The paper is concerned with the decay property of solutions to the initial-boundary value problem of the semilinear heat equation \(\partial _tu-\Delta u+u^p=0\) in exterior domains \(\Omega \) in \(\mathbb {R}^N\) ( \(N\ge 2\) ). The problem for the one-dimensional case is formulated with \(\Omega =(0,\infty )\) which is one of the representative of the connected components in \(\mathbb {R}\) . One can see that the \(C_0\) -semigroup for the corresponding linear problem possesses an invariant measure \(\phi (x)\,dx\) , where \(\phi \) is a positive harmonic function satisfying the Dirichlet boundary condition. This paper clarifies that the mass of solutions with respect to the measure \(\phi (x)\,dx\) vanishes as \(t\rightarrow \infty \) if and only if \(1<p\le \min \{2,1+\frac{2}{N}\}\) . In the other case \(p>\min \{2,1+\frac{2}{N}\}\) , we prove that all solutions are asymptotically free. The asymptotic profile is actually given by a modification with Gaussian when \(N\ge 3\) .