Adobe announced that it will acquire Semrush for approximately $1.9 billion in cash. The acquisition, coming at a moment of intense competitive pressure, represents more than the addition of an SEO and generative engine optimization (GEO) powerhouse, it highlights Adobe’s strategy to flex its dominance as generative AI reshapes how brands get discovered.

The deal also arrives as Adobe faces new threats from below: just months after Canva acquired Affinity, a major challenger in the small-to-midsize business (SMB) creative market. While Affinity’s suite does not yet match Adobe’s breadth, its affordability and loyalty among independent designers, agencies, and SMBs positioned Canva to chip away at Adobe’s historic stronghold in Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign.

Adobe’s response appears clear: instead of fighting, the company is expanding through strategic acquisitions that lock in end-to-end control of the customer experience, content supply chain, and now, brand visibility across AI interfaces.

Why Adobe Wants Semrush: AI Search Is the New Front Door for Brands

Consumers are increasingly bypassing traditional search engines in favor of large language models—ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and others—for product recommendations, advice, and purchase decisions. Adobe’s own data highlights this shift: traffic from generative-AI-driven sources to U.S. retail sites surged 1,200% year-over-year in October.

This movement places enormous pressure on companies to remain visible not just on Google, but inside LLMs. With Semrush’s decade of SEO expertise and emerging GEO capabilities, Adobe can now offer marketers:

• A unified view of brand presence across owned channels, LLMs, traditional search, and the broader web
• Tools to optimize for both search engines and generative AI models
• Deeper insights into audience reach and brand health
• A competitive edge as “AI search” becomes a primary traffic and revenue driver

With offerings like Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), Adobe Analytics, and the newly launched Adobe Brand Concierge, the Semrush acquisition fills a clear gap: ensuring that brands not only create content efficiently, but that their content is discoverable within AI interfaces that increasingly act as gatekeepers.

As Adobe’s Digital Experience Business President Anil Chakravarthy put it, “Brand visibility is being reshaped by generative AI, and brands that don’t embrace this new opportunity risk losing relevance and revenue.”

Competition Heats Up

For Adobe, bolstering its Digital Experience business with Semrush is a way of widening its competitive moat not just in creative tools, but in the entire lifecycle of brand creation, distribution, and discovery.

Where Canva is attacking Adobe from the creative side, Adobe is reinforcing its position at the enterprise and marketing layers basically areas Canva has yet to penetrate.

Semrush’s Strengths

In its most recent quarter, the company posted 33% year-over-year ARR growth in the enterprise segment, supported by major brands.

By combining Semrush’s deep visibility data with Adobe’s analytics and experience tools, the companies aim to deliver the most comprehensive brand visibility platform in the market.

Semrush CEO Bill Wagner emphasized this strategic alignment:

“Brands need to understand where and how their customers are engaging in these new channels… This combination provides marketers more insights and capabilities to increase their discoverability across today’s evolving digital landscape.”

Compete or Acquire

Adobe’s purchase of Semrush for $12 per share, with closing expected in the first half of 2026 pending regulatory approval, is part of a larger industry trend: big players are choosing acquisition over head-to-head product battles.

In an era where generative AI is fragmenting the marketing landscape, companies that once dominated isolated categories now need to grow and expand from content origination to AI-driven customer touchpoints.

Adobe clearly sees that the battle for visibility in AI is not optional. It is existential.

The Takeaway

Adobe’s $1.9B acquisition of Semrush is more than a strategic expansion—it is a preemptive recalibration of the company’s role in the next decade of digital marketing. With AI search redefining how consumers discover information and make decisions, Adobe is positioning itself at the center of this new visibility economy.

Meanwhile, Canva’s absorption of Affinity signals a bold push into the professional creative space, challenging Adobe’s long-standing dominance.

The result is a market no longer defined by feature wars between individual products but by sweeping acquisitions that build end-to-end solutions. Adobe’s move shows that in the age of agentic AI, survival belongs to those who control not only creation, but also distribution and discoverability.