Digital Marketing Updates: December 2025

Welcome to this month’s summary of what’s new in the world of digital marketing.

SEO & AIO

Adobe acquires SEO software company SEMrush for $1.9 billion

Underscores the market’s appetite for brand visibility and web usage data

Tech giant Adobe has acquired SEMrush for a staggering sum in a move that is sending a message to SEOs and the market in general. 

For current users there’s a fair bit of concern over SEMrush eventually losing its edge now that it’s part of a massive corporation, as the company may not be able to move as quickly and innovate as freely. Ahrefs is now the only major independent SEO software company on the market, and LinkedIn posts from the Ahrefs team suggest that the acquisition is a big opportunity for them as well.

On a larger scale, this move represents how important brand visibility and web usage data is to the Fortune 500 (of which Adobe claims to serve 99%). SEMrush is a goldmine of traffic and visibility data, and absorbing SEMrush means Adobe can quickly roll out those insights to its massive enterprise client base.

SEMrush also owns Datos, a massive clickstream panel that captures data on user journeys in the form of the real actions being taken. That data combined with brand visibility figures is a powerful combo that will help Adobe clients measure the tangible impact of their marketing efforts. More than that, many high profile AI trackers use Datos as their primary data source, meaning that Adobe now controls the datasets of these independent products. It will be interesting to see how the independents fare in the coming years.

Google is rolling out the ability to leave anonymous reviews

And assures us it will be on top of spam

If your business has a Google Business Profile, you know how important Google reviews can be. For some industries they’re like gold and can make or break a person’s decision to visit or order.

In a recent product announcement, Google detailed that users will soon be able to use a nickname instead of their real name when they leave a review. This news has lots of folks feeling a bit anxious about what comes next, even if Google has confidence in its anti-spam protections. 

We have every reason to be skeptical of anonymous online behavior and it’s easy to worry about this change leading to more bad reviews. But it may also swing the other way and reduce friction for people who want to leave positive reviews but typically don’t. Clients of mental health therapists are a good example. 

If you’re a local business with a GBP, we still recommend you lean into asking for reviews. If you’re running a good operation you’ll always come out ahead.

Paid Media

AI Ads Agent in Google

Google will launch Ads Advisor and Analytics Advisor this month. Google’s new AI agent will be able to:

• • Create a full campaign from a single sentence
• • Pick the right bidding strategy
• • Set budget, locations, keywords
• • Create Ads in bulk
• • Ask for approval before launching
• • And deliver clean reports automatically

The claim is that this isn’t automation or an AI assistant, but a full media buyer that runs on AI. Instead of making suggestions or answering questions, they take action and complete tasks on their own. 

While this sounds enticing to anyone looking to streamline budgets and still use Google Ads as a primary marketing channel, what we know about Google-run advertising is that trusting it as a strategic campaign builder can quickly go awry. We also know that human understanding of brand and cross-channel marketing strategies are crucial to making any paid advertising successful. 

ChatGPT Paid Advertising

In our October update, we posted about OpenAI hiring a developer role that appeared to point in the direction of the company building its paid advertising platform. This seems to be a closer reality as Sam Altman has more recently discussed what ChatGPT will (or won’t) look like when it finally rolls out paid ads.

According to Altman, ChatGPT should only make money when it earns users’ trust by showing the best recommendation first. Then, if a user books or buys with one click, OpenAI could take a small commission that doesn’t affect results. The implication is that if you are paying for a subscription on ChatGPT, any question you ask will be better aligned with the answer you are looking for. 

The paid media world is coming up with its own conclusions of what this will mean in practicality, including how pricing will work, where ads will show up and how they will be targeted.

There is expectation that ads will appear directly in the chat conversations as promoted GPTs and messages along with action buttons. 

Keywords will not be the primary targeting strategy within ChatGPT ads, as it bases results on semantic intent, so matching questions to answers will be context- and data-based (which honestly, doesn’t sound too different from the direction Google has been heading).

We don’t yet know how users will be able to control ad personalization or the effect of disabling memory and what effect this will have on results, nor how businesses with goals other than purchases can benefit from ads. 

Altman claims ChatGPT won’t have pay-to-play answers, because he says, if money corrupts rankings, trust collapses. Anyone who has been in this industry for long enough would raise an eyebrow or two at that, but we’ll just have to wait and see how this will play out.