Key takeaways
- Two big acquisitions are documented in our research: Adobe closed its roughly $1.9B Semrush deal on April 28, 2026, and Sitecore announced its Scrunch acquisition on June 3, 2026. HubSpot reportedly bought XFunnel, with no detail found.
- We found no confirmed shutdowns or public pivots among the main AI visibility vendors. Nothing on AthenaHQ, Otterly, Brandlight or Profound status changes turned up, which is not the same as proof that nothing changed.
- Independents still being compared in November 2026 include Profound, Peec AI, Otterly.AI, AthenaHQ, Brandlight, Ahrefs Brand Radar, AirOps and Promptwatch.
- The practical risk is not only the vendor vanishing. It is the vendor being absorbed, repriced or folded into a suite you did not buy.
- Build exit plans now: data export rights, change-of-control clauses, and a second source of truth for your own visibility numbers.
A note on how solid these facts are
The research behind this guide is partial. The Adobe and Sitecore deals come from third-party roundups that cite the primary press releases, and I have not verified post-deal pricing, roadmaps or sunset plans. Funding and pricing figures from vendor-style comparison blogs should be checked against each vendor's own site before you rely on them. Where something is opinion or speculation, I say so.
The headline question, who survived, also needs care. The honest answer so far is that the category consolidated through acquisitions rather than collapse. If you see a confident list of dead vendors elsewhere, ask for the source.
What actually happened: consolidation, not collapse
The pattern in 2026 is large platform companies buying AI visibility capability instead of building it. That matches the warning in a recent CIO piece by Grant Gross, which quotes Dave Shanker of STS Consulting Group: "Assume your AI vendor will get bought or go under, and plan for it now."
The CIO article names special AI-specific risks: data access and privacy, and the loss of models trained for your particular needs. Both apply directly to visibility tooling, because the value sits in your historical prompt data, your tracked competitor sets and any custom configuration.
Adobe and Semrush
Adobe announced its Semrush acquisition on November 19, 2025 at $12.00 per share, about $1.9B. It closed April 28, 2026 after US antitrust clearance and stockholder approval. Semrush now sits inside Adobe CX Enterprise, and Adobe pitches GEO as a growth channel next to SEO. Adobe also sells its own Adobe Brand Visibility product, so overlap between the two is a fair question to put to account reps.
What I could not confirm: whether the standalone Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit keeps its current $99 per domain per month price on annual billing, or whether enterprise buyers get steered into Adobe bundles. Ask directly.
Sitecore and Scrunch
Sitecore announced its Scrunch acquisition on June 3, 2026. Scrunch had raised about $26M and sells an Agent Experience Platform. One November 2026 comparison explicitly notes Scrunch is no longer independent. If you were a Scrunch customer evaluating it as a neutral tool, that assumption changed.
HubSpot and XFunnel
HubSpot is reported to have acquired XFunnel. I found nothing beyond the name, so treat it as a lead to verify, not a fact to build a decision on.
Funding tells you who has runway
One count puts venture money into pure-play GEO startups at $255M or more over about 18 months to March 2026, with Profound accounting for roughly $155M. Peec AI reportedly raised about $29M. Lots of cash buys time, but it also makes a company an attractive target or a pressured one. The same source speculates Salesforce is the likeliest next acquirer. That is a guess, not reporting.
Vendor status at a glance
| Vendor | Status in our research | What is verified | What to check |
|---|---|---|---|
| Semrush | Acquired by Adobe, closed Apr 28, 2026 | Deal terms, close date | Standalone pricing and roadmap |
| Scrunch | Acquired by Sitecore, announced Jun 3, 2026 | Announcement, prior ~$26M raised | Product continuity, standalone access |
| XFunnel | Reportedly acquired by HubSpot | Name only | Everything |
| Profound | Independent per EPR | ~$155M raised (secondary source) | Pricing tiers, enterprise terms |
| Peec AI | Independent per EPR | ~$29M raised (secondary source) | Enterprise features |
| Otterly.AI, AthenaHQ, Brandlight | Independent per EPR | No status change found | Funding and roadmap |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar, AirOps | Independent per EPR | Listed as active | Depth of AI-specific data |
| Promptwatch | Independent | EUR 7.2M raised, ISO/IEC 27001 certified | See below |
Why vendor risk is sharper in this category
The ground moves under every vendor
Promptwatch Data's report on the ChatGPT citation drop after GPT-5.3 is a useful warning. GPT-5.3 rolled out on March 4, 2026, and average citations per search-enabled ChatGPT response fell across GPT-5.3, GPT-5.4 and GPT-5-Mini. Before the rollout ChatGPT cited about 6.4 sources per response. By late March it settled near 4.7 to 4.9, roughly 27% fewer, with no recovery a month later.
Why does this matter for vendor choice? Because your visibility numbers can fall for reasons that have nothing to do with you, and a tool that cannot tell "we lost visibility" from "ChatGPT cites fewer sources everywhere" will cause a bad internal conversation. A vendor in the middle of an integration into a larger suite may also have less capacity to adapt quickly when the platforms change. That is a worry, not a finding.
Acquirers have their own agenda
When a CMS vendor buys a visibility tool, the roadmap tends to bend toward the CMS. When a marketing suite buys one, expect bundling. Neither is bad by default, but a neutral measurement tool becomes less neutral once its owner sells the thing being measured.
Your data is the hostage
The CIO piece flags data access as a top concern. For visibility tooling, months of daily prompt responses are not easily recreated, since AI answers change and you cannot go back and rerun last quarter.
A practical vendor-risk checklist
- Ask for change-of-control terms. If the vendor is acquired, can you terminate without penalty and get a prorated refund?
- Confirm full export of raw data: prompts, responses, citations, competitor sets. CSV or API, not just PDF reports.
- Check API and MCP access. If your reporting runs through the vendor's API, find out rate limits and whether history is available.
- Ask about funding and runway. Private companies will usually share the broad picture under NDA.
- Read the security paperwork. ISO/IEC 27001 and GDPR compliance matter more once procurement or legal gets involved.
- Separate monitoring from execution. If the same tool tracks and publishes, a sudden shutdown takes both away.
- Keep your own baseline. Run a periodic export into a warehouse or Looker Studio so history survives any vendor.
- Track overlap. If you already pay for a suite that is acquiring or bundling visibility, you may be double-buying.
Contract clauses worth asking for
- Termination on change of control within 90 days of announcement
- Data export on request, in a documented machine-readable format, for at least 30 days after termination
- Advance notice of product sunset, ideally 6 to 12 months
- Price protection through the renewal term, including after acquisition
Most vendors will resist some of these. Which ones they resist tells you something.
Where the independents stand
I would not recommend picking a vendor simply because it has not been bought yet. Independence is a fact, not a quality signal. Still, for buyers who want a neutral tool, it matters.
Promptwatch is one such independent. Full disclosure: 1001 SEO Media, which publishes this site, uses Promptwatch for its own GEO work, so weigh that accordingly. The relevant facts for a risk review are that it is run by Promptwatch B.V., raised EUR 7.2M in total (a EUR 1.2M pre-seed in September 2025 and a EUR 6M seed in July 2026), passed EUR 2M ARR in May 2026, is ISO/IEC 27001 certified and GDPR compliant with EU-based data handling, and offers a REST API and a hosted MCP server so you can pull your own data out. It also tracks the real interfaces of ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and others, and ties tracking to crawler logs, content creation and traffic measurement in one product. Pricing starts at $95 per month on Essential and $579 on Business, which is the first plan with the Content Agent. Confirm current numbers at promptwatch.com/pricing.
For a head-to-head view of how monitoring-only tools differ from full-stack platforms, see Promptwatch's 2026 platform comparison. It is vendor-authored, so read it alongside independent sources.
If you want a wider shortlist, the GEO software directory at bestgeosoftware.com lists many more options, including newer entrants that did not make the EPR comparison.
How to run a shortlist in the next 30 days
Week 1: inventory
List every tool that touches AI visibility today, including suite add-ons. Note owner, contract end date and what data lives where. The Protecht team makes the same point about vendor risk generally: incomplete inventories and hidden dependencies are the usual failure, and AI makes both worse.
Week 2: triage
For each tool, record whether it was acquired in the past 12 months, who owns it now, and whether pricing or packaging changed. Semrush and Scrunch customers should do this first.
Week 3: test exits
Try an actual export. Not asking whether you can, actually doing it. You will learn quickly which vendors have real data portability.
Week 4: decide and document
Pick a primary tool and a fallback, set a quarterly review, and write down your triggers: acquisition announcement, price jump above a set percentage, or removal of a feature you rely on.
What I would not do
I would not panic-migrate because a vendor was acquired. Acquisitions often leave products untouched for a year or more. I would not sign a three-year deal with a vendor whose ownership just changed without a change-of-control clause. And I would not trust any claim about who is dying without a primary source, including the ones in this guide that I flagged as unverified.
Bottom line
The 2026 shakeout, as far as the evidence shows, was consolidation: Adobe took Semrush, Sitecore took Scrunch, and a few independents including Profound, Peec AI, Otterly.AI, AthenaHQ, Brandlight and Promptwatch remain. No confirmed shutdowns turned up, but our research was thin on that front. Treat every vendor as potentially acquirable, get export rights in writing, and keep your own copy of the data.