Adobe previews answer engine optimization, agentic AI creative tools

Adobe previewed many marketing and creative tools this week ahead of next week's Cannes Lions International Festival in Cannes, France.

Marketers waiting to see details on how the Semrush acquisition would unfold at Adobe got their answer: Semrush will be integrated with Adobe's LLM Optimizer as a new product called Brand Visibility, coming soon. But it will also remain a standalone product for Semrush users who have built marketing workflows around it.

Brand Visibility sits in the Adobe stack alongside other apps such as Brand Concierge, Experience Manager and Sites Optimizer. It can suggest content to broaden a company's authority in LLM search and offers benchmarking tools to measure how adding or changing content affects AI search results.

While SEO and answer engine optimization are distinctly separate sciences -- or arts, depending on your perspective -- they dovetail and are necessary to the marketer's mix. Brand Visibility monitors and analyzes users' mentions across traditional and AI search to figure out how to make it all work together, said Loni Stark, vice president of strategy and product at Adobe.

"A lot still happens in SEO -- AI is one of the biggest users of search, as you see when you type into chat," Stark said. "Another is the question of what people are really typing into ChatGPT? What are people really asking? You know what you're asking, I know what I'm asking, but how do brands know what the collective is asking, and what are the blind spots?"

Brand Visibility was one of the fastest integrations of an Adobe acquisition ever, Stark said. Several factors made it happen, including the current state of cloud interoperability through APIs. Also, Adobe prioritized productizing Semrush to satisfy immediate user needs for more sophisticated answer engine optimization tools in a rapidly evolving market. Another factor was the use of new AI coding tools that sped up the typical development cycle.

Adobe customers have "held Adobe's feet to the fire" for how long it has taken for past acquisitions to be natively integrated into the company's marketing suite, said Liz Miller, analyst at Constellation Research. But Adobe Experience Platform's modern architecture and Adobe Experience Manager's headless architecture capabilities likely made this integration -- and will make future acquisitions -- faster.

Semrush adds outside data and competitive analysis from 28 billion keywords and 289 million prompts to a brand's own website traffic analysis in LLM Optimizer. Together, the two promise to paint a more complete picture to drive a user's marketing decisions.

"The breadth of Semrush analytics -- capable of delivering a view of how brand content and conversations appear across the entirety of marketing's paid, earned and owned landscape -- [is] now side-by-side with LLM Optimizer," Miller said. "The [user's] path from identifying insights, getting recommendations and then taking action is accelerated and, eventually, automated."