An Old Idea of an Automated SEO Plugin For AEM Comes Back to Life

This is an idea which I had come up with a little over 10 years ago and had implemented a pilot for a customer which was working breifly, up until Google cut off our API calls. It was a plug in for text fields in AEM authoring dialogs that allowed the content owner to come up with any number of permutations on localized vernacular, see my earlier post, which is born out of the same idea. Every few days the plugin would check with Google to see how the content was performing and if it wasn't, say a top 5 result, the content in that component would try one of the other vernacular permutations that the content owner had authored at publication time. We had a few pages that were top of a Google search for localized content, but with just a couple of different locale content pages, the API calls got volumonous quickly. Anyway AI here to fufill a past vision in a modern way that should be scalable.

When Adobe announced its acquisition of SEMrush, my reaction was immediate, this wasn’t just a random purchase, it rarely is with Adobe. It was a flashing beacon in the ether. Adobe can bring search intelligence closer to the content supply chain, closer to authors, closer to assets and ultimately closer to the moment content is created.

For those of us who live inside Adobe Experience Manager, the possibilities are endless and exciting beyond compare. AEM has always been a powerhouse CMS, but SEO has historically lived outside the walls of the authoring experience. Teams rely on disconnected tools, manual audits and tribal knowledge to optimize pages long after they’re published. The result is predictable: SEO becomes a reactive discipline rather than a proactive one.

Here comes that idea from 2015, searing a path across my brain again. What if AEM could self‑optimize? What if SEO wasn’t a checklist, but a capability woven directly into the fabric of page objects, components and content fragments? Adobe’s move on SEMrush makes that future feel not only possible, but inevitable. For me, imagining a native SEO intelligence layer inside AEM that optimizes every time an author creates or edits a page in AEM, a new intelligence layer activates behind the scenes and optimize as keywords fall in and out of vogue is nicem but the real value is if it can run in the background as well, constantly running on existing content it evaluates on the page in real time considering the structure, metadata, copy, assets, links, performance and compares it against live SEMrush data, competitive benchmarks and search intent signals.

Instead of static fields like “Page Title” and “Meta Description,” and because over 15 years in digital marketing technology, I know that no one would just hand the keys to content over to a machine, they're barely willing to had it over to their own content owners, even with workflow guardrails in place. Content owners would regularly receive dynamic recommendations like ...
- “This headline is underperforming for your target keyword cluster.”
- “Competitors ranking for this topic use more structured subheads.”
- “Your hero image lacks alt text aligned to search intent.”
- “This page could rank for three additional long‑tail queries with minimal content expansion.”
And instead of waiting for SEO teams to run audits weeks later, AEM becomes the audit engine.

This is where the idea of a self‑optimizing SEO plugin for AEM page becomes possible again in my mind. At the core, the technical vision for this capability would be a fusion of three engines...
1. SEMrush Data Ingestion
AEM would pull in keyword intelligence, competitive insights, backlink data and SERP trends through a native integration. No more CSV exports or API workarounds—just a clean, governed data flow into Adobe’s content layer.
2. AEM Page Object Intelligence
Each page object—templates, components, content fragments—would expose a semantic model:
- Headings
- Body copy
- Media
- Metadata
- Structured content fields
- Internal links
This model becomes the canvas for optimization.
3. An Agentic Optimization Layer
This is where Adobe’s broader AI strategy comes into play. An agentic layer could...
- Analyze the page against SEMrush benchmarks
- Identify gaps and opportunities
- Generate optimized metadata, copy, and structural recommendations
- Simulate ranking outcomes
- Automatically apply improvements (with governance controls or maybe just email the content owner ir create a ticket for the content authoring team to execute on)
The result is a feedback loop where AEM pages continuously improve based on real search behavior, not quarterly audits.

This matters for enterprise brands because enterprise SEO is notoriously slow. Not because teams lack expertise, but because the systems around them weren’t built for speed. Content lives in one place, insights in another, and optimization in yet another. A self optimizing SEO engine inside AEM does what it has always done, it collapses that distance. It gives marketers superpowers that result in empowered teams that gives brands a competitive edge in a landscape where search intent shifts daily and it aligns perfectly with Adobe’s long term vision, a unified content supply chain where intelligence flows freely across creation, optimization, and activation.

Adobe’s acquisition of SEMrush isn’t just about owning a search tool. It’s about embedding search intelligence into the creative and operational heart of the enterprise. A self‑optimizing SEO plugin for AEM is the natural next step that transforms SEO from a downstream task into an upstream capability. It turns every content owner into an optimizer and it positions Adobe Experience Manager as not just a CMS, but a living, learning content engine. The future of SEO inside AEM isn’t a feature, it’s a shift in how content is built, measured, and improved. With SEMrush now in the fold, that future feels closer than ever.

Stay tuned, check back often, this idea is on fire in my mind, I will be posting on this in the near future. How do I know, its 9:30 and I have been awake grinding the gears on this idea in my mind since 3:30.