Semrush Launches Brand Visibility Operating Model at Adobe Summit
Semrush used the Adobe Summit to announce a formal operating model built around what the company is calling “Brand Visibility”—a framework designed to replace channel-by-channel marketing execution with a coordinated system for managing how brands are discovered across both human and AI-mediated surfaces.
The launch is accompanied by two research reports: Brand Visibility Orchestration: How to Execute on the Brand Visibility Operating Model and Brand Visibility in the AI Search Era: A Strategic Framework for CMOs. Together they make the case that fragmented execution is no longer a manageable inefficiency—it is a structural liability as AI agents increasingly mediate brand discovery.
Central to the model is a concept Semrush calls Agentic Search Optimization (ASO), framed as a new operational layer for ensuring brands are selected and surfaced correctly by autonomous AI systems evaluating relevance and authority. The timing is pointed: Gartner has projected a 25% decline in traditional search volume by 2026, and Semrush is positioning ASO as the discipline that fills the gap.
The research identifies three specific failure modes it calls the Alignment Gap. The Measurability Gap refers to the finding that 55.5% of fully aligned teams describe their brand visibility as measurable and actionable, against only 15.5% of partially aligned teams. The Process Gap captures the fact that just 22.6% of organizations have a unified workflow spanning both traditional search and AI-generated answers. The Ownership Gap reflects that a majority of enterprise teams—57.3%—describe their brand visibility coordination as somewhere between “somewhat aligned” and “completely disconnected.”
The operating model proposes a Brand Orchestration Lifecycle with four stages: Foundation (narrative definition), Content (multi-format asset production), Distribution (cross-surface activation), and Feedback (visibility signal analysis). A new organizational role, the Brand Visibility Orchestrator, is defined as the connective layer between strategy and execution—responsible for maintaining narrative consistency across all discovery surfaces. The model also introduces a Unified Content Supply Chain in which topics and briefs are defined once and propagated across search and AI environments rather than rebuilt per channel.
Semrush reports that applying these principles internally drove its own AI share of voice from 13% to 32% in a single month. Whether that rate of movement reflects a generalizable result or a first-mover advantage in a nascent measurement category, the underlying argument is sound: as AI agents become the primary intermediaries between brands and buyers, the organizations that engineer for that layer will hold a structural edge over those still optimizing for a search paradigm that is actively contracting.