Adobe Is Buying Semrush for $1.9 Billion. Here's What Its Traffic Really Looks Like. March 27, 2026 Expanded update to last month's post, to include new findings on Semrush's programmatic traffic sources after somehow escaping Google's March 2026 spam update . In November 2025, I started looking into Semrush's traffic composition after noticing visibility drops on a site I follow. I was also intrigued by the huge purchase of Backlinko (subject of the previous article), and the far bigger purchase of Semrush by Adobe. Using Ahrefs' free traffic checker looking at semrush.com, something unexpected showed up in the data: a meaningful chunk of Semrush's organic traffic was coming from programmatic scaled content: "alternatives and competitors" pages targeting some of the most toxic domains on the internet. I checked Spyfu's free traffic estimator which showed similar sites. The specific domains are visible in the results but too problemati...
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