What happened to Searchmetrics?

Searchmetrics, the Berlin-built SEO platform whose Visibility score was standard vocabulary in European search marketing for a decade, no longer exists as a product you can buy.

Conductor acquired the company in a deal that closed on February 2, 2023, folded the customer base into its own platform, and wound the Searchmetrics software down.

People still search for it in 2026 for three reasons: they used it and want to know where it went, they found an old contract and want to know what they're being billed for, or they read a Reddit thread accusing Conductor of mistreating former Searchmetrics customers. This report covers all three.

The Short History

Marcus Tober founded Searchmetrics in Berlin in 2005 as an organic search specialist, and the product grew into the enterprise SEO suite of record for the German-speaking market, with the annual Searchmetrics ranking-factors studies cited across the industry through the mid-2010s.

The SEO Visibility score was the company's signature asset: one index number per domain, tracked weekly, that let anyone compare search performance across sites without touching their analytics.

At its peak the company's marketing claimed over 1,000 customers and 100,000 users; by the time of the sale, the sellers, founder Marcus Tober and Holtzbrinck Digital GmbH among them, handed Conductor a business Conductor itself counted at over 500 global customers and roughly 70 employees.

Its focus on the European market and its data technology kept the company in industry news for years, and through the early 2010s it set the innovation pace in digital marketing analytics; the range of rivals that later overtook it borrowed plenty from its playbook.

Tober himself had already moved on by then: he joined Semrush in 2022, a detail that says a lot about where the category's center of gravity went.

What the Platform Actually Did

For anyone who never used it, here is what the money bought, in past tense because all of it is gone.

The research side ran on scale: Searchmetrics operated a database it sized at over 30 billion keywords and more than 250 billion data points, tracking rankings, competitors, and market demand across countries.

Per keyword, the database carried search traffic estimates, cost per click, and the ranking URL; per domain, it tracked organic keyword footprints, backlinks, and page changes over time, the raw material for competitive analysis against top competitors.

The keyword discovery tool sat on top of that data, and the pitch was comprehensive market analysis inside one SEO workflow: the ability to go from market insights to keyword research to content brief to stakeholder report without leaving the Searchmetrics platform, so an entire team worked in one tool instead of stitching together other tools.

Content Experience, the writing product, offered real-time content optimization: briefs scored against the ranking pages, so writers produced SEO-friendly drafts without a separate tool, and the company's case studies reported six-figure traffic gains from customers using it.

The technical side covered automated website audits with customizable settings, flagging crawl errors, broken links, and structural problems on a recurring schedule rather than as one-off crawls.

Keyword tracking came with seasonal performance insights, paid search reporting tied ad spend to the same keyword data, and the reporting layer connected SEO performance to business KPIs, which is why stakeholder decks leaned on it.

Every client also got a personal success manager, a service model closer to consulting than to self-serve SaaS, and buyers rated the product 4.2 out of 5 on G2 as of February 2022, the last full year before the sale.

Reviews from those final years agreed on the strengths and the gripes. Marketers and agencies praised the organic keyword depth, the rank tracking, and the full range of enterprise functionality, features that held up in a hyper competitive search landscape; case studies referenced household names, eBay among them, and framed results in revenue and search traffic rather than rankings alone.

The recurring complaint was the user interface: a bit clunky to navigate compared with newer rivals, with functionality spread across modules, and reviewers noted the platform integrates with the standard marketing stack but took onboarding to master beyond the basics.

The Conductor Acquisition

Conductor, founded in New York in 2006 with its SaaS platform launched in 2010, was Searchmetrics' most direct US rival for enterprise SEO contracts.

The February 2023 acquisition was pitched as expansion into Europe, and it was Conductor's second acquisition within a year, following the ContentKing purchase in 2022: Conductor kept the Searchmetrics data assets and support team and migrated customers onto Conductor's platform.

The Searchmetrics product itself was discontinued. As of this writing, searchmetrics.com still stands, but as a consultation-request page pitching "custom enterprise SEO solutions" rather than a platform you can sign up for; there is no self-serve product, no pricing page, and no login for new customers.

What Searchmetrics Used to Cost

Because the pricing pages are gone, the numbers below come from archived plan pages and contemporaneous reviews, which is exactly where anyone verifying an old invoice should look too.

For most of its life the product sold in two shapes. Searchmetrics Essentials, the self-serve research tier covering the Visibility score, keyword research, and competitor data, was listed at $69 per month for years of its run.

Archived screenshots of the Research Cloud plan page, the name Searchmetrics used for its self-serve euro-denominated tiers, show the same self-serve idea split two further ways. Research Cloud National ran 89 EUR per month for one user in one country, five years of SEO Visibility history, complete rankings, and no export credits. Research Cloud International ran 159 EUR per month, marked as the bestseller, and covered one user across six countries with the same five-year history plus 50,000 export credits. Both tiers included Content Performance, SEO, PPC, keyword research, competitor research, SERP research, subdomain rankings, directory ranking, and mobile ranking.

The Searchmetrics Suite, the enterprise platform with projects, content tools, and API access, was negotiated individually per client rather than listed with a fixed price. The same archived page shows it sold in three configurations, scaling up to unlimited users, 30 countries, ten years of Visibility history, 500,000 export credits, and universal search on top of the standard feature list. Buyer reports from the platform's final years put monthly subscriptions rarely below $500, typical contracts in the low four figures per month depending on domains, keywords, and seats, and a minimum 12-month contract as standard.

That 12-month minimum matters for the billing disputes covered below, because it is exactly the kind of clause an acquirer can keep enforcing after the product it covered has changed shape.

Anyone reconstructing what they used to pay can pull the archived pricing pages from the Wayback Machine; snapshots of searchmetrics.com across 2015 to 2021 preserve the Essentials price, the Research Cloud tier breakdown, and the Suite's packaging.

The Reddit Complaints About Conductor

In November 2024, a thread appeared on r/bigseo titled "Conductor scamming old Searchmetrics customers", in which posters allege billing problems affecting accounts inherited through the acquisition.

These are user allegations in a forum thread, not findings by a court or regulator, and Conductor has its own side; we cite the thread because it ranks for Searchmetrics searches and because inherited-contract billing disputes after acquisitions are a real, recurring pattern across the software industry.

The practical takeaway does not depend on who is right. If you hold a legacy Searchmetrics contract, three steps protect you regardless.

• Find the paper: the original Searchmetrics order form, its renewal clause, and any assignment or migration notices received after February 2023. An acquirer's rights over your contract flow from those documents, not from an invoice.
• Cancel in writing, to the notice address the contract names, before the renewal window closes; email trails settle billing disputes faster than any phone call.
• If invoices keep arriving for a product that no longer exists in the form you bought, dispute them in writing and say specifically which service was discontinued; discontinued-product billing is the pattern the thread's title alleges, and it is also the easiest kind to contest with documentation.

Where Former Searchmetrics Customers Went

Four destinations cover nearly everyone we can find discussing the migration publicly.

Conductor itself kept a large share; for enterprise teams already mid-contract, migrating was the path of least resistance, and Conductor's platform covers the same enterprise SEO job.

Semrush absorbed many of the rest, helped by breadth, published pricing, and the symbolism of Searchmetrics' own founder working there.

Sistrix took over the Visibility-score habit in the German-speaking market; its Visibility Index is the closest living relative of the metric Searchmetrics built its brand on.

Similarweb picked up the teams that mainly used Searchmetrics for market and competitor visibility rather than hands-on SEO work.

Our market intelligence tools ranking and digital marketing intelligence ranking cover the current field in detail.

FAQ

Is Searchmetrics still available?

No. The platform was discontinued after Conductor's February 2023 acquisition; the website remains as a consultation page, but there is no product to subscribe to.

Who owns Searchmetrics now?

Conductor, which bought the company from its shareholders, including founder Marcus Tober and Holtzbrinck Digital.

What replaced the SEO Visibility score?

No single metric inherited it. Sistrix's Visibility Index is the nearest equivalent in concept and in the DACH market; Semrush and Similarweb each publish their own domain-level visibility measures.

I'm still being billed on an old Searchmetrics contract. What should I do?

Pull the original contract and every post-acquisition notice, cancel in writing per the notice terms, and dispute any invoice for discontinued services in writing; escalate through your card provider or legal counsel only with that paper trail in hand.

What did Searchmetrics cost before it shut down?

Archived pages list the Essentials tier at $69 per month and the euro-priced Research Cloud tiers at 89 EUR (National) and 159 EUR (International) per month; the enterprise Suite was individually negotiated, rarely below $500 per month by buyer reports, commonly in the low four figures, on 12-month minimum contracts.

Bottom Line

Searchmetrics had a real 18-year run: it named a metric the industry still thinks in, built a 250-billion-point database, and ended the way most enterprise software ends, absorbed by the rival that outlasted it.

Former customers owe it no loyalty and Conductor no benefit of the doubt on billing; the contract paperwork decides everything, so keep it, and pick a current platform from the rankings on their present-day merits.