Adobe Generates Excitement with Firefly AI Image Generator and Editor

Designers are even more excited to get image generation and modification as part of tools like Photoshop, with AI video editing to follow

As both a stand-alone product and a component of other applications like Photoshop, the Adobe Firefly AI image generator is generating tons of interest.

Key takeaways

• “Adobe Firefly” was the #3 most popular search term bringing traffic to adobe.com over the last 28 days, through May 27, according to Similarweb estimates.
• Although Adobe has incorporated AI capabilities into its product line previously with a product known as Adobe Sensei, the 1 million searches recorded on “adobe firefly” in April reflect a much higher level of interest than Sensei was attracting.
• The firefly.adobe.com website recorded more than 419,000 visits in a day when the beta version was announced at the end of March and has been attracting in the range of 150,000 to 200,000 daily visits since then. Those aren’t quite ChatGPT numbers (50 to 60 million daily visits), but they represent a solid beta launch. For comparison, the better-established Adobe Express has been drawing about 500,000 daily visits to express.adobe.com.

In addition to being paired with the Adobe Express suite of web-based creative tools, Firefly is contributing technologies to the latest beta release of Photoshop, with the tech also being added to its broader Creative Cloud suite and coming soon to video editing. In addition, Adobe and Google recently announced a partnership to integrate Firefly into the Google Bard, a competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and the version of that technology baked into Microsoft Bing.

Like other AI image generators, Firefly can create a new image from a simple text prompt like “Robotic firefly flying down Wall Street,” but Adobe has particularly poured effort into techniques for prompt-driven edits to existing images from its Adobe Stock image library or incorporating Adobe fonts into generated or edited images.

Although we don’t yet see the effect in the search and web traffic numbers, last week’s unveiling of Firefly integration with Adobe’s core suite of tools is bound to boost interest in the tech as a productive component of a designer’s daily workflow. Designers may also appreciate that Adobe has taken a more respectful approach toward AI, training the software on its own image library rather than images scraped from the web.

A recent video walkthrough of the “generative fill” capabilities in the latest photo Photoshop beta release included examples of taking a photo of a person and altering his or her clothing or the images in the background. You can remove unwanted people or objects from an image and smoothly blend the background to guess at what the scene would be like if those people or objects hadn’t been in the picture in the first place. Just highlight any region within the image and use a text prompt to describe the new imagery you would like to see in place of what’s already there.

The #3 search traffic generator for adobe.com

Since its introduction, Firefly has steadily generated more interest as reflected in search volume to the point where it is now the #3 keyword bringing traffic to adobe.com.

Looking at how search traffic from across the internet has risen for “adobe firefly” and related keywords, we see that it crossed 1 million searches in May – including searches driving traffic to the many written and video tutorials and reviews appearing across the web, not just Adobe’s content.

A traffic peak on launch day, followed by steady interest

Below is the traffic trend through May 27 for firefly.adobe.com. That’s the website for a free, open beta of the software, which gives everyone a chance to try the technology.

This traffic alone doesn’t reflect all the interest in Adobe’s AI image generation, since users of the Photoshop beta release will be able to use the same prompt-driven image generation – and better ones, for professional purposes – through their tool of choice rather than creating and downloading them from the Firefly website.

This is a developing story, and we will update our reports as more data comes in.

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Contact: For more information, please write to press@similarweb.com.

Report By: David F. Carr, Senior Insights Manager

Methodology

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Image: “Robotic firefly flying down Wall Street” by Adobe Firefly

by David F. Carr

David covers social media, digital advertising, and generative AI. With a background in web trends since the 1990s, he’s also the author of "Social Collaboration for Dummies".