Feel the GEO Rush: Adobe to Acquire Semrush for $1.9B to Enhance AI Search

Well, it happened. 

I’ve been predicting a move like this for a while, although I thought it might be an up-and-comer like Conductor or even a niche startup like Otterly.ai elsewhere in the stack.  

But then again, it’s Adobe. And when they go, they go big.

And that’s what they’re doing with the acquisition of Semrush, a stalwart of modern martech and one of the “must-have” tools for search engine optimization over the last decade. Adobe just announced that it will purchase Semrush for the tidy sum of $1.9 billion in an all-cash transaction for $12 per share.

The deal is said to close in the first half of 2026, pending regulatory and shareholder approvals. It should be “smoother” sailing, despite the pothole in the rearview that is Figma. Semrush is, comparatively, a tame acquisition that’s almost 20 times less breathtaking than that debacle. 

No doubt, Adobe is posturing to expand its leadership in the realm of marketing intelligence and the concentration on Generative Search Optimization (GEO) and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). As competitors like Optimizely position themselves as “GEO-ready” platforms, the race is on to give brands more comprehensive tools that address the shift towards AI search discovery.

Despite this focus on marketing-centric tools that address the pressures of AI, Adobe lives beyond a single category like DXP or CMP, evolving its value to that of customer experience orchestration in the agentic AI era – and pointing its collective powers at the complete content supply chain, customer engagement, and brand visibility.

It's doing all of this with its suite of industry-leading products like the ubiquitous Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), its unified Adobe Analytics suite, and the recently launched Adobe Brand Concierge for creating interactive, AI-powered conversational journeys.

Adding Semrush to this puzzle brings the picture into sharp relief, giving marketers a holistic view of how their brands appear across the new frontier of LLMs, as well as owned channels, legacy search, and the broader web. It also gives them more control over managing their visibility across the entire ecosystem. 

“Brand visibility is being reshaped by generative AI, and brands that don’t embrace this new opportunity risk losing relevance and revenue,” said Anil Chakravarthy, president of Adobe’s Digital Experience Business. “With Semrush, we’re unlocking GEO for marketers as a new growth channel alongside their SEO, driving more visibility, customer engagement and conversions across the ecosystem.”

CMOs need better tools to master AI search

The Chief Marketing Officer’s job has always been a little cursed. Often a revolving door of talent that lives and dies by the numbers, it has recently grown a bigger backbone when it comes to strategic performance. 

What's at stake? Pretty much everything. Enterprises are relying on marketing to deliver the goods at a breakneck pace. Meanwhile, CMOs are expected to make sense out of metric tons of data from a wide range of sources and tools – and make actionable decisions that drive growth. It's a tough racket, and forget the fact that a CMO's marketing team is also being challenged by cognitive overload. 

While brand equity and visibility are key, CMOs face a reckoning with results. According to a report from NIQ, 84% of CMOs now prioritize ROI as their primary metric for budget allocation, signaling pressure to drive short-term conversion over long-term brand growth.

And driving those conversions is search. Google still crushes AI answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity, maintaining roughly 90% of the global search market share. Google’s traffic has continued to increase into 2025 due in part to its new Gemini-powered AI Overviews and AI Mode features.

But the landscape is starting to shift. ChatGPT’s adoption has been downright mindboggling, reaching 100 million users within two months of launch, making it the fastest-growing consumer app ever. By late 2024, it was reportedly logging around 1 billion interactions per day. By one account, it could surpass Google by 2028, and new data from Adobe Analytics showed that traffic from generative AI sources to U.S. retail sites increased by 1,200% year-over-year in October.

As consumers increasingly turn to answer engines for information, recommendations, and purchase decisions, CMOs need tools that address generative AI platforms so they can enhance their visibility across these new customer interfaces and drive conversions. Organizations that invest in GEO – alongside their SEO capabilities – are poised to keep their brands well-represented, more easily discovered, and trusted across owned and earned channels.

A legacy of SEO innovation with a new focus on GEO

Semrush is the gold standard in SEO. It provides a deep cache of rich information, from competitive insights to keyword research to campaign planning. It’s also incredibly intuitive and accessible, with many third-party platforms surfacing Semrush data in their analytics dashboards. 

For more than ten years, Semrush has armed marketers with “traditional” search engine optimization capabilities. But its recent gains in the development of GEO capabilities – specifically with its AI Visibility Toolkit – are helping brands enhance visibility, expand audience reach, and remain discoverable in AI search. 

The good news for marketers is that the core principles of SEO also apply to GEO. Translation: They work together, and you don’t need to abandon your SEO strategy to build your presence across the AI engines. AI assistants provide helpful and (hopefully) accurate information to users, and they pull that information from the same internet your SEO-focused content lives on. Generally speaking, the more your brand is associated with the topics you want to focus on, the more likely it is to be referenced in an AI-generated answer.

The combination of Adobe and Semrush could be a catalyst for even greater insight across both the SEO and GEO channels. Marketers need both, and Adobe's consolidation will likely benefit both competencies. 

“Adobe is an industry leader in helping marketers create personalized customer experiences at scale. With the advent of LLMs and AI-driven search, brands need to understand where and how their customers are engaging in these new channels,” said Bill Wagner, chief executive officer of Semrush. “This combination provides marketers more insights and capabilities to increase their discoverability across today’s evolving digital landscape.”

From a performance standpoint, Semrush has been bringing the rain. As of last year, it boasted nearly 1.2 million users with annual revenue of over $300 million. In its most recent quarter, it drove 33% year-over-year ARR growth in its enterprise customer segment, earning the trust of industry leaders like Amazon, JPMorganChase, and TikTok.

It’s worth noting that Semrush does have a large cohort of free-tier users (by one estimate, it represents as much as 90% of its base). This speaks to the company’s commitment to deliver value while building a strong SaaS pipeline to future paid users. 

Will Adobe maintain that? Only time will tell, but it’s a great example of a “Big Give” that works.

The verdict

GEO is becoming a crucial objective for brands and their marketing teams. This is a non-negotiable requirement of their modern tooling, and will inform the decision-making as they assess technologies to light these dark alleyways in their marketing intelligence.  

Semrush and its peers might be innovating on the edge, but we’re still in catch-up mode. Every day could be another DeepSeek moment of change, threatening to send practitioners back into a well of shadows when it comes to LLM behaviors. As such, having the scale and skunkworks that Adobe provides could inject more value into the GEO roadmap, giving enterprises greater confidence around the futureproofing.

This isn't “guesttimation” for me. I’ve personally relied on Semrush for years to analyze competitors, test longtail keywords, identify and root out toxic backlinks, and more. It’s a fantastic tool, and that’s why I think this is a smart move. Semrush is a solid, long-standing brand that’s built deep trust with its community, and that brand loyalty could benefit the transition to Adobe – a shift that hasn’t always been easy on cultures or communities.

Is it worth the bucks? As far as the tendered deal is concerned, the math around multiples appears sound and reflects what we’re seeing elsewhere (early to say if it’s a steal or a deal). While the numbers aren’t as mammoth, 2025 has been a solid year for M&A, tracking a 10% increase in overall activity in the first nine months of the year. A lot of that has been led by tech and specifically AI-related acquisitions, but the martech realm has been active, starting with the purchase of the Lytics CDP by Contentstack in January of this year.

Competitive pressure is a clear driver. As players like Optimizely and Sitecore expand their agentic AI features and evolve what a complete martech stack looks like, GEO capabilities are becoming front and center. And as the research indicates, conversions are going to be the key metric for ROI – and AI search is becoming a bigger piece of the integrated pie. 

What’s next? A lot. 

With the introduction of ChatGPT’s Agentic Commerce Protocol, we’re now seeing the potential for more retail transactions shifting to LLMs – creating even greater urgency for brands to elevate their presence across these channels. As we look ahead to the agent-to-agent frontier powered by MCP, it’s fair to predict that these buying motions will be faster and increasingly automated.

Look, there’s more here than just broadening the scope of Adobe’s marketing intelligence. It’s a signal that the race is on to shape the customer experience within the generative AI horizon – and giving marketers the best tools to meet the moment.

Enterprises want composable solutions that offer adjacent integrations but include purpose-built features to help them address the immediate challenges of the AI era. And they can’t wait for tomorrow – they have to act today. That’s what Adobe is delivering: the promise of speed and scale for an agentic world.

Can you feel the rush?

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