Semrush is an American software company. It sells tools for search engine optimization (SEO), competitor analysis and website reporting. Its tools collect keyword data from Google and Bing. Adobe Inc. became the parent company of Semrush on 28 April 2026.
History of Semrush
Creator: Oleg Shchegolev and Dmitri Melnikov. Year: 2008.
Oleg Shchegolev built SeoQuake in 2006, according to a Clay company profile. SeoQuake was a browser extension for search engine optimization. The product later became a Firefox extension. The company later took the name Semrush. SEM stands for search engine marketing.
The company was founded in 2008 by Oleg Shchegolev and Dmitri Melnikov. Both founders are named in the Wikipedia article and in a Clay company profile. In April 2018, the firm raised $40 million.1 The platform covers SEO, competitor analysis and website reporting.
In March 2021, Semrush finished an initial public offering (IPO). It began trading on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). The ticker was SEMR.2 The listing used the name Semrush.
In July 2024, Semrush acquired Ryte, a website analysis company based in Munich, Germany. Ryte's own newsroom dated the announcement July 12, 2024. The platform offers tools for search engine optimization (SEO). It also covers AI search visibility. Other tools cover content marketing, paid advertising and local SEO.
On 19 November 2025, Adobe announced a deal to buy Semrush. The price was about $1.9 billion in cash. The price was $12.00 per share. Adobe completed the purchase on 28 April 2026. Adobe's release that day says the deal strengthens its CX Enterprise offering.
Changelog and latest update
In 2022, Semrush bought Backlinko. Backlinko is a search engine optimization training site founded by Brian Dean. Semrush also bought Kompyte in early 2022. Kompyte is a competitive intelligence and sales platform. In February 2023, it bought Traffic Think Tank, an SEO community. In October 2024, it bought Third Door Media. Third Door Media owns Search Engine Land, MarTech, SMX and Digital Marketing Depot.
The 2024 deals added Ryte for website SEO and user experience. The Third Door Media purchase added marketing education and publishing brands to the company. The platform now tracks how brands appear in answers made by AI platforms. Adobe names this AI search visibility feature in its deal release. The release says the deal adds brand visibility to CX Enterprise.
Latest update: Adobe acquisition of Semrush, 2026-04-28
On 28 April 2026, Adobe announced that it completed its acquisition of Semrush. The release title says the deal strengthens Adobe CX Enterprise. It adds brand visibility features. The release says the deal adds SEO, generative engine optimization and agentic search optimization to Adobe offerings.
Usage examples
Semrush offers tools through a web dashboard. It also offers an application programming interface (API). A developer sends an HTTP request with an API key. The API returns text or comma-separated rows. The three examples show a domain overview call, a robots.txt rule and a log count. They cover the Semrush crawler. Replace the key and the domain names with your own values.
curl -s "https://api.semrush.com/" \
-d "type=domain_ranks" \
-d "key=YOUR_API_KEY" \
-d "domain=example.com" \
-d "database=us" \
-d "export_columns=Dn,Rk,Or,Ot"This request asks the Semrush API for the domain ranking report for example.com. It uses the US database. The export_columns value selects four fields. They are the domain, the rank, the organic keyword count and the organic traffic. The API returns semicolon-separated rows.
User-agent: SemrushBot
Disallow: /private/
Disallow: /drafts/This robots.txt block tells the Semrush crawler, named SemrushBot, not to fetch two folders. The folders are /private/ and /drafts/. The file goes in the root folder of the domain. A crawler reads this file first. It follows the rules for its own user agent.
grep -i semrushbot access.log \
| awk '{print $1}' \
| sort | uniq -c | sort -rnThis command reads the Apache access log. It finds each line that names SemrushBot. It takes the first field, which is the client address. Then it counts the visits per address. A site owner can check those addresses against the robots.txt rules.
References
These sources are outside Websnoogie and were checked on 2026-10-12.
Semrush
Wikipedia
The encyclopedia article on the Semrush company. It covers the founders, the 2008 founding, the earlier names Seodigger and SeoQuake, the 2021 initial public offering, the 2024 acquisitions and the Adobe acquisition. Each fact cites a dated source, such as a press release or a news report.
Adobe Completes Semrush Acquisition
Adobe Newsroom
The Adobe press release dated 28 April 2026, which announces that Adobe completed its acquisition of Semrush Holdings. The release title says the deal adds brand visibility capabilities to Adobe's customer experience enterprise. It is the primary source for the completion date.
Search engine marketing
Wikipedia
The encyclopedia article on search engine marketing (SEM), the marketing that uses paid search results and search optimization. The Semrush name comes from SEM. The article explains the difference between paid and organic search, which matches the products that the company sells.
Search engine optimization
Wikipedia
The encyclopedia article on search engine optimization (SEO). It describes the methods that improve a page in search results and the search engines that the methods target, such as Google and Bing. It also covers the tools that analyze keyword and traffic data, including Semrush.
Check the page before you open a tool
Before any research tool runs, we check three things on your site. We read the title of each page, the description under it and the headings inside the page. Those parts tell search engines what each page is about. A tool can count words, but someone must decide whether those words fit your business.
Websnoogie, LLC is not affiliated with Semrush and is not endorsed by it. Many marketers use research tools like it. When a page needs their reports, we use the numbers as one input and explain each one in plain words. The page still has to say what your business does.
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