Why Adobe Really Acquired SEMrush for $2 Billion — A Hail Mary by Two Struggling Giants
Adobe is acquiring SEMrush for just under $2 billion — and the press releases make it sound like a visionary AI alignment. Let’s not pretend. This was not a strategic masterstroke. This was a hail mary pass from two companies trying not to get left behind.
SEMrush’s stock had been sliding for years. Their product was still 98% tied to SEO — a channel that’s collapsing as Google replaces blue links with AI Overviews and LLMs answer questions directly.
Adobe, meanwhile, has been getting creamed in the creative tools market by AI-native competitors like Canva, Grok’s creative tools, and Nano Banana. Adobe Creative Cloud is losing relevance, speed, and cultural momentum. Both companies needed something.
Let’s start with the inconvenient facts. Despite the AI buzz, SEMrush had only about 2% of its usage tied to AI analytics. The other 98% was: Keyword rankings, Backlink charts, Page audits, Search volume reports, etc.
SEO is dead as a growth channel — and SEMrush knew it. This wasn’t an exit from strength. It was an escape from irrelevance. SEMrush is a 20-year-old SEO analytics platform sitting on a mountain of legacy data — and very little future. They looked at the landscape and saw:
100+ venture-funded AI visibility startups
Perplexity, Google, and OpenAI building their own analytics layers
A shrinking SEO market with no high-growth path
A pivot into AI analytics that was too little, too late
SEMrush executives are smart. They saw the cliff. They chose a parachute, not the freefall. Adobe was that parachute.
The “Turtle Docs” Moment — Adobe’s Longstanding Limitations
Years ago, in a Microsoft meeting I attended, Bill Gates referred to PDFs as “turtle docs.”
A turtle doc, he explained, is: slow, rigid, heavy, closed, uneditable. A hard shell you can’t do much with.
Meanwhile, Microsoft Word docs were “rabbits” — fast, dynamic, open, collaborative. Gates wasn’t mocking Adobe. He was defining Adobe’s DNA:
“Adobe builds beautiful, rigid shells for creatives — not flexible, dynamic platforms for the masses.”
That’s been true for decades. Adobe dominates creation, but historically has been weak in:
collaboration
distribution
data
analytics
visibility
The “turtle docs” analogy has aged remarkably well. Because today, creatives don’t just need to export something beautiful. They need to know whether that asset will: be seen, be cited, rank in AI answers, or show up in Google’s AI Overview.
Adobe cannot offer that. They never built the analytics muscle. So they went out and bought SEMrush — hoping it would fill the analytics gap the same way Acrobat filled a documentation gap decades ago.
People forget this: Adobe has had analytics tools for more than a decade… and failed to make them relevant.
Adobe Analytics never broke through. It never became cultural. It never became the standard like: GA4, Looker, Tableau, Power BI, Mixpanel, Hotjar, and the list goes on and on….
Adobe simply couldn’t win on their own. Their analytics suite was overshadowed for years.
While Adobe was struggling to build analytics credibility, they were simultaneously losing creative market share to faster, cheaper, AI-native tools:
Canva dominating design for non-professionals
Grok introducing dynamic AI creative tooling
Nano Banana rising as lightning-fast, AI-first creation software
Adobe Creative Cloud still dominates the high end, but the momentum is shifting away from them. They needed a way to make the Creative Suite feel essential again.
Here’s the core truth no one at Adobe will publicly say: Adobe bought SEMrush because Adobe couldn’t jumpstart analytics on their own. By acquiring SEMrush, Adobe gets: Instant legitimacy in analytics, Direct access to marketing teams, A foothold in AI visibility, A way to tell creatives how their work will perform after creation. This wasn’t strategic brilliance. It was analytics outsourcing by acquisition.
This Was Not a Marriage of Strength. It Was a Merger of Necessity.
Both companies can spin this as synergy — and yes, there is a case for why the combo might work. But it’s important to recognize the truth:
SEMrush sold because SEO is collapsing.
Adobe bought it because their creative suite is losing momentum.
Adobe needed analytics.
SEMrush needed survival.
AI analytics is overcrowded with 100+ tools.
Both sides were cornered.
This wasn’t a bold bet on the future. It was a hail mary disguised as a strategic alignment. If Adobe can execute the integration flawlessly — maybe they revive their creative suite and turn SEMrush into a creative-to-visibility pipeline.
But make no mistake: Adobe didn’t buy SEMrush because both companies were strong. Adobe bought SEMrush because both companies were vulnerable. And that vulnerability is exactly what made the deal happen.