Adobe buys Semrush for US$1.9B: the Generative Engine Optimization era begins-visibility, agents, and AI-native commerce 

With this move, Adobe is positioning itself to dominate the next frontier of marketing: GEO, the art and science of ensuring brands appear inside AI-generated answers, agentic conversations, and commerce flows. 

This deal fuses Adobe’s creative and data clouds with Semrush’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) intelligence, a platform with 26.5 billion keywords, 43 trillion backlinks, and insights drawn from 774 million desktop and 32 million mobile domains, to create a closed-loop visibility engine, where content is not only produced and distributed but also continuously optimized for discoverability within generative ecosystems. 

This blog takes a closer look at what it means for the fast-evolving agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) domain and implications in the MarTech provider ecosystem. 

Reach out to discuss this topic in depth.  

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and agentic commerce: when visibility converts itself 

For two decades, SEO has been the digital world’s oxygen, a ritual of ranking pages and chasing algorithms. But gen AI has detonated that model. Search is now diffuse, contextual, and conversational. Visibility is negotiated not on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) but inside large language models, copilots, and agent ecosystems. 

By integrating Semrush’s 26.5 billion-keyword and 43-trillion-backlink corpus into Experience Cloud, Adobe can now translate search telemetry into GEO intelligence, visibility mapping for generative engines such as Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. This marks the end of keyword optimization and the rise of entity optimization, where the battleground is semantic authority inside AI cognition. 

The Adobe–Semrush alliance crystallizes the rise of agentic AI, autonomous systems that perceive, reason, and act without human intervention, marking a shift from traditional automation to full autonomy in marketing and commerce. By coupling Semrush’s vast visibility intelligence with Adobe’s creative and data engines (Firefly, Marketo, and AEM), the ecosystem evolves into a living network of agentic visibility systems capable of continuously generating, testing, and refining content; detecting visibility decay across generative ecosystems; and self-optimizing creative elements, metadata, and tone to sustain brand prominence.  

These agents will extend beyond marketing into agentic commerce, a new paradigm where discovery, engagement, and transaction converge within a single AI-orchestrated flow. 

Imagine this: 

• A generative engine identifies user intent (“eco-friendly running shoes”)
• Adobe’s agentic marketing stack ensures the brand surfaces in that conversation 
• A connected commerce agent autonomously configures the product, pricing, and delivery experience, right within the conversational interface 

Here, visibility isn’t the end goal; it’s the trigger for autonomous conversion. Adobe now has the arsenal of building blocks: creative generation (Firefly), marketing orchestration (Marketo), analytics, and Semrush’s intent telemetry, to become the core operating system for agentic commerce. 

The acquisition also comes at a moment of strategic opportunism. Semrush’s stock has fallen sharply over the past year, down nearly 40% year-to-date, hovering around US$11–12 after peaking above US$18 earlier in 2025. The decline reflected slower-than-expected enterprise growth, pressure on marketing tech budgets, and intensifying competition in SEO analytics from AI-native startups.  

Despite this dip, Semrush’s fundamentals remain strong, with Q3 2025 revenues exceeding US$105 million and 1.1 million+ active users, underscoring its enduring relevance and data depth. For Adobe, the downturn created a bargain entry point, acquiring a category-leading visibility engine at a discount, while competitors are still recalibrating to gen AI disruption.  

Implications for Adobe 

1. From experience platform to visibility platform 

Adobe Experience Cloud evolves into a ‘Visibility Cloud’, tracking not just engagement metrics but interpretation metrics: how AI systems read, reference, and recommend brand content. Every creative asset becomes measurable for its AI discoverability value. 

2. Generative orchestration advantage 

Adobe can now deploy fleets of autonomous marketing agents that: 

• Monitor AI-answer ecosystems for brand presence 

• Generate or adapt creative variants automatically 

• Optimize entity graphs and schema markup to sustain visibility 

This converts marketing operations from manual to self-learning orchestration. 

3. Commerce convergence 

By coupling Semrush’s intent data with Adobe’s Experience Manager and Commerce Cloud, Adobe gains visibility across the entire purchase continuum, from search intent to transaction execution, enabling agentic commerce at scale. 

The three wars of Adobe: how one move threatens the giants of MarTech, search, and commerce 

Adobe is now in a three-front war against 

• Salesforce, HubSpot, for marketing automation intelligence 

• Google, Microsoft, for generative discovery share 

• Shopify, Amazon, for commerce orchestration relevance 

Adobe’s acquisition of Semrush positions it at the center of a three-front competitive war reshaping the digital ecosystem.  

Against Salesforce and HubSpot, Adobe is challenging the incumbents in marketing automation and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) intelligence by moving beyond campaign workflows to agentic marketing orchestration.  

Semrush’s real-time intent and visibility data allow Adobe to anticipate customer needs and optimize AI answer presence, an advantage competitors currently lack. Both Salesforce’s Data Cloud + Einstein and HubSpot’s AI Assistants remain powerful in engagement analytics but lack a Large Language Model (LLM)-visibility layer comparable to Adobe’s integration of GEO and creative intelligence. Expect these platforms to evolve toward “answer-rank” analytics, tracking how brands perform across AI-generated results, as they attempt to close the visibility gap. 

Against Google and Microsoft, Adobe’s challenge is existential. These giants own the discovery layer, through AI Overviews and Copilot, they determine what information is cite-worthy and which brands are surfaced.  

Adobe’s path to resilience lies in durable data-sharing and ad-platform integrations, which it has already begun expanding through GenStudio partnerships. Yet platform risk remains high: if LLMs restrict third-party visibility data, Adobe’s GEO advantage could narrow. Maintaining strategic interdependence with Google’s marketing Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), Microsoft Advertising, and emerging generative ecosystems will be critical to ensuring persistent agentic visibility across closed AI networks. 

On the commerce front, Adobe’s competition with Shopify and Amazon centers on control points. Shopify dominates small-to-midsize commerce enablement, Amazon rules retail distribution and media monetization. Adobe, however, is building the connective tissue between visibility, content, and transaction, the foundation of agentic commerce.  

Through Experience Cloud and recent Adobe MAX updates, the company is deepening AdTech and retail media integrations, enabling brands to manage their creative assets, campaigns, and commerce feeds within a single autonomous loop. By blending Semrush’s demand intelligence with these hooks, Adobe is positioning itself as the orchestrator of end-to-end commerce journeys, where discovery, engagement, and purchase are managed by AI agents rather than isolated platforms. 

In essence, Adobe’s move forces an industry realignment: Salesforce and HubSpot will race to build visibility intelligence, Google and Microsoft will guard platform access, and Shopify and Amazon will tighten commerce ecosystems. Adobe’s advantage lies in uniting them, creative, data, and commerce, under a single agentic operating model that turns visibility into conversion and content into cognition. 

Implications for enterprise marketers 

For Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) and marketing operations leaders, Adobe’s acquisition of Semrush redefines how visibility, content, and experience strategies must evolve in the AI era. 

1. Search and AI visibility become mission critical 

Enterprises need to move beyond SEO to ensure brand presence within AI and generative discovery systems. Visibility now depends on how AI models interpret and retrieve brand entities, not just how they rank on search engines. 

2. Consolidation of MarTech stacks 

Adobe’s integration of Semrush will unify visibility, analytics, and creative workflows. This creates efficiency but also increases dependence on a single ecosystem, which requires careful assessment of flexibility and vendor risk. 

3. Data and creativity converge 

With Semrush data feeding into Adobe’s creative and marketing platforms, content creation will be guided by visibility intelligence. Creative, data, and AI teams must work together to sustain discoverability in generative environments. 

4. New governance and measurement priorities 

AI systems now shape how brands are represented. Enterprises must monitor accuracy, manage bias, and measure success through AI visibility share, which captures how often and how favorably a brand appears in generative outputs. 

Final thoughts

Adobe’s acquisition of Semrush marks a pivotal inflection point in the evolution of digital marketing, signaling the definitive transition from static, human-managed optimization to autonomous, intelligence-driven visibility and commerce.  

By fusing Semrush’s vast SEO and intent data, spanning billions of keywords, trillions of backlinks, and hundreds of millions of domain insights, with Adobe’s creative, analytics, and experience orchestration engines, the company has effectively built the foundation for a new marketing paradigm: one where GEO ensures brands are recognized by AI systems, agentic AI sustains that recognition autonomously, and agentic commerce transforms visibility into seamless, self-executing transactions.  

In this emerging landscape, visibility is no longer a metric to be measured but a living, adaptive system that learns, acts, and converts in real time.  

The winners in this new era will not be those who create the most content, but those who teach AI to recognize, amplify, and transact on their behalf, shaping a marketplace where brand presence and business outcomes are algorithmically intertwined. 

If you found this blog interesting, check out UJET acquires Spiral: Moving from contact management to customer understanding – Everest Group Research Portal, which delves deeper into another acquisition in the marketplace in recent weeks. 

To discuss this further, please contact Nitish Mittal ([email protected]), Aakash Verma ([email protected]) and Prachi Rohira ([email protected])