Its because web publishing industry is dead, killed by corrupt government(s) and mega corpos which now call themselves "AI companies". Intellectual property rights are no more, not to the small and medium size publishers anyway.

Semrush owners managed to exit right on time.

That is a lot to pay for something that doesn't work.

Uh... you want to BUY? Gim'me a pen! Where do I sign!

(nothing rushed here, of course)

Reality? Once great, still fairly decent, an add-on for a behemoth determined to remain relevant. Not a bad acquisition.

The Adobe–Semrush deal feels like a marker for where SEO tooling is heading; especially for the smaller operators here who rely on accurate, affordable data.

TL;DNR (a practical version for search practitioners):

1. Pricing reality (USD/mo):
•Semrush: $129 > $249 > $499+ (real use often $300–$600 with add-ons)
•Ahrefs: $99 > $399 (still expensive, but fewer upsells)
•Mid-tier tools: $30–$90 (SE Ranking, Serpstat, Mangools)
•Crawlers: $259/year (Screaming Frog - still unbeatable value)

For most small–medium sites, Semrush is already outside the viable range.

2. What Semrush uniquely offers (that cheaper tools don’t):
•very large keyword database
•competitive traffic/ad intelligence
•integrated content tools (entity scoring, topic gap analysis)
•broad “all-in-one” workflow

Useful, yes — but many metrics (traffic estimates, competitor numbers) can be off by 40–70%, and its backlink index is still noticeably smaller than Ahrefs.

3. What Adobe’s ownership signals:
•SEO data sets are becoming commoditised
•The value is shifting to integration in enterprise marketing stacks
•Expect heavier UI, higher pricing, less independence
•Ahrefs now stands as the only major independent SEO data provider

This is similar to what we’ve already seen in other parts of digital: tools migrate “upmarket,” and the lower/mid market adopts modular alternatives instead.

4. Likely impact for the Google Search community:
•Fewer affordable large-dataset tools
•More reliance on Search Console + smaller modular add-ons
•AI tools closing the gap on keyword/topic clustering
•Technical work moving back toward crawlers and logs
•“One-suite-fits-all” becomes an enterprise story, not a webmaster one

5. Bottom line:
Semrush won’t disappear, but it will almost certainly move further into the enterprise tier under Adobe. For those of us running small or mid-sized sites, the future looks more “build your own stack” — combining crawlers, mid-cost rank trackers, and lightweight AI tools — rather than relying on a single large suite.

Thoughts?

the general public's least favorite company buys all SEOs' least favorite company.

First of all, Adobe's share price has dropped by a third in the last two years...it is perceived as hopelessly behind in the AI race. Paying this much for SEMrush seems reckless and pointless for a company that offers no tangential services. I am hoping that Adobe starts offering SEMrush as part of their already very expensive all-inclusive plan. It's $70 / month for the Adobe plan, not including the Generative AI plan they are trying to shove down everyone's throats now. If they add SEMrush for free my plan will become a lot more cost effective. I refuse to pay for SEMrush as half of the data it provides is half-baked and inaccurate. It pretends to do everything, but very little of it well.

It pretends to do everything, but very little of it well.

The others are no better.

If I could afford to launch rockets into space, I would buy up all the SEO services and send them into space where they cannot bother anyone ever again.

Adobe buys Semrush - what’s going on in SEO?

They see the writing on the wall and are selling while they still can find a buyer to cash out. None of these AI chatbots are sending much traffic which leaves little use for tools that monitor meaningless ranks and citations. Search is dead.

SEMrush Authority Score is a vanity metric just like Ahrefs DR.
You can inflate it to 60+ with cheap Fiverr backlink bundles.
If a metric can be gamed in a weekend, it’s not “authority,” it’s sales collateral.

The Adobe acquisition doesn’t fix the underlying issue: SEMrush is still a keyword + crawl + competitive discovery tool pretending its single-number “score” reflects how Google ranks.
It doesn’t.

Google runs entity graphs, behavioral models (Navboost), embeddings, and real editorial signals.
A single credible citation will outperform 500 spam domains every day of the week.

Use SEMrush for audits, research, and competitor insights.
Not to decide which site is “powerful.”

The web decides that, not Adobe, not Ahrefs, not SEMrush.

SEMrush Authority Score is a vanity metric just like Ahrefs DR.
You can inflate it to 60+ with cheap Fiverr backlink bundles.
If a metric can be gamed in a weekend, it’s not “authority,” it’s sales collateral.

That's right. DR is complete joke. But don't make it sound like actual Google ranking isn't. It is just as dumb, only different.

Any tools out there more related to this that add value, per Brett's must read article? [searchengineworld.com...]
Also at:

DOJ Leak; Google’s ranking stack exposed
NavBoost, RankEmbed & Twiddlers

thread here: [webmasterworld.com...]

[edited by: not2easy at 10:18 pm (utc) on Dec 1, 2025]
[edit reason] fixed link encoding [/edit]

Feels like classic consolidation. Big platforms want data and Semrush basically sits on one of the biggest SEO datasets outside Google. For Adobe it fits perfectly into their marketing stack, analytics, content tools, ads, everything in one place. The risk for smaller SEOs is exactly what you mentioned, tools slowly moving upmarket with enterprise pricing and heavier integrations. Usually when a big company buys a tool the product survives, but it rarely stays as simple or accessible as before.