The SEO community is excited by the Semrush Adobe acquisition. The consensus is that it’s a milestone in the continuing evolution of SEO in the age of generative AI. Adobe’s purchase comes at a time of AI-driven uncertainty and may be a sign of the importance of data for helping businesses and marketers who are still trying to find a new way forward.
Cyrus Shepard tweeted that he believes the Semrush sale creates an opportunity for Ahrefs under the belief that Adobe’s scale and emphasis on the enterprise market will present an opportunity for Ahrefs to move fast to respond to rapidly changing needs of the marketing industry.
He tweeted:
“Adobe’s marketing tools lean towards ENTERPRISE (AEM, Adobe Analytics). If Adobe leans this way with Semrush, it may be a less attractive solution to smaller operators.
With this acquisition, @ahrefs remains the only large, independent SEO tool suite on the market. Ahrefs is able to move fast and innovate – I suspect this creates an opportunity for Ahrefs – not a problem.”
Shepard is right, some of Adobe’s products (like Adobe Analytics) do lean toward enterprise users but there’s a significant small and medium size business user base for design related tools with pricing at the $99/month range that make the tools relatively affordable. Nevertheless that’s a significant cost compared to the $600 range that Adobe used to charge for standalone versions for Windows and Mac.
I agree that Ahrefs is quite likely the best positioned tool to serve the needs of the SMB end of the SEO industry should Semrush increase focus on the enterprise market. But there are also smaller tools like SERPrecon that are tightly focused on helping businesses deliver results and may benefit from the vacuum left by Semrush.
Validates SEO Platforms
Seth Besmertnik, CEO of the enterprise SEO platform Conductor, sees the acquisition as validating SEO platforms, which is a valid observation considering how much money, in cash, Semrush was acquired for.
Besmertnik wrote:
“I’m feeling a lot this morning. HUGE news today. Adobe will be acquiring Semrush…our partner, competitor, and an ally in the broader SEO and AEO/GEO world for over a decade.
For a long time, big tech ignored SEO. It drove half of the internet’s traffic, yet somehow never cleared the bar as something to own. I always believed the day would come when major platforms took this category seriously. Today is that day.”
It’s an exciting moment! We’re starting to see some consolidation and this represents huge recognition of how important the work of SEOs is. From traditional SEO through optimizing for AI platforms, the work is important. Clearly Adobe is thinking this way on behalf of their clientele, which means great things ahead.”
Besmertnik also made the point that the industry is entering a transitional phase where platforms that are adapted to AI will be the leaders of tomorrow.
He added:
“This next era won’t be led by legacy architectures. It will be led by platforms that built their foundations for AI…and by companies engineered for the data-first, enterprise-grade world that’s now taking shape.”
Validates SEO
Duane Forrester, formerly of Bing, shared the insight that the acquisition shows how important SEO is, especially as the industry is evolving to meet the challenges of AI search.
Duane shared:
“It’s an exciting moment! We’re starting to see some consolidation and this represents huge recognition of how important the work of SEOs is. From traditional SEO through optimizing for AI platforms, the work is important. Clearly Adobe is thinking this way on behalf of their clientele, which means great things ahead.”
Online Reactions Were Mostly Positive
There were a few comments with negative sentiment published in response to Adobe’s announcement on X (formerly Twitter), where some used the post to vent about pricing and other grudges but many others from the SEO community offered congratulations to Semrush.
Congratulations!
— Lee Odden (@leeodden) November 19, 2025
What It All Means
As multiple people have said, the sale of Semrush is a landmark moment for SEO and for SEO platforms because it puts a dollar figure on the importance of digital marketing at a time when the search marketing industry is struggling to reach consensus of how SEO should evolve to meet the many changes introduced by AI Search.
Many Questions Remain Unanswered
What Will Adobe Actually Do With Semrush’s Product?
Will Semrush remain a standalone product or will it be offered in multiple versions for enterprise users and SMBs or will it be folded into one of Adobe’s cloud offerings?
Pricing
A common concern is about pricing and whether the cost of Semrush will go up. Is it possible that the price could actually come down?
Semrush Is A Good Fit For Adobe
Adobe started as a software company focused on graphic design products but by the turn of the millenium it began acquiring companies directly related to digital marketing and web design, but increasingly focusing on the enterprise market. Data is useful for planning content and also for better understanding what’s going on at search engines and at AI-based search and chat. Semrush is a good fit for Adobe.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Sunil prajapati
