The Martech Land Grab: Two Deals, One Message

Most people will read the Adobe–Semrush deal as an SEO headline.

They’ll see a big platform buying a well-known tool, nod politely at “GEO,” and move on.

But that’s not the real signal.

The real signal is that marketing intelligence is changing hands because the interface of demand is changing, and we now have two deals that show it from different ends of the market.

• On November 19, 2025, Adobe announced an agreement to acquire Semrush for $12.00 per share, valuing the business at roughly $1.9 billion.
  
  
• In early December 2025, Semify announced it had acquired Dragon Metrics, an international SEO/AI/PPC reporting platform, to expand global measurement and accelerate AI Optimisation (AIO) capabilities. 

Different scale. Same direction.

Enterprise platforms are consolidating the category crown.
Agency ecosystems are consolidating the delivery engine.

That’s the land grab.

This is the simplest way to understand what’s happening.

1) The interface has shifted

Consumers no longer discover brands through a single doorway.

Discovery is now layered across:

• traditional search,
• owned channels,
• social discovery,
• LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini,
• and increasingly, AI agents who research, shortlist, and recommend.
  
  

This is a multi-ecosystem demand environment.
That is the new normal.

2) The infrastructure is catching up

When discovery fragments, the value moves upstream.

The winners aren’t the brands that publish the most content.
They’re the brands who understand:

• where they show up,
• how they are represented,
• and what that visibility is actually doing to revenue.

That is precisely why Adobe wants Semrush.

Adobe’s announcement frames Semrush as a brand visibility platform that helps marketers understand how their brands appear across owned channels, LLMs, traditional search, and the wider web, positioning GEO alongside SEO as a core growth channel.  

This isn’t a random add-on.
It’s a move for relevance and control in the agentic AI era.

3) The talent shift is next

As platforms rebuild infrastructure for this new interface, the market will reward the operators who can orchestrate it.

This is where the agency opportunity becomes real.

Adobe–Semrush is the enterprise end of the story. Adobe is effectively saying that brand visibility in the age of LLMs now belongs inside the core experience stack, not as a tactical add-on, but as a CMO-grade capability. 

And the simplest way to frame the risk is this: if your brand is invisible in AI answers, you’re invisible in modern discovery. Because the first shortlist is increasingly being formed before anyone opens Google, and this isn’t just an enterprise play, the same consolidation logic is showing up in the agency ecosystem.

Semify–Dragon Metrics is the ecosystem end of the same story. 

Semify is a white-label platform serving agencies. 

Dragon Metrics brings deep international reporting across SEO, AI, and PPC, with strength in major Asian markets. 

The acquisition is positioned as a way to expand global measurement and accelerate AIO product development. So while Adobe is acquiring the top-of-market intelligence layer, Semify is strengthening the agency-ready infrastructure that turns modern visibility into a repeatable service. Different size, same signal. The measurement layer is being consolidated because discovery is no longer single-engine.

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There’s a lazy take floating around that AI will kill SEO.

That’s not what the serious buyers are betting on.

What we’re actually watching is a split:

• Traditional search still matters.
• LLM visibility is rising.
• Owned-channel consistency is becoming more critical because AI systems pull from broader brand signals.

So the job is no longer just ranking.

The job is representation.

In that world, AI doesn’t reduce the need for marketing.
It raises the price of certainty.

And certainty requires intelligence.

That’s what this acquisition cycle is really about.

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When interfaces change, categories reorganise.

Mobile did it.
Social did it.
Now, AI-assisted discovery is doing it.

This is not a contraction phase for marketing.
It is a rejuvenation phase, a reshuffling of budgets, roles, and value.

Tools that quantify brand visibility across LLMs and search will stop being specialist add-ons and become expected infrastructure. 

And when a capability becomes standard, the smart money either builds it or buys it.

Adobe is buying it.

Semify is scaling the white-label route to deliver it.

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If your growth depends on visibility, your visibility risk is now multi-interface.

You should be asking:

• Do we understand how our brand appears in AI answers today?
• Are our owned and earned signals coherent enough to be represented accurately?
• Can we connect visibility to pipeline and revenue, not just traffic?
• Who internally owns this, and do they have the authority to act?

This is not just a tooling question.

This is a strategic operating decision.

Because in the LLM era, brand invisibility isn’t your only threat.
Brand misrepresentation is too.

This is the bigger opportunity hidden within a complex shift.

Brands are not struggling with content volume.
They are struggling with decision velocity.

They are trying to work out:

• which channels matter now,
• which signals influence AI discovery,
• what “good” looks like across multiple ecosystems,
• and how to allocate budget without flying blind.

That is why agencies may become more essential than ever.

But only if they mature their positioning.

The sell is no longer: “We do SEO.”

Or even: “We do GEO.”

The sell becomes:
“We run your visibility operating system across search and LLMs, tied to commercial outcomes.”

That means productising:

• a multi-interface visibility audit,
• narrative consistency across owned/earned/search/LLMs,
• an authority and content roadmap that maps to AI-assisted discovery,
• and a reporting cadence a CMO can trust.

Adobe is building the enterprise visibility OS.

Semify is building the agency-scale infrastructure that helps the rest of the market deliver it.  

Agencies that understand that dual movement will win.

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We’re not watching a couple of isolated acquisitions.

We’re watching the market decide what matters next.

The story of December 2025 is simple:

Demand is now multi-layered.
So visibility intelligence is becoming foundational.
So the stack is consolidating around the truth layer.

Adobe–Semrush is the validation at the enterprise level.  
Semify–Dragon Metrics is the validation inside the agency ecosystem.  

If you’re a founder, the play is to treat visibility across Google and LLMs as core infrastructure.

If you’re a founder-led agency, the play is to stop selling outputs and start selling navigation.

Because the next phase of marketing won’t reward the loudest brands.

It will reward the best-instrumented ones.

Ask yourself one question:

If a buyer asked ChatGPT who the best agencies in your category are, would you show up?

If you’re not sure, you don’t have a visibility strategy yet.

Talk to Unusual about building one that’s buyer-grade.

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