The LSE Directory / Alternative data
Semrush is a SaaS platform for online visibility, search engine optimization and marketing analytics, founded in 2008 in Boston. It aggregates data gathered by continuously crawling the web and search engines, chiefly Google and Bing, into a suite of toolkits covering SEO, content marketing, paid advertising, social media, local-business listings, PR, and a newer AI Visibility Toolkit that tracks how a brand appears in AI chat and generative-search answers rather than only classic search results pages. Marketing teams and agencies use it for keyword research, rank tracking, technical site audits, backlink analysis and competitor benchmarking. Its differentiator against single-purpose analytics tools is breadth combined with estimation: because its data is crawled and inferred rather than pulled from a site owner's own first-party analytics, Semrush can estimate a competitor's organic and paid search traffic, keyword rankings, backlink profile and ad spend without needing that company's cooperation, which is the core value proposition for competitive-intelligence work. It sells through a large partner-agency channel as well as direct self-serve subscriptions, with pricing tiers running from individual marketers up to a separate enterprise product line for larger organizations. Within the wider alternative-data category, its crawled web-traffic and search-visibility estimates are also used by some equity researchers as a proxy for a company's online consumer demand, distinct from transaction-level or point-of-sale alternative-data providers. Semrush was founded in 2008 by Oleg Shchegolev and Dmitri Melnikov, evolving out of an earlier keyword-research browser extension the pair had built. The company raised $40 million in an April 2018 funding round led by Greycroft, Siguler Guff and e.ventures; in a release at the time it said its customer base included seven of the top ten AdWords spenders, more than a quarter of the Fortune 500, and named clients such as Booking.com, eBay, HP and BNP Paribas. Semrush listed on the NYSE under ticker SEMR in March 2021, reporting more than 82,000 customers and $213 million in revenue at IPO; revenue grew to $376.8 million by 2024. By 2025 the company employed roughly 1,600 people across ten offices, headquartered in Boston with additional sites in Barcelona, Belgrade, Berlin, Yerevan, Limassol, Prague, Warsaw, Amsterdam and Dallas. Bill Wagner became CEO in March 2025, with co-founder Shchegolev moving into the chief technology officer role. On 28 April 2026, Adobe completed its acquisition of Semrush Holdings for about $1.9 billion in cash, at $12.00 a share, a deal agreed in November 2025 and approved by Semrush shareholders in February 2026. Semrush now operates as a wholly owned subsidiary of Adobe; its NYSE listing was delisted and the company is deregistering its SEC reporting. Adobe has said it plans to fold Semrush's visibility and discoverability data into its Experience Cloud products, including Experience Manager, Commerce and Experience Platform, to help brands track and optimize their presence across traditional search engines, AI chat assistants and other generative-search surfaces.
