Last updated September 2026.
No vendor keeps a public, dated record of who bought whom in AI SEO, or who raised what and when. Trade press covers each deal once, then moves on. This entry does the opposite: it logs every verifiable money event in the category as it happens, dates it, links the primary source, and gets corrected the moment a figure changes.
Consolidation here means one company absorbing another’s technology, team, or customer base through a full acquisition, not a partnership or an integration deal. The ledger below tracks that specific kind of event, plus the funding rounds that keep the independent players in the race.
The ledger
| Date | Company | Event | Amount | Primary source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| August 2026 | AthenaHQ | Restructures entry pricing: adds a free Essential tier, renames Self-Serve to Starter | $295/mo Starter, plus a free tier | AthenaHQ |
| June 3, 2026 | Sitecore | Acquires Scrunch AI | About $225 million (reported) | Bloomberg |
| April 28, 2026 | Adobe | Closes acquisition of Semrush | $1.9 billion (announced); $1.87 billion (closing filing) | Adobe |
| February 24, 2026 | Profound | Raises Series C at a $1 billion valuation | $96 million | Profound |
| November 18, 2025 | Peec AI | Raises Series A, the opening round of this funding wave | $21 million ($29 million total) | Peec AI |
The record starts with Peec AI’s November 2025 raise on purpose. It is the round that set the pace for everything that followed into 2026, so leaving it off the table would cut the story off at its own beginning.
AthenaHQ resets its pricing tiers: August 2026
AthenaHQ restructured its plan lineup in 2026. It added a permanent free Essential tier carrying 300 monthly credits (about $25 of usage), and it renamed its former Self-Serve plan to Starter, still priced at $295 a month for 3,600 credits. API access, previously part of the conversation around that tier, now ships as a separate paid add-on rather than a bundled feature. Engine coverage on Starter runs across ten AI models, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, and Microsoft Copilot.
Last verified: August 2026, against AthenaHQ’s published pricing page.
Sitecore acquires Scrunch AI: June 3, 2026
Sitecore, the digital experience software company, announced on June 3, 2026 that it had acquired Scrunch, an AI visibility platform that pairs multi-model monitoring with a content-delivery layer built for AI crawlers. Sitecore’s own release did not state a price. Bloomberg reported the figure at about $225 million, citing people familiar with the deal. Scrunch now operates as a Sitecore company, backed by Sitecore’s existing capital rather than a standalone venture round.
Last verified: August 2026, against Bloomberg’s original reporting and Sitecore’s press release.
Adobe closes its acquisition of Semrush: April 28, 2026
Adobe first announced the deal on Nov. 18, 2025: an all-cash offer of $12.00 a share, valuing Semrush at roughly $1.9 billion in total equity. The acquisition closed April 28, 2026, at which point Semrush stock stopped trading on the NYSE under the ticker SEMR. Adobe’s own quarterly SEC filing recorded the completed purchase price at $1.87 billion, primarily in cash consideration, the small gap from the announced figure reflecting the deal’s final terms at close. Semrush now operates as an Adobe company inside Adobe’s CX Enterprise line, and its AI visibility toolkit continues to run as a paid add-on to its core SEO subscription.
Last verified: August 2026, against Adobe’s newsroom release and its SEC filing.
Profound raises a $96 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation: February 24, 2026
Profound announced a $96 million Series C on Feb. 24, 2026, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with existing investors Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Saga VC, South Park Commons, and Evantic all returning. The round valued the company at $1 billion and pushed its total funding past $155 million, reached about 18 months after Profound’s founding. Profound’s platform is built around citation-level attribution: naming the exact source pages an AI engine pulled into an answer, not just whether a brand was mentioned.
Last verified: August 2026, against Profound’s own funding announcement.
Peec AI raises a $21 million Series A: November 18, 2025
Peec AI, a Berlin-based AI search analytics platform, raised a $21 million Series A on Nov. 18, 2025, led by European VC firm Singular, with Antler, Combination VC, identity.vc, and S20 also participating. The round followed a €7 million seed led by 20VC in July 2025, bringing total funding to $29 million. The company positions its platform for agency workspaces running several client brands at once, and this raise is the earliest event in the current AI SEO funding wave, six months before Profound’s Series C and Adobe’s Semrush announcement followed it.
Last verified: August 2026, against Peec AI’s own funding announcement.
Reading the pattern
Two forces are running through this ledger at the same time. Established platforms are buying category capability instead of building it: Adobe added AI answer tracking to its marketing suite by acquiring Semrush outright, and Sitecore did the same with Scrunch to strengthen its digital experience line. Neither company treated this as a partnership. Both wanted the technology, the team, and the customer base under one roof.
The second force runs in the opposite direction. Independent, category-native platforms are raising larger rounds to stay independent. Profound’s $96 million Series C and Peec AI’s $21 million Series A both fund the same bet: that AI visibility tracking is big enough to support standalone companies, not just features bolted onto existing SEO suites. AthenaHQ’s pricing reset fits here too, a sign that even a funded independent platform is still tuning its entry price as the category’s expectations settle.
This directory’s own roster reflects that split directly. Semrush and Scrunch now report up through Adobe and Sitecore. Profound and Peec AI remain independent and freshly capitalized. Temso, an all-in-one AI SEO platform starting at $89 a month, has not been party to any acquisition or funding announcement as of this entry’s last verification date. It is named here for that context alone, not as an event in the ledger.
A category with this much acquisition and funding activity in a single year is not a niche anymore. It is a market big enough for legacy software companies to buy their way in and for independent teams to keep raising money to stay ahead of them.
Check the current state of the roster
Every tool named in this ledger, along with every other entry in the category, carries a current, dated profile on the AI SEO tools index, including which ones now sit under new ownership. Read the verification method behind that index and this ledger for how a claim gets checked and corrected.