Adobe has announced a landmark agreement to acquire Semrush for $1.9 billion in cash, marking one of the company’s biggest moves to strengthen its position in digital marketing and AI-driven brand visibility. The deal, priced at $12 per share, almost doubles Semrush’s previous closing price of $6.89 and highlights Adobe’s belief in the rapidly growing importance of AI-optimized search.
With this acquisition, Adobe aims to bring Semrush’s industry-leading SEO, competitive intelligence, and content analytics tools into its expanding Digital Experience ecosystem. The company expects the deal to close in the first half of 2026, pending regulatory approvals.
Why Adobe Wants Semrush
The rise of generative AI has sparked a major shift in how consumers find information. People now increasingly rely on AI chatbots, agents, assistants, and AI-enabled browsers to get answers, product recommendations, travel ideas, news, and more. According to Adobe, traffic from generative AI sources to U.S. retail websites grew 1,200% year-over-year, signaling a dramatic upheaval in discovery behavior.
This shift has given birth to a new discipline: Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) — the practice of improving visibility within AI-generated answers, not just in Google or Bing’s traditional search results. Semrush is one of the earliest players to invest heavily in GEO, launching tools that help brands optimize for LLMs such as ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Grok, and Perplexity.
Adobe sees Semrush as the perfect complement to its existing marketing tools, which include Adobe Experience Cloud, Adobe Analytics, and the newly launched Brand Concierge. Together, the two companies aim to provide marketers with a unified toolkit to track visibility across search engines, websites, social channels, and now AI engines.
Benefits for Marketers
The acquisition positions Adobe to help brands understand and improve how they appear both in traditional search and in AI-generated outputs. This integration will offer:
- Stronger SEO + GEO insights in one platform
- Better measurement of AI-driven traffic and engagement
- Smarter content strategy decisions across all digital touchpoints
- Future-proofed visibility tools as AI becomes the default interface for information discovery
Adobe Digital Experience President Anil Chakravarthy emphasized that “brand visibility is being reshaped by generative AI,” and companies that fail to adapt risk losing relevance and revenue.
