Engine Upgrade
Adobe has acquired SEO tech business Semrush in a $1.9 billion deal, The Wall Street Journal reports.
As the Journal notes, Adobe’s been making feature updates for search optimization lately, but that’s not the kind of SEO (or SEM) that Semrush is best known for. The hype these days is all about new acronyms like AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization).
Adobe is mostly interested in how Semrush could apply to its business moving forward, rather than how search optimization has operated to date.
“This is a natural way for us to keep growing in a space that’s very important to our existing customers,” says Anil Chakravarthy, president of Adobe’s Digital Experience Business. “Every chief marketing officer today is thinking about how they’re showing up in ChatGPT [and other platforms].”
Semrush should help boost Adobe’s analytics specifically for AI search responses.
Also, strangely enough, this deal means Adobe could end up with a search industry trade publication on its hands. Semrush bought Search Engine Land a year ago.
The Insight Racket
Speaking of generative AI search insights, there’s a huge market forming for products that track how people, products and brands appear in responses from the likes of ChatGPT, Perplexity, Anthropic’s Claude and Google AI Overviews.
The problem is that, while interesting, these insights are rarely useful to be acted upon by a business or marketer. For one, the engines themselves provide very few tools to process and track that data via an API. The tools essentially run automated queries themselves en masse.
For instance, want to know how Nike sneakers appear in ChatGPT searches? Well, run a script for the same search roughly 10,000 times and see what comes back. And then do the same for every other engine.
Also, brands can’t directly influence generative AI search results. All they can do is collect and analyze data.
And so the economics just won’t work for many such startups – but nobody is going to hit the brakes on this gravy train.
“Everyone is going crazy about becoming the next agency – all the side hustlers and snake oil sellers with their tools already on the train and riding the hype,” Kai Spriestersbach, an applied AI researcher, web scientist and SEO veteran, tells Business Insider.
Strides With Pride
The LGBTQ community is growing – and it’s an opportunity for marketers.
Outside of Pride Month (and even during), brands don’t tend to put their marketing dollars toward queer media – which means that “it’s an easy demographic to reach because it’s a white space,” according to Damian Pelliccione, CEO and co-founder of queer entertainment platform Revry.
Consistency is key when targeting queer audiences or, as Pelliccione puts it, “I’m still gay after June, and I still purchase products after June.”
The brands that see the highest ROAS working with Revry are those that don’t target a specific community, as per eMarketer. Advertising on queer media is already an effective strategy, as is targeting content that draws a high percentage of queer viewers.
Pelliccione encourages marketers to work with smaller partners when targeting LGBTQ audiences due to the sensitive nature of the first-party data.
The data needs to be “secure and protected,” they said, lest it “fall into the wrong hands of major DSPs that could resell that information for the wrong reasons.”
But Wait! There’s More!
A new industry report suggests that data centers are contributing to electricity blackout risks across Texas, the Southeast and the Mid-Atlantic. [Business Insider]
Meta has started announcing to Australian teenage users that their accounts will be shut down in compliance with an upcoming social media ban. [TechCrunch]
Defector, a (mostly) worker-owned subscription-based media publication, released its fifth public annual report. [Defector]
AI video analysis company Kerv.ai closed its Series B funding round. [release]
How MediaMint’s new agentic AI tool is helping publisher ad ops work more efficiently. [AdMonsters]
Music blog Stereogum says Google’s pivot to AI Overviews caused its ad revenue to drop by 70% this year. [blog]
You’re Hired!
TiVo parent company Xperi appoints Matt Milne as president of TiVo ads. [release]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
