Adobe’s agreement to acquire Semrush for 1.9 billion dollars has landed with a mix of surprise, curiosity and scepticism across the marketing and technology worlds. On paper, it is a straightforward deal. Adobe adds a well known SEO and digital visibility platform to its marketing suite. SEMRush gains a deep pocketed owner with enterprise distribution.
But the timing and the context make the move far more complex than it first appears. Search behaviour is changing rapidly. AI assistants are replacing traditional queries with direct answers. The prominence of classic search results is narrowing. And across the industry, there is a live debate over whether SEO as we know it is entering a long slowdown.
Against that backdrop, Adobe ’s decision feels both bold and counterintuitive. It could prove to be a visionary investment in the future of AI based discoverability. Or it could become one of the more expensive misreads in Adobe’s history.
Understanding that tension requires looking at both sides of the equation.
Why Adobe Might See Opportunity Where Others See Decline
Although SEMRush is known for SEO, Adobe is not buying it for the world of rankings and snippets alone. The acquisition announcement made it clear that Adobe sees this technology playing a role in understanding how brands appear not only in search engines but also in generative AI tools like OpenAI‘s ChatGPT and Google‘s Gemini. This is an important signal. Adobe wants to reposition itself for a world where algorithmic answers, not lists of links, guide consumer discovery.
Adobe’s existing marketing products cover content creation, automation, analytics and personalisation. What they have lacked is a strong external visibility component a way to understand how a brand shows up across the wider digital landscape. SEMRush fills that gap, providing competitive insight, keyword intelligence, backlink data and a mature crawling infrastructure.
That infrastructure matters. Building a web scale crawler and visibility engine from scratch takes years and many millions of dollars. Acquiring SEMRush gives Adobe a ready made backbone that can be extended into areas far beyond traditional search engine optimisation. Even though SEMRush currently offers no AI ranking or generative visibility product, it provides the scaffolding for Adobe to build one quickly.
There is also a narrative logic. Investor pressure on Adobe has intensified, with the company’s share price under strain and questions emerging about how quickly its AI investments will translate into revenue. SEMRush allows Adobe to tell a compelling story about AI driven discoverability and the evolution of digital marketing beyond search.
Finally, there is a defensive dimension. If AI assistants increasingly become the first stop for consumer questions, Adobe risks being boxed into creative tools while others shape the discovery layer. SEMRush is a hedge against that future. It gives Adobe a fighting chance to own the emerging concept of generative engine optimisation.
Why This Move Could Backfire
For all its strategic potential, the acquisition is laden with risks. The most obvious is that SEMRush’s current business is closely tied to traditional SEO. If the prominence of conventional search results continues to contract, the value of classic SEO tooling may decline faster than Adobe can reinvent it.
There is also a foundational problem: historical SEO data does not directly explain how AI assistants choose answers. AI models do not use search rankings, snippets or backlink counts. They rely on training data, embeddings, semantic relationships and reasoning layers that operate very differently from the Google era metrics SEMRush is built on. In other words, Adobe may be buying a platform whose core signals are becoming less predictive in the world it is trying to enter.
Another concern is integration. Adobe’s marketing cloud is vast and powerful but also complex. Folding SEMRush into that environment will take time and carries operational risk. Adobe will have to transform a product designed for search era behaviour into a suite of tools optimised for generative AI. That is not a simple translation.
The timing raises further questions. Adobe cancelled its twenty billion dollar acquisition of Figma under regulatory pressure. This puts more scrutiny on any new move. Regulators may again question the strategic intent of a major consolidation play. And even if approved, the acquisition will not close until the first half of next year, meaning any meaningful GEO product may still be years away.
Perhaps the biggest risk is conceptual. There is no guarantee that the emerging world of AI driven discovery will resemble the world SEMRush was born to analyse. If generative search becomes fully conversational, or if AI models rely more heavily on proprietary data sources, the importance of web based authority metrics may diminish significantly. Adobe could be left with a legacy platform that requires heavy reinvention to remain relevant.
A Bet on the Future Wrapped in the Logic of the Past
Adobe’s acquisition of SEMRush is not really a statement about SEO. It is a statement about visibility. It reflects a belief that brands will still need to understand how they are discovered, even if discovery moves away from the traditional search engine results page. It also reflects an ambition to own the emerging space between AI assistants and the open web.
Yet it is also a gamble. Adobe is assuming that SEMRush’s strengths can be translated into a new context, that historical authority signals remain useful, and that marketers will pay for tools that help them understand how they appear inside AI driven experiences. If those assumptions hold, Adobe will have bought an undervalued foundation for the next decade of digital marketing. If they do not, SEMRush may become an expensive reminder that buying relevance in a shifting landscape is far harder than buying technology.
For now, the acquisition sits in a rare moment of strategic ambiguity. It could redefine Adobe’s role in the marketing ecosystem. Or it could become the company’s most significant misstep since its abandoned Figma deal. The truth will only emerge as the industry discovers how AI will reshape the way brands are found and chosen in the years ahead.
