TLDR: SEO management platform SE Ranking has acquired social media management platform Planable. This strategic move aims to create a unified marketing solution, enabling brands to maintain visibility in the rapidly evolving landscape of AI-powered search and increasingly influential social media content.
In a significant development for the digital marketing industry, SE Ranking, a prominent SEO management platform, announced on August 4, 2025, its acquisition of Planable, a leading social media management platform. This strategic merger is set to redefine how marketers approach online visibility, particularly in the burgeoning era of AI-powered search.
SE Ranking, with over a decade of innovation and trusted by more than a million businesses, agencies, and SEO professionals since 2013, has evolved into a multi-product platform. Planable, founded in 2016, has built a strong reputation for streamlining content collaboration, serving over 7,000 brands and agencies. Planable users reportedly approve posts three times faster and cut scheduling time by up to 88%, having collectively created over 26 million posts and exchanged more than 3.5 million internal comments.
The acquisition is driven by a clear recognition of the changing digital landscape. Vik Kuushynau, CEO at SE Ranking, highlighted the fragmentation of search and the company’s mission to keep brands visible ‘wherever people—and AI agents—look.’ He stated, ‘Partnering with Planable, together with our commitment to rapidly evolve our AI Search toolkit, moves SE Ranking several steps closer to that goal.’
The shift in search behavior is profound. Users are increasingly turning to platforms like TikTok and Instagram for information, and AI chatbots are becoming a preferred alternative to traditional search engines. Recent data underscores this trend: Instagram has begun indexing public posts, captions, images, and Reels directly on the main Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). A study by SE Ranking involving 2,000 AI responses revealed YouTube as the top-linked source across ChatGPT (11.3%), Perplexity (11.11%), and Google AI Overviews (6.31%). LinkedIn also features in Google’s top-10, and TikTok content feeds ChatGPT’s models.
Furthermore, the growth of LLM-based search is exponential. SE Ranking’s research indicates that traffic to websites from ChatGPT and Perplexity has grown sixfold since 2024. In the same period, desktop visits to AI tools in the US tripled. This data strongly suggests that SEO and social media are no longer isolated disciplines; their synergy is crucial for comprehensive online visibility.
Vlad Calus, Co-founder of Planable, expressed enthusiasm for the merger, stating, ‘As part of the acquisition, Planable is joining SE Ranking’s mission to build a multi-product platform that helps businesses stay visible in the AI-powered era.’ He emphasized that social media managers are now integral to the ‘bottom of the funnel,’ as their content is indexed, cited by AI, and surfaced to intent-driven audiences, influencing the full customer journey.
Both companies assure existing users of no disruption to their current projects, with dashboards and workspaces continuing to operate as usual. The plan is to continue developing each product as best-in-class while building bridges between them to unify marketing workflows. This integration aims to empower social media and SEO teams to collaborate more effectively, creating content that is valuable for human users and discoverable by AI search, and better track results across all platforms.
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SE Ranking’s long-term vision is to become a multi-product platform where intelligent tools work alongside marketers to drive results across search, social, and beyond. This acquisition is a significant step towards offering integrated solutions for AI search and bridging the gap between SEO and Social Media Marketing, which is increasingly critical in today’s AI-driven landscape. The goal is to help marketers not only rank in traditional search but also appear in AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, and Perplexity answers, and gain recommendations from platforms like YouTube.
