Adobe acquires SEO platform Semrush for $1.9BN
The SEO industry hasn’t exactly been short of news over the past 18 months. From the various trials and tribulations of AI, some big Google algorithm updates, and the slow death of X, there’s a seemingly never-ending cycle of digital marketing stories and events from across the web.
As 2025 draws to a close, there is one (hopefully) last big event that will be sending shockwaves and raised eyebrows around the whole SEO Industry:
Adobe has purchased the digital marketing platform Semrush for a staggering $1.9bn.
Industry reaction to the deal has been a mixture of scepticism and bewilderment.
At nearly double the value of the pre-announcement share price, the general consensus is that Adobe appears to have been on the wrong end of a very one-sided deal.
That’s… a lot of money, no?
Yes! So, the question is, why? Why have Adobe been so apparently desperate to acquire a Semrush type platform that they would potentially overpay by such a huge amount?
Anil Chakravarthy, Adobe’s president of their Digital Experience Business, gave some clues in an interview with Bloomberg shortly after the news was announced.
The answer? AI.
The increasing talk of an AI bubble has either undeterred Adobe from pursuing such a mighty deal or simply come too late to stop it. A huge oil-tanker of a company like Adobe will have had this deal in the works for months, potentially years with prior scoping. It was never going to hit STOP within a few weeks of completion.
In his interview, Anil spoke about how this deal was motivated by their belief that AI will be essential for marketers, not only for brand visibility, but also for work planning and processes:
They (Semrush) use AI across their own data. They use it to understand what brands need to do and think about to be visible to their consumers. They also use AI to help guide the workflows of marketers to be able to manage their work efficiently and to make sure they are both proactively and reactively increasing their brand presence and optimising their brand visibility. – Anil Chakravarthy, speaking to Bloomberg News
Is AI genuinely worth this much in 2025?
At B#, we are not at all convinced by the role that AI has in terms of both marketing processes or as marketing channels to effectively target resources.
The features that AI is supposedly “powering” in these types of digital platforms are typically features that have been around in some form or another for years, well before the rise of AI.
They are as effective now as they were before, although less-experienced marketers or those choosing a DIY approach may find the AI prompts useful.
However, these are not the types of users that Adobe will be targeting. They are banking (literally to the tune of almost $2,000,000,000) that big enterprises will be tempted to move to Semrush for AI data analysis and outputs.
Considering Semrush has always been considered a one-size-fits-all digital marketing suite, rather than a specialist platform for data or AI, this seems to be optimistic at best.
A smart bet… or another one for the AI Bubble?
My personal belief is that Adobe have been caught up in the AI Bubble and have scrambled to acquire an AI platform in the hope that they can catch their slice of any future revenue winds.
Anil alluded to this by talking about anticipating a “coming wave” of “enterprise customers relying on AI”.
Adobe has always been good at looking around the corner and anticipating what customers are going to need. What we see now in the world of Agentic AI is that for chief marketing officers (CMOs) this is top of mind for them. – Anil Chakravarthy, speaking to Bloomberg News
This deal ultimately boils down to a $2bn bet that, in the future, in-house marketing teams are going to become dependent on AI.
Adobe will be hoping that big-budget companies are going to flock to Semrush to achieve their marketing goals, as opposed to building their own in-house AI infrastructure (or simply continuing to utilise hybrid software/AI/human methodologies that have always worked and still work to this day).
How will the deal impact Adobe and Semrush?
With the latest accounts for Adobe showing yearly revenue of over $21bn, the success or failure of this new venture isn’t likely to affect the wider business with any great severity.
The same can’t be said for Semrush. A tool that has suffered repeated pushbacks from subscribers for repeated price increases, feature-locking, and increasing focus on new tools at the expense of improvements to existing features.
There is already speculation within the industry that prices will rise once more to offset acquisition costs. It would also be reasonable to assume that a further pivot towards AI process and management features is likely, based on Adobe’s stated aims for the platform.
SEO Platforms: What Do We Recommend?
When it comes to SEO or GEO, at B# we have worked with all the major digital marketing tools (including Semrush, Ahrefs, SE Ranking) and indeed have active subscriptions with all of the big three.
Our typical recommendation is always to choose the tool that is rated the highest for the key feature that is most important to your marketing goals. For example, if tracking links and analysing domain link data is most important, then Ahrefs or Majestic would be a sensible solution.
However, this approach can be quite draining on resources or unfeasible for limited budgets. If an all-in-one solution is required, SE Ranking currently provides the pound-for-pound industry leading platform for SEO, AI, and content marketing in our expert opinion.
That is at least until the next big player comes along looking to get on the AI acquisition train.
