The Semrush acquisition by Adobe is over (unfortunately, a loss in my book this time; I bought at $13.2, and Adobe acquired at $12 per share).
I bought some SEMR two years ago. Been a user for many years, DevriX is an agency partner member, organic has been close to my heart for 15+ years, and big data is what we plow through at work.
Two more poor choices for individual SaaS in my portfolio performed similarly – Zoom and Asana. I gave up on Zoom (even though I prefer it to Meet/Teams) and still struggle with Asana’s business decisions and enterprise processes after 12 years as a user there, too.
Still, a smart move by SEMR. The SaaS market is rough. AI is eating up a lot of that. Justifying SaaS subscriptions against a $20/mo Claude or ChatGPT license is not easy.
And we pay close to $1K/mo for our agency plan (which is still stretched as user seats are $90/user and still using the same shared tokens of the core plan).
Probably comes as no surprise that we’ve been using the API for 5 years, and the MCP for the past 8 months. But still, we’re barely scratching the surface of the data intelligence we need – and with organic positioning shaken drastically, it’s a mix of cost, limitations, lots of manual work + extra AI license/token fees to enrich or crunch data.
So:
As a former shareholder, I kept the business’s interest in mind, investing time in internal training, R&D, adoption, integrations – despite the limitations, steep price, or lack of any specific “advantage” for being an agency partner (other than an extra cost to the program).
As someone who sold at a loss to a company I’m not affiliated with (and never used actively), I’ll take a moment to reconsider the agentic revolution in organic search intelligence across the rest of the ecosystem.
