- Adobe has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Semrush in an all-cash transaction for $12.00 per share for a total equity value of $1.9 billion according to Adobe’s press announcement.
- Semrush has a trackrecord of success in digital brand intelligence across search engine optimization (SEO), content performance and insight into paid, earned and owned media campaign performance and audits.
Q: Why is the Adobe acquisition of Semrush interesting?
Adobe’s acquisition of Semrush is interesting because it adds significant capabilities and expertise in the gathering, utilization and analysis of brand driven search, including search conducted by large language models (LLMs).
TL;DR The acquisition is the opening salvo for a new frontier where the understanding of how people search and the intelligence of how models answer sits at the very center of how marketers drive their growth strategies forward.
Welcome to the future of content creation in the age of AI summaries, where questions that mirror prompts and answers that feed answer generations haunt a whole new generation of marketers battling modern search. The formatted content above demonstrates a new normal for creation when models crave authority and clarity in content and where answers best reflect the reality of a user’s prompt. While Search Engine Optimization (SEO) pushed marketers to think in keywords and high-quality, relevant, authentic content, the new battle ground of AI-powered engine optimization has new rules and new challenges. This AI age also welcomes two new and notable entrants to the marketing lexicon: Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). While AEO is a strategy to format content to serve the answers brands expect, GEO focuses in on making brand content visible, available and referenceable by AI search tools including ChatGPT and Google Gemini.
AEO and GEO feel a bit like the wild west, reminding marketers just how long it took to perfect SEO strategies that were once managed manually with more gut and guesswork than precision automation. Today's marketing operations and digital teams are actively seeking out tools that can identify, recommend and automate these optimization efforts. Which makes the announcement of Adobe’s intention to acquire Semrush for a reported $1.9 billion so timely.
What do we know about the deal? Adobe announced their definitive agreement to acquire Semrush in an all-cash transaction set to total $1.9 billion. Many market watchers have been quick to note that the $12 per share price is almost double the closing price of $6.89 before the announcement. The 17-year-old SEO darling has seen strong performance of late, delivering a reported third-quarter revenue of $112.1 million. Beyond healthy performance, Semrush has been at the epicenter of the changing nature of content performance, being an early innovator in AI search optimization. While the press announcement boasts that Adobe works with 99% of the Fortune 100, Semrush is no shrinking violet when it comes to powering recognizable customers including Amazon, TikTok, UPS, Publicis Groupe and Wix.
Few details are expected about Adobe’s intentions with Semrush until acquisition approvals and regulatory reviews, but with Adobe’s own push into AEO and GEO with the introduction of the LLM Optimizer product earlier in the year and new innovation around AI-powered conversational journeys for consumers with Brand Concierge, there is little doubt that Semrush will be a welcome integration to Adobe's analytics, data and brand intelligence offerings. It is also safe to assume that Semrush capabilities will be central to the brand visibility intelligence marketers will need to accelerate durable outcomes powered by a more automated content supply chain.
What makes Adobe + Semrush so interesting? In the near term, Semrush will supercharge Adobe’s brand intelligence offerings, delivering actionable insights across GEO and search. Importantly Semrush’s premiere solution, Semrush One, serves as a one-stop-shop for visibility, merging the view of more traditional keyword-based SEO metrics and analytics with insight and visibility tracking across AI models from ChatGPT, Google, Perplexity and Claude. Not only does this intelligence track visibility of a brand, but Semush can also monitor markets and competitors in an effort to bring a competitive edge by identifying trends and opportunities faster. Coupled with Adobe’s already extensive analytics portfolio and newly minted Agentic AI agents trained to monitor, analyze and act automously on specific outcome drive processes, this new holistic brand intelligence capability turns early warning signs into early action systems.
In the long term, which we know is where these acquisitions get exceedingly interesting, watch for Adobe to make their intelligence capabilities become as available and ubiquitous as AI action and generation tools have become across all of Adobe’s product lines. It could answer marketing's call for the ever ellusive "easy button" that answers the questions of where and what...but also why content or experiences succeed or fall flat. This is in lock step with Adobe’s long standing AI strategy that elevates and accelerates “quality of life” AI updates that focus on optimizing a creator, an artist or a marketers time to free more wild creativity and action. Instead of toiling over manual tweaks to content fit for AI search, we can see a future where the speed at which models evolve is easily handled by the signals these visibility tools can constantly monitor and understand.
Until the details of post-deal-close operations are revealed, one can only daydream about the new intelligence doors that customers may be able to open. While early focus will be on how Adobe mainstays in the Digital Experience offerings will integrate and intertwine with the Semrush platform, the reality is that Semrush brings a robust portfolio of toolkits that address everything from SEO to visibility into localization and advertising to social media and PR bringing us back to the fundamentals of marketing's work in paid, earned and owned channels of engagement..
For Adobe this is a solid investment into AI and intelligence innovation, but it is also a bet that brand visibility data will play a critical role in the larger knowledge and data set that brands will need to continue to power enterprise AI rollouts. Historically where organizations have struggled is turning captured insights into brand placements into actionable signals that drive revenue, often ending in lengthy discussions of how to wade through the noise of marketing analytics to identify higher fidelity signal that points to opportunity. This acquisition could very well mark one of the key steps forward in that noise to signal advancement.
What is the big takeaway from this acquisition? Adobe often faces market criticism over its AI strategy...criticism that this analyst has always questioned. While many AI foundation model darlings in the market have developed their models for the sake of wild unbridled innovation and sometimes shocking application, Adobe has always remained focused on the demands of its own customers that don’t demand the capacity to create everything in AI, but instead demand the capacity to create responsibly and reliably with AI. This has sometimes held Adobe’s own AI innovation back to a more conservative approach where enterprise viability and commercial safety rule the day. But the Semrush acquisition not only bolsters Adobe’s AI vision, it answers growing problem for marketers who realize their existing content and search strategies have become less effective and are not fit for purpose in this new age of AI generated content and AI summarized search. AI search and summary generation is a new game that feels familiar, but demands new plays. This acquisition is Adobe answering that call.
