |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Initial exploration | Limited daily queries, basic keyword data |
| Pro | Solo founders, small teams | Full keyword/backlink access, 5 projects |
| Guru | Growing projects, content teams | Content Marketing Toolkit, historical data |
| Business | Agencies, large campaigns | API access, white-label reports, 40 projects |
| Semrush One | Teams that want everything in one subscription | SEO, content, advertising, social, AI visibility, and competitive research unified under a single plan |
For teams scaling past the startup stage, Semrush One bundles the full platform into a single subscription: SEO, AI visibility, content marketing, paid advertising, and social tools all included, without managing separate tool budgets. It’s the plan we recommend most often for crypto and iGaming projects with active growth campaigns.
Where This Leaves Us
SEO in 2026 covers more ground than it did three years ago: Google rankings, AI-generated answers, brand mentions in LLMs, and competitive positioning across all of them. Most agencies are still running 2022 playbooks.
ICODA has always built campaigns on data. This partnership puts the best dataset in the industry behind every engagement we run. If you’re launching a token, growing an iGaming operation, or building a DeFi brand, the difference between good data and guesswork shows up directly in your rankings.
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