Adobe announced on Wednesday that it will buy Semrush — the SEO and brand-visibility platform beloved by digital marketers — in an all-cash deal worth $12 a share, or roughly $1.9 billion in equity value. The move, signed by both companies’ boards, is being framed as a fast track for Adobe to deepen its marketing stack for the so-called “agentic AI” era: helping brands not just rank in search engines but appear inside answers generated by large language models and other AI tools.

Semrush started as an SEO toolkit — keywords, rank tracking, backlinks, site audits — and has grown into a broader “brand visibility” suite that includes social, content and competitive research. In recent quarters, the company has leaned into what it calls generative engine optimization (GEO) — the practice of making brands discoverable in AI-driven search and chat responses, not just classic blue-link results. Adobe says Semrush’s GEO chops and decade of SEO data will plug into its Experience Cloud products to give marketers a single view of how their brands show up across owned properties, traditional search and LLM responses.

From a product standpoint, that’s the crux: Adobe already offers tools for content production (Creative Cloud), experience orchestration (Experience Manager) and analytics. Adding Semrush’s dataset and tooling gives Adobe a way to measure and act on brand visibility where consumer queries increasingly land — inside chatbots, assistants and generative search results. Marketing teams that have relied on separate SEO tools may now find that visibility signals and content workflows are stitched together inside Adobe’s environment.

The boards of both companies have approved the transaction, which Adobe expects to close in the first half of 2026, pending regulatory approvals and Semrush shareholder consent. Adobe said it has commitments from Semrush’s founders and other holders representing more than 75% of voting power to support the transaction — a strong sign the vote is likely to pass if regulators don’t intervene.

Wall Street reaction was immediate: Semrush shares jumped sharply on the announcement (the deal price implies a large premium to the stock’s recent trading level), while Adobe’s stock moved more modestly on the news. Analysts and investors will now watch whether Adobe’s pitch about GEO translates into higher monetization for its marketing business or adds cost and integration risk.

Why Adobe is buying now

Adobe has been explicit over the past year about treating generative AI as a structural change to how customers find brands. The company has already started shipping AI features that help marketers generate ads, produce creative assets and — more recently — experiment with AI agents to brainstorm and plan social campaigns. Semrush gives Adobe a data arm that measures discoverability outside the walled gardens of owned sites, which Adobe executives say is rapidly becoming “top of mind” for CMOs as users rely more on LLMs like OpenAI‘s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini for recommendations.

There’s also a strategic element: Adobe’s acquisition appetite has been constrained by regulatory risk after its abandoned $20 billion attempt to buy Figma in 2023, which was scuttled amid EU and UK antitrust scrutiny. That episode is a reminder that large software deals now face heightened review in multiple jurisdictions — something both companies acknowledged as they flagged the usual regulatory approvals required to close this deal.

What marketers and customers should expect

For Semrush customers, the immediate question is continuity: will the product stay the same, will pricing change, and what integrations will appear? Adobe says the plan is to combine Semrush’s GEO and SEO tools with Adobe Experience Cloud products to give marketing teams a more holistic visibility and orchestration capability. That could make life easier for enterprise teams that already pay for Adobe tools — but it could also push some agencies and small teams to shop around if Adobe bundles features into higher-tier offerings.

Technically, integration is never trivial. Adobe will need to merge Semrush’s datasets, APIs, and customer flows with its own analytics and content pipelines — a process that takes time and often exposes edge cases (data privacy, differing contract terms, third-party integrations). The companies themselves warn about these integration risks in the press release’s forward-looking language.

Who else is watching

The deal will be watched closely by other platform companies and SEO tooling vendors. Google and Microsoft have been quietly refining how their search and assistant experiences surface third-party content, and independent SEO vendors will be sizing up how Adobe’s expanded capabilities might reshape enterprise buying. If Adobe successfully bundles GEO insights into a broader marketing workflow, it could accelerate consolidation in martech — but it might also spawn new specialist tools that focus exclusively on the technical requirements of appearing in AI responses.

The short take

This is a smaller, more targeted acquisition than Adobe’s old Figma bid, but it says a lot about where Adobe thinks marketing is headed: visibility in the AI era isn’t just about keywords and backlinks anymore. It’s about being present in the answers, assistants and agentic flows consumers use every day. Whether Adobe turns that thesis into measurable revenue and smoother workflows for marketers will determine whether this $1.9 billion buy proves prescient — or merely defensive.