This Week in M&A Issue #212

Your revenue may be rising, but that doesn’t mean the value of your business is increasing. And for founders planning an exit, that’s the only number that matters.

In this week’s podcast, Greg is joined by Mark Osborne, author of Are Your Leads Killing Your Business? and one of the only Certified Exit Planning Advisors focused specifically on sales and marketing.

Mark reveals the biggest early mistakes that hurt valuations, the simple operational wins that free up time and resources, and why sales, marketing, and customer success must work as one value-building system. He also explains which systems buyers care about most, and how chasing more revenue can actually reduce your exit value.

If you’re planning an exit or want to build a business worth more tomorrow than it is today, this is an episode you don’t want to miss.

Adobe is buying SEO platform Semrush for $1.9 billion in cash, paying $12 per share, nearly double its price before the news broke. The deal, announced on November 18, is expected to close in the first half of 2026 once it clears regulatory and shareholder approvals.

Semrush, founded in 2008, is known for tools that help businesses with keyword research, site audits, competitive analysis, and tracking online visibility. Recently, it has expanded into AI-powered tools that show how brands appear in AI-driven search results, including ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. Its generative engine optimization, or GEO, helps marketers make sure their brands get noticed in the growing world of AI search.

This acquisition comes as AI-driven search is booming. Adobe reports that traffic from generative AI chatbots to U.S. retail websites jumped 1,200 percent year-over-year in October.

By bringing Semrush into its marketing suite, Adobe plans to give marketers a full picture of how their brands are performing, across traditional search, their own channels, and AI platforms. Semrush will integrate with tools like Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Analytics, and Brand Concierge to create a more complete marketing toolkit.

Some experts say the deal validates the SEO industry, showing that major tech companies now recognize the value of search optimization and brand visibility. They note that the next era of SEO will likely be driven by AI-ready, data-focused platforms.

The deal represents a roughly 77% premium over Semrush’s previous share price, and shares jumped more than 70% after the announcement. Both companies will continue to operate independently until closing.

This acquisition shows a trend of adding specialized SEO and AI marketing tools to bigger enterprise platforms. For online business owners, it could mean smarter ways to track, manage, and improve brand visibility as AI becomes an even bigger part of how people search, shop, and interact online.

In the second major infrastructure incident in a month, another massive outage took down many of the web’s biggest platforms. Just weeks after AWS went offline on October 20, Cloudflare suffered what CEO Matthew Prince called its “worst outage since 2019,” temporarily disabling access to ChatGPT, X, Downdetector, and countless other websites.

Roughly 20% of the web runs through Cloudfare’s network, helping sites manage traffic spikes and defend against DDoS attacks. That reach is exactly why Tuesday’s outage spread so widely.

The company later explained that a latent software bug, buried deep in its Bot Management system, was triggered by a routine configuration change. A recent database update caused a flood of duplicate entries in a key configuration file. Once this file exceeded memory limits, the core proxy responsible for routing traffic began to fail, cutting off legitimate users while bots were incorrectly flagged.

Cloudflare’s chief technology officer, Dane Knecht apologized to customers, saying Cloudflare had failed both its users and the wider internet, and promised measures to prevent a repeat incident. Cloudflare is now working on stronger safeguards, including stricter configuration handling, global kill switches, and improved system failover checks.

For website owners worried about how the downtime might affect Google, Bing, and other search engine crawlers, experts assure there’s no cause for concern. Search engines regularly encounter 5xx errors during outages and simply slow down crawling until systems recover. Google’s John Mueller noted that only multi-day outages might cause temporary indexing drops, and even those usually recover quickly once servers stabilize.

The incident highlighted a growing concern across the tech industry. With so much of the internet depending on a handful of providers, a single hidden bug can send shockwaves across the web. Cloudflare’s outage was fixed within hours, but it served as a powerful reminder of how fragile the modern internet can be when so much depends on so few systems.