The Alpha Is Not LLM Monitoring

Adobe just paid $1.9 billion for Semrush. Not for the LLM tracking dashboards. For the platform, the customer relationships, and the distribution.

Contrast: Investors poured $227 million into AI visibility tracking. Most of that went to tracking dashboards. The companies shipping outputs from agentic SEO raised a third of that. Adobe’s acquisition proves dashboards were never the point.

Investors chased LLM monitoring because it looked like easy SaaS, but the durable value sits in agentic SEO tools that actually ship work. Why? Because agentic SEO…