Semrush Shuts Down Prowly: What It Means for PR Professionals
In December 2025, Semrush announced it was phasing out Prowly, its dedicated public relations platform, effective immediately. The move came just weeks after Adobe entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Semrush for approximately $1.9 billion, a deal that is still pending regulatory and shareholder approval and expected to close in the first half of 2026.
For the thousands of PR professionals who had built their workflows around Prowly, the news landed with very little warning and even less time to plan a transition.
A brief history of Prowly
Prowly was founded in Warsaw in 2013 by Joanna Drabent and Sebastian Przyborowski. Over seven years, the team bootstrapped the platform into a respected PR tool offering a media database of over one million journalist contacts, a press release builder, CRM, email pitching, online newsrooms, and media monitoring.
Semrush acquired Prowly in September 2020, promising it would continue to operate as a standalone brand within the Semrush ecosystem. At the time, Semrush’s Chief Strategy Officer Eugene Levin said the company had been watching Prowly for years and was excited to help the team scale globally.
For several years, that promise held. Prowly continued releasing product updates, publishing industry reports, and growing its feature set. It had built a user base spanning more than 70 countries.
The Adobe acquisition changes the picture
On November 19, 2025, Adobe and Semrush jointly announced an acquisition agreement. Adobe will pay $12 per share, roughly a 77% premium, in an all-cash transaction. The deal is designed to fold Semrush’s SEO and generative engine optimisation (GEO) capabilities into Adobe’s Digital Experience business, alongside products like Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Analytics. Semrush’s founders and other stockholders representing over 75% of the voting power have already committed to voting in favour of the deal.
Adobe’s strategic interest centres on brand visibility in AI-driven search. The company cited a 1,200% year-over-year increase in traffic from generative AI surfaces to retail websites as a key motivator. Prowly’s PR-specific tooling, it seems, was not part of that vision.
Within weeks of the Adobe announcement, Semrush confirmed Prowly was being wound down.
Some functionality lives on, but at a cost
While Prowly as a standalone product is gone, some of its features appear to have been absorbed into Semrush’s AI PR Toolkit, a newer add-on within the Semrush platform. The toolkit offers journalist discovery, media list management, AI-assisted pitching, and media monitoring.
However, early feedback from users has not been kind. Common complaints include a confusing pricing structure built around layered add-ons that make true costs difficult to predict, restrictive limits on contact exports (Base plan users must pay extra just to export their own media lists), and a cancellation process that has drawn repeated criticism on review platforms. The AI PR Toolkit also has a significantly smaller media database, with roughly 600,000 journalist profiles compared to the over one million that Prowly previously offered.
For PR professionals who valued Prowly’s relative simplicity and dedicated focus, the transition to an add-on buried within a broader SEO platform has felt like a downgrade rather than an upgrade.
PR teams are now looking for alternatives
The abrupt shutdown has left PR teams scrambling to find and onboard a replacement. It’s a familiar pattern in the SaaS world: a specialised tool gets acquired, operates for a period under new ownership, and is eventually sunsetted when corporate priorities shift. But knowing the pattern doesn’t make it any less disruptive when your media lists, newsrooms, and campaign history are on the line.
Sacha Fournier, founder of JournoFinder, sees this as a moment of opportunity for PR professionals willing to rethink their tooling:
“The Prowly shutdown has caught a lot of people off guard, but it’s also a chance for PR professionals to upgrade rather than just replace. For anyone looking for a great-value media database and PR platform to step into the gap left by Semrush, JournoFinder offers better, more up-to-date data at a genuinely competitive price. It was built specifically for PR professionals who are tired of paying a premium for outdated contacts and clunky interfaces.”
What happens next
Semrush stockholders formally approved the Adobe acquisition at a special meeting on February 3, 2026. The deal now awaits final regulatory clearance, with completion still expected in the first half of this year. Once it closes, Semrush’s core SEO and visibility tools will become part of Adobe’s product ecosystem, and the future of any remaining Prowly-derived features within Semrush becomes even less certain.
For the PR professionals who relied on Prowly, the transition is already well underway, whether they were ready for it or not.