Adobe is acquiring Semrush for $1.9 billion. The creator of Photoshop and Acrobat wants to expand its marketing offering with SEO and AI search capabilities.
The acquisition should help Adobe give companies better insight into their online visibility. Adobe is paying $12 per share, a premium of 77.5 percent over Tuesday’s closing price. Semrush shares rose 55 percent before the market opened, a logical consequence of the news.
Adobe’s stock has fallen more than 27 percent this year, Reuters reports. This is cause for concern. Investors want the company to bring AI products to market faster. Competition is increasing in Adobe’s creative domain, where it has long reigned supreme. In October, Adobe announced that video and photo editing tools will be controllable via chat. It is also collaborating with OpenAI to allow users to operate applications directly via ChatGPT. At the same time, accessible AI tools such as image generation via ChatGPT are competitors for Adobe’s professional suite.
Read also: Adobe launches AI Foundry for custom generative AI models
Why Semrush?
Semrush is a platform that helps organizations with search engine optimization (SEO), social media, and digital advertising. The company has over ten years of experience in optimizing online findability.
With Semrush, Adobe gains access to GEO expertise, where the G (generative) replaces the S (search) because it concerns findability via GenAI chatbots. Figures from Adobe Analytics show that traffic from generative AI sources to US retail sites rose by 1,200 percent in October compared to a year earlier. This does not seem to be a cause for concern for Google: the former handles 14 billion searches per day versus 66 million searches from ChatGPT.
Nevertheless, generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini are changing how consumers search for information in the long run. Brands must therefore invest in both traditional SEO and generative engine optimization (GEO). Those who fail to do so will be at risk in the long term.
Complementary solutions
Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), Adobe Analytics, and the newly introduced Adobe Brand Concierge address issues for brands getting started with AI. Together with Semrush, Adobe hopes to deliver a complete solution that shows marketers how their brand appears in their own channels, large language models (LLMs), traditional search engines, and the rest of the web.
“Brand visibility is being reshaped by generative AI, and brands that don’t seize this new opportunity risk losing relevance and revenue,” said Anil Chakravarthy, president of Adobe’s Digital Experience Business.
The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2026, subject to regulatory and shareholder approval. Adobe has already secured commitments from shareholders representing more than 75 percent of the voting rights.