Google’s AI Overviews now sit on top of millions of search results, answering the question before anyone lands on your page. Ahrefs measured a 34.5 percent drop in click-through rate for the #1 organic result when an AI Overview appears. Meanwhile, the same company’s 55.8 million-panel study shows those overviews are surfacing more often than ever, with a March 2025 spike that hasn’t slowed down. SE Ranking’s 10k-keyword audit adds another wrinkle: AI Mode reshuffles its cited sources from day to day, making “ranking” feel like a moving target.

It’s obvious that clicks are being decoupled from outcomes, but budgets still rely on proof. Traditional dashboards—pageviews, organic sessions, time-on-page—were built for a ten-blue-links world. In 2025, they’re actively misleading: they make high-impact content look like it’s under-performing.

Drawing on dozens of client conversations, we’ve distilled five replacement metrics that capture the real revenue story right now. They map directly to how buyers move through modern funnels and to how generative engines surface expertise.

1. AI Citation Share

What it is
The percentage of AI answers (Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Claude, ChatGPT browsing) that cite your brand compared with competitors.

Why it matters
Ahrefs found that domain-level link strength no longer predicts who gets quoted; entity relevance and topical depth do. Relato’s GEO primer frames citation share as “the new page-one real estate” because buyers increasingly stop at the answer box.

How to track
Run your priority keywords through Brand Radar, AIO Monitor, or a manual prompt bank once a week. Record total overviews returned and how many include your brand. Trending up? You’re feeding engines structured, quotable data. Trending down? You’re invisible where decisions start.

Remember—SE Ranking’s report found high volatility in Google’s AI Mode. The same query run multiple times yielded different results. There’s no research (yet) to prove whether that volatility also occurs across other AI answer machines, but safe to say that citations are a moving target

2. Touchpoint Depth

What it is
The average number of distinct content assets a prospect consumes before they self-identify (book a demo, start a trial, request pricing).

Why it matters
With AI overviews shortening the discovery phase, buyers arrive on your site deeper in their journey and are more willing to binge on lower-funnel material—benchmarks, teardown posts, product tutorials. Higher numbers of touchpoints correlate with larger deal sizes in our client data, because each piece tackles a new objection.

How to track
Use attribution tools like Mutiny or HockeyStack to map content IDs to CRM contacts. Then calculate the median touches in closed-won deals each quarter. Optimize flows to nudge that number up: embed related-read modules, surface relevant research in chatbots, cluster pillar pages into Netflix-style playlists.

3. Sales-Enablement Usage

What it is
How often reps pull a content asset into decks, send it in follow-ups, or reference it on calls.

Why it matters
In the age of compressed funnels, sellers need authority at their fingertips. When a benchmark or case study shows up in Gong call transcripts, it’s a signal that content shifted the confidence curve. This metric makes the revenue hand-off visible and lets marketing prioritize refreshes on material that actually moves deals.

How to track
Publish all assets in a Seismic or Notion library. Add a naming convention that IDs each file, then mine email and call-recording tools weekly for mentions. Pair quantitative counts with qualitative rep surveys to surface sleeper hits that don’t register in traditional analytics.

4. Return Engagement Rate

What it is
The percentage of unique visitors who come back to any owned channel within 30 days of a first visit.

Why it matters
Search clicks may fall, but intent signalling rises when someone actively returns. A double-digit RER tells you your editorial voice is sticky, that you’re winning attention span even as algorithmic windows narrow.

How to track
Set a user-level cohort in GA4 or Mixpanel. Filter for return-session timestamp within 720 hours. Break it down by acquisition source—organic, social, direct—to isolate which channels create habits, not one-offs.

5. Brand-Search Lift

What it is
Month-over-month change in branded search queries that exclude navigational modifiers like “login.”

Why it matters
Generative engines act like giant recommendation layers. When an AI answer names you, curious buyers skip the SERP entirely and type your brand straight into the address bar. Ahrefs’ click-loss study shows this “search-side door” is accelerating: branded queries are twice as sensitive to AI visibility as classic ranking factors in 2025. Rising search lift often precedes pipeline spikes by one to two quarters.

How to track
Use Search Console’s query filter or a rank-tracking tool. Flag baseline volume, then watch the delta after releasing data-heavy pieces or earning high-authority citations. Pair the metric with homepage conversion rate to ensure the front door is ready for warmer traffic.

Real-World Proof: 10x Conversion Rates

One of Campfire Labs’ customers (a finance platform) logged 81 “hand raises” originating from AI answers and 280 from traditional organic search last quarter. At first glance, the organic channel looks healthier. Yet the AI-sourced trials converted at nearly 10x the rate, driving more revenue with one-third the volume.

Implementation Playbook

1. Pick one metric this month. Don’t try to boil the ocean. Stand up a simple Google Sheet for AI Citation Share or Brand-Search Lift and update it weekly.
   
   

2. Instrument attribution for Touchpoint Depth. Even a lightweight UTM → HubSpot workflow will show patterns you can act on.
   
   

3. Interview your sales team. Ask which one-pagers or articles they actually send. If an asset isn’t getting airtime, refine or retire it.
   
   

4. Automate branded-query alerts. A Search Console API script can drop anomalies in Slack every Monday. Spikes usually map to press hits or influential podcast mentions—lean in with follow-up content while interest is hot.
   
   

5. Report the new numbers alongside the old. Pipeline owners still expect traffic charts. Showing both views side-by-side trains leadership to value the deeper metrics before you phase out vanity KPIs.

The Takeaway

Clicks are no longer the leading indicator of content success; they’re a lagging artifact of a search paradigm that’s already disappearing from the top of the funnel. In an increasingly AI-first landscape, visibility inside generative answers, repeated buyer touchpoints, and downstream sales usage tell a far clearer ROI narrative.

At Campfire Labs we’ve spent the past few months helping SaaS teams shift from ranking pages to feeding engines structured expertise. The fastest-growing brands in our portfolio audit AI mention share monthly, produce original data that bots can’t resist quoting, and measure success by how often that content re-enters a sales conversation, not by how many strangers skim an article.

If you’re ready to escape the vanity-metric hamster wheel and start tracking what actually moves revenue, reach out.

Here's a question that's been keeping CMOs up at night: When someone asks ChatGPT about my product category, does my brand appear in the response?

While traditional SEO still accounts for 95% of search traffic today, generative AI is growing rapidly. Search behavior is shifting, and the companies that get ahead of this trend now will dominate the AI-powered search results of tomorrow.

The challenge? Unlike traditional search rankings, AI search visibility is much harder to track and optimize for.

Why traditional SEO audits aren't enough anymore

Here's what we've learned after running generative engine optimization (GEO) audits for some of the biggest names in B2B SaaS: it’s possible to be left out of AI search results, even for companies that rank well in Google.

Take this scenario: A prospect asks ChatGPT, "What's the best analytics platform for SaaS startups?" Your company might rank #1 for that keyword in Google, but if you don't appear in the AI response, you've lost that potential customer entirely.

The problem goes deeper than visibility. Even when brands do appear, they often lack control over:

• How they're described in AI responses

• Which competitors they're mentioned alongside

• The context in which their product appears

• The source information that LLMs are pulling from

The 5-Step GEO audit framework that actually works

Try this systematic audit process to reveals exactly where you stand in AI answers—and what you need to fix.

Step 1: Visibility & attribution baseline

Core question: How often do AI engines surface your brand today?

Start by compiling 25-50 priority search queries and test them across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, and Claude. For each query, log:

• Citation frequency and position

• How your brand is described

• Competitor mentions

• Potential hallucinations or inaccuracies

Output: A "Share-of-Answer" spreadsheet that shows your current visibility across AI platforms, plus a risk/opportunity heat-map highlighting critical gaps.

Step 2: Technical & parsability audit

Core question: Can LLMs easily crawl, interpret, and quote your content?

AI models need clean, well-structured content to understand and cite your pages effectively. We check:

• Core web vitals (load times under 2 seconds, HTTPS, mobile optimization)

• Schema markup validation (Article, FAQ, Product schemas)

• HTML structure for proper headings and content chunks

• No-index barriers or paywall restrictions

Output: Technical audit report with prioritized fix list and development tickets.

Step 3: Entity authority & knowledge-graph signals

Core question: Do AI engines trust your brand as an authoritative source?

Audit your presence across major knowledge bases:

• Wikidata and Crunchbase entries

• Google Knowledge Graph signals

• Brand mentions and backlink analysis

• Context-rich brand mentions across the web

Output: Entity profile assessment with outreach opportunities for citation partners.

Step 4: Content depth & semantic coverage

Core question: Do you answer the full intent behind each query theme?

Using keyword clustering and conversational data, map content gaps:

• Intent cluster analysis for target topics

• Content freshness and format diversity scoring

• Competitive content gap identification

• Editorial calendar planning for missing pieces

Output: 90-day content roadmap focused on AI search optimization.

Step 5: Continuous testing & feedback loop

Core question: How will you track GEO performance over time?

Establish ongoing monitoring systems:

• Weekly automated prompt testing across AI models

• Answer presence tracking in BI dashboards

• Regular content re-submission for model updates

• Monthly performance reviews and strategy adjustments

Output: GEO performance dashboard and quarterly generative SERP reporting.

What we learned running our own audit

Before recommending this process to clients, we tested it on ourselves here at Campfire Labs. The results were eye-opening.

We discovered gaps we never expected. Despite ranking well for content marketing keywords, we didn’t consistently appear in AI responses for queries like "best content agencies for SaaS companies."

The tools landscape is still emerging. Most tools only track a subset of AI models, and the data varies significantly between platforms.

Manual testing revealed more insights than automated tools. While automated monitoring is essential for scale, the initial manual research gave us context that tools missed—like understanding how we were being described and which sources the AI was citing.

The reality check: Why this matters now

Look, we get it. Adding another audit to your already-packed marketing calendar feels overwhelming. But here's what convinced us to prioritize GEO:

Demand is real. In the past three months, we've received more requests for AI search optimization than any other new service. CMOs are reading the same a16z reports you are, and they're asking their teams for strategies.

The window is still open. Unlike traditional SEO, where established players dominate, AI search results are still fluid. Brands that invest in optimization now can establish authority before their competitors catch up.

It builds on what you're already doing. GEO isn't about scrapping your content strategy—it's about making sure your existing content works harder across new channels.

Getting started without the overwhelm

If you're ready to audit your AI search presence, start small:

1. Pick 10 core queries your ideal customers might ask an AI about your product category

2. Test them manually across ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity

3. Document what you find: Do you appear? How are you described? Who else is mentioned?

4. Identify quick wins: Missing schema markup, thin content, or citation opportunities

The goal isn't perfection—it's getting a baseline understanding of where you stand.

What's next

We're still learning. The tools are evolving, the AI models are updating constantly, and best practices are emerging in real-time. But that's exactly why this is such an exciting area to invest in.

Over the next few weeks, we'll be sharing what we learn as we run GEO audits for clients and build out our own optimization playbook. If you want to follow along, we'll be documenting everything—the tools we test, the strategies that work, and the mistakes we make.

Because in a world where your customers are increasingly turning to AI for answers, being invisible isn't an option.

If you run content at an e-commerce SaaS, hearing about the traffic growth experienced by AI startups is not always helpful. And if you’re trying to get a B2B SaaS blog off the ground, benchmarking yourself against the growth of industry behemoths can be daunting rather than motivating.

For content leaders trying to figure out what “good” looks like in their industry right now, benchmarks are most helpful when they’re vertical-specific. That’s why Campfire Labs has expanded the research done in our previous report, Is SEO Dead?

This time, we looked at month-over-month organic traffic performance for over 500 SaaS companies over the last year. We categorized those companies into seven verticals—sales, marketing, HR, design, developer tools, collaboration & productivity, and customer service software—and mapped out trends in organic traffic acquisition for each vertical over time.

In this report, you’ll find realistic benchmarks to gauge your site’s organic performance in the context of specific industry verticals. You’ll also understand the wider vertical-specific trends impacting your organic traffic acquisition, and get actionable ideas for outperforming industry competitors.

How We Analyzed Traffic Data from 500+ Companies

For this analysis, we identified seven key SaaS industries that reflect a wide spread of users and use cases. We used the established categories and sub-categories found in G2 Crowd to identify the industries to focus on.

We then selected dozens or even hundreds of companies from each G2 Crowd category, aiming to represent the breadth of each industry. For example, we analyzed over 200 SaaS companies in the “marketing” category, comprising over 20 subcategories, from event management software to ABM and CDP solutions. We ended with a target list of over 500 companies for analysis.

Finally, we used Ahrefs to collect monthly traffic data for each of these 500+ companies between July 2023 and July 2024.

Our Overall Takeaways

The average SaaS company across all verticals we analyzed increased organic traffic 26% over the last 12 months. That translates to an average organic traffic growth rate of 1.9% month-over-month.

Of the seven industries we focused on, marketing software sites saw the strongest organic growth—70% over 12 months. This vertical also has the 2nd highest number of organic visits overall, second only to customer service software.

Development software came in second, showing 57% organic growth over 12 months, and the 3rd highest number of organic visits.

We’re planning to write a whole newsletter about why development software traffic is booming. We have some theories. If you want that story sent to your inbox later this week, subscribe to our newsletter here:

Our top-level takeaway: Content leaders in these two verticals should be setting some aggressive organic growth goals, as there’s everything to play for right now. We’ll get into the details of that growth in the next section.

Organic Growth Benchmarks by Vertical

Marketing Software - 70% YoY Growth

Companies in this category have seen 70% organic traffic growth over the last 12 months, or an average monthly growth rate of 5.8%.

Within this category, there are some interesting trends. SEO tools, for example, are showing strong organic growth to their sites, which seems to contradict with the theory that SEO is dying:

• Semrush: +350% organic traffic YoY, hitting 21,049,113 organic visits in July 2024.

• Surfer: +378% organic traffic YoY, to 211,314 visits in July 2024.

• Moz: +18% organic traffic YoY, to 903,947 visits in July 2024.

Our takeaway: 6% MoM organic traffic growth is a realistic benchmark for content leaders in this space to aim for. The SEO landscape may feel saturated, but in marketing SaaS there’s a lot of opportunity for growth.

Developer Tools - 57% YoY Growth

Companies in this category have seen 57% organic traffic growth over 12 months, which translates to 4.75% MoM average growth.

Over the first 4 months of 2024, this category saw over 50% growth in organic traffic. That dipped a little in May but has leveled off at strong annual growth.

What’s striking about this category is the growth seems to be partially driven by classic SEO content strategies.

HackerOne, for example, has grown organic traffic 104% through good old-fashioned listicles, “what is” content, and “how to” guides. Test management SaaS Tuskr has leveraged classic educational SEO content (check out their Learn subfolder) to a similar effect, growing traffic 240% from an almost standing start in 2023.

Our takeaway: Content leaders in the dev tool space might set 5% MoM organic growth as a target. To succeed, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel—classic SEO plays still work in non-saturated, niche sub-categories in this vertical.

Collaboration & Productivity Software - 29% YoY Growth

Companies in this category have seen 29% organic traffic growth over 12 months, which translates to 2.4% MoM average growth.

Content leaders working in this vertical will be happy to hear that 2024 was the year that this category finally recuperated its previous organic traffic high from the COVID-19 days. There’s still traffic volatility in the sector, but the trend is up and to the right for organic growth.

Our takeaway: 3% MoM organic growth is an ambitious but achievable objective for blogs in this vertical.

Design Software - 23% YoY Growth

Companies in this category have seen 23% organic traffic growth over 12 months, which translates to 1.9% MoM average growth.

Design software is a classic horizontal SaaS category, selling into multiple user sectors (compared to vertical SaaS, which sells to one specific niche group, like construction companies). And we can see that the horizontal SaaS playbook continues to drive growth for design tools—many of the companies we analyzed here are using search-optimized template pages to drive traffic and get folks into the product, then leveraging the templates to create ToFU content for related keywords.

Our takeaway: Set a benchmark of 2% MoM organic traffic growth, and leverage templates in different ways to build a critical mass of keywords.

Customer Service Software - 11% YoY Growth

Companies in this category have seen 11% organic traffic growth over 12 months, which translates to 0.9% MoM average growth.

While 11% YoY growth is on the lower end of our benchmarks for the seven categories, customer service software has the highest overall organic traffic of all our industries. The SaaS companies we analyzed in this vertical drove over 15 million monthly organic visits in July 2024, compared to 2.6 million for the marketing software category. Basically, this vertical is already a huge driver of organic traffic, so double-digit growth is still impressive.

And the ongoing growth isn’t being driven by small startups, but rather the established players in this monster category. Atlassian’s Jira grew organic traffic by 37% (5,555,323 monthly visits), Zendesk by 5% (4,087,869 monthly visits), and ServiceNow by 41% (1,201,106 monthly visits). We’ll dig into what it takes to grow traffic to an established blog in a future report.

Our takeaway: Content leaders working with a customer service SaaS are facing a mature and competitive category, but it’s still possible to get organic traffic traction, even for large blogs. Set 1% as a realistic MoM growth goal.

HR Software - 10% YoY Growth

Companies in this category have seen 10% organic traffic growth over 12 months, which translates to 0.8% MoM average growth.

Sites in this vertical see notable seasonality, with upticks in organic traffic December to January. 2023-2024 year-end was no different, with a traffic spike over the festive period.

Our takeaway: Content leaders in this vertical can celebrate if they hit 1% MoM organic growth. Strategies and expectations should take into account seasonality, and try to capitalize on the annual bump in December to convert one-time site hits to repeat visitors through sticky content.

Sales Software - 6% YoY Growth

Companies in this category have seen 6% organic traffic growth over 12 months, which translates to 0.5% MoM average growth.

While the vertical saw a bump in organic traffic at the start of 2024, things have been declining through most of this year. AI-native sales tools seem to be the outliers, with FlashIntel, Fathom, and Convin all outperforming the category average.

Our takeaway: It continues to be a tough year for sales teams and the technology that supports them. But within the vertical, smaller sites and those built off AI seem to be finding more opportunities to grow traffic than established players.

Forget SEO Vibes, Benchmark Based On the Data

We’ve spoken before about how the reports of SEO content’s death have been overstated. This expanded data analysis supports our conclusion that SEO SaaS content is in fact alive and well. And we can go further than that—classic SEO strategies that we thought were outdated are still driving meaningful results for content marketers in 2024.

Across our seven key verticals, we see assets like listicles and definitional posts continuing to drive organic traffic (as a company that has generally put our nose up at this type of content—and prides itself on deeply researched, original content like this article—we were surprised by this). We see academy content drive growth, especially in new or niche technologies or sub-categories. And we see organic traffic as a whole continuing to rise across all the sectors we analyzed, even mature sectors that have been chasing keywords for decades.

We recommend you use this data to combat the “SEO is dead” vibes, and instead leverage our vertical-specific benchmarks to set realistic growth goals for the next 12 months. From there, think from first principles, talk to your customers, experiment, measure, and learn.

On the day of ChatGPT 3.5’s launch, the pundits were already foretelling SEO content’s demise. People would quit using search engines and instead use tools like ChatGPT to answer queries. Generative AI, including Google’s own Bard (now Gemini), would flood SERPs with zero-click answers and no one would ever need to visit a website for information again. Organic would cease to be a viable acquisition channel, and cease to drive revenue or pipeline.

Following that logic, any B2B content marketer worth their salt needed to stop investing in search optimization and start investing in… something else? The end was nigh for SEO, and we all had to scramble to figure out what was next.

Except, it hasn’t quite happened like that.

According to original research done by the team here at Campfire Labs, the average large software company has 17.5% more organic traffic today than it did when ChatGPT 3.5 launched in November 2022. Some companies have seen their organic traffic surge by more than 200% over the last 18 months. Here are the top highlights from our research:

• 85% of the companies we analyzed saw their organic traffic grow, while only 15% saw stagnant or negative growth;

• 9 companies have increased their organic traffic by 100% or more since November 2022;

• The companies driving the most organic growth from content are using a variety of content strategies—including localization, programmatic SEO, and ungated tools—to keep winning at search.

The TLDR from our data is that the world’s top SaaS companies continue to see healthy traffic returns off SEO content. And while past performance is no predictor of future success, understanding the content strategies that continue to drive organic growth remains a crucial component of sustainable organic acquisition, and of a diverse channel mix going forward.

Let’s get into the data.

Our Methodology

Using data from Bessemer Venture’s 2023 Cloud Index, we identified the world’s top SaaS companies. They include horizontal SaaS like Canva and Dropbox, and more niche software like Mambu and Procore, a construction project management SaaS.

The companies we looked at have $654 billion in combined market capitalization and an average valuation of $6.6 billion. Their combined monthly organic traffic reached 287 million visits in June 2024, and the average company in the dataset had 4.2 million monthly unique visits.

Using Ahrefs data, we analyzed monthly organic traffic numbers for each company in the index for the last five years. We aimed to uncover trends in organic traffic flowing to these sites, both in aggregate and individually.

We then sliced the data to better understand individual company performance, and draw out lessons other content marketers can use.

Our Takeaways

The average company has 17.5% more organic traffic today than it did when ChatGPT 3.5 launched in November 2022, translating to an average 0.85% growth month over month:

That growth isn’t driven by a few outliers: the majority of companies (61%) we looked at saw between 0–75% positive organic traffic growth. Only 15% saw negative traffic growth since the launch of ChatGPT 3.5, while almost as many (13%) experienced growth of 100% or over.

Drilling down into the 10 companies with the strongest growth, five of them experienced increases of over 200% in their organic traffic since 2022.

The growth isn’t confined to one industry or technology either: the top 10 performers range from customer engagement platform Braze (459% growth) to enterprise AI suite provider C3 AI, and niche solutions like Procore, a construction project management SaaS.

We’ll dig into the drivers behind the biggest organic winners below. But it’s worth taking a moment to check out the 10 companies that saw the biggest declines in organic traffic since November 2022:

It’s possible that these companies pivoted away from an SEO content strategy during the period we’re looking at, which would mean we’re looking at strategic decline. But there are probably companies in there experiencing involuntary traffic decline—it doesn’t take a data scientist to hypothesize why Zoom saw a dramatic rise and fall in traffic between 2019 and 2024.

What This Means for Content Marketers

Overall, it seems that AI hasn’t had the effect of flooding SERPs with junk results and driving searchers to alternative acquisition channels. People are still searching for, finding, and clicking through to company sites via organic search.

This means that, for now at least, content marketers can and should continue to invest in SEO content, if that traffic has historically resulted in conversions and pipeline.

But we can’t just put our feet up and pull out the old “hub and spoke” strategy again. Like all acquisition channels, organic search has become more competitive, and faster-moving, than five years ago. What worked in 2019 won’t work in 2024 and beyond.

So what kind of strategy is working for organic acquisition right now? To find out, we dug a little deeper into the data.

What SEO Strategies Are Working Today?

We zoomed in on the companies in our data set seeing the steepest increase in organic traffic. We then parsed their sites to find out what kind of SEO strategy and tactics they’re pursuing. Here are three strategies that we found content teams are using today to drive organic traffic:

Localization

Three years ago, Asana had roughly the same organic traffic as their competitor Smartsheet. Today, Asana has around 3.5 million more visitors to their site. The compounding traffic growth is mainly attributable to one SEO content strategy—localization, or creating content in other languages.

In 2021, Asana started publishing content in four languages other than English. In Q2 of that year, they were already pulling ahead of Smartsheet’s organic traffic performance. All in all, the company drives over 2 million monthly visits off their localized content, broken out as follows:

The content Asana wrote in these languages accounted for about 70% of the company’s traffic growth over the last three years.

Today, 40% of the company’s revenue comes from outside the United States. Localization has helped the company grow from $360 million per year in revenue three years ago to $664 million today.

Takeaway—Obviously, localization only makes sense as a content strategy if a company is looking to grow its user base overseas. But for content teams working in that context, the translation and transcreation of both existing and planned content can boost traffic sustainably.

Programmatic SEO

Enterprise app development platform C3 AI has seen its organic traffic grow by 322% since the end of 2022, up to almost 140,000 monthly visits. Much of the growth comes from just 100 glossary pages, which make up 6% of the site’s content but drive 13% of its traffic.

And here’s the thing—the company’s content team probably didn’t have to design, write, or even publish those pages manually.

C3 AI uses programmatic SEO to target hundreds of definitional keywords in an automated or semi-automated way. By combining a database of target keywords with public information that’s licensed for commercial use (such as most of the content on Wikipedia), the company can pull that information into a page template that generates different content for each target term.

C3 AI’s page template includes the classic SEO H2s:

• What is [target keyword]?

• Why is [target keyword] important?

• How C3 AI enables organizations to use [target keyword]

If you’re looking at the glossary pages and thinking they look a little thin (some of them are just 300 words long and definitely not EEAT), you might have a point. But that doesn’t matter, or at least not right now.

C3 AI has likely seen success with its programmatic glossary because the company is targeting a lot of new, AI-related terms that few other sites are providing definitional content for (think “gradient boosted decision trees” if you want an example).

And they’re not the only company in our top 10 growth list that’s using a programmatic SEO glossary. Definitive Healthcare drives 61% of its organic traffic off programmatic SEO pages, which proportionally make up under 40% of its content.

Takeaway—A programmatic strategy is a solid approach for any company working in a relatively new or niche sector that wants to “land and expand” using content. But to maintain the gains, you’ll need to keep adding relevant and unique data to complement the publicly sourced information.

Free Tools

Vertical SaaS companies—those that focus on providing a range of features for specific industries—face challenges when it comes to growing organic traffic. They have a smaller TAM, fewer keywords to go after, and lower monthly searches for those keywords.

That hasn’t stopped Procore from growing organic traffic to over 800,000 organic visitors a month, an almost 100% increase since November 2022.

One of the successful strategies the company is using is search-optimized free tools. These pages feature a dynamic calculator up top, and then classic SEO content below that breaks down both the calculation process, and the job to be done. So searchers can automatically calculate the number of asphalt shingles needed for a roof, then scroll down and get more information on how to shingle a roof.

The ungated calculators allow Procore to do things that are vital for niche companies using SEO:

• Drive repeat organic visits. For a company with a small TAM, every user visit matters, so content that drives repeat visits is more valuable than a one-and-done article.

• Hit multiple search intents on one page. By increasing the number of target keywords per page, Procore increases the likelihood of anyone in their TAM finding the calculator. The traffic potential of each page goes up accordingly.

A company with a larger TAM could gate these tools. But for Procore, the payoff is higher for driving repeat traffic from a smaller group of searchers.

Takeaway—Companies with reduced keyword opportunities can still blow up organic traffic by finding a content style that drives repeat visitors, hits multiple search intents on one page, and can be replicated across a range of target terms.

No, SEO Isn’t Dying. And We Have the Data to Prove It.

SEO content is kind of having its Mark Twain obituary moment. Reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated, at least for now, and many of the world’s most valuable SaaS companies continue to drive searchers (and potential users) to their sites via organic.

So AI hasn’t stolen sites’ organic traffic; rather, it’s given content teams some of the tools they needed to scale content meaningfully. Programmatic SEO creation is supported by LLMs, as is the translation needed to localize content at scale. It seems that some content teams are finding ways to work with ChatGPT and similar tools to accelerate organic traffic growth, rather than losing out to AI answer machines.

Content strategies are evolving, and we predict that as more companies leverage scalable content to grow traffic, organic acquisition will become more and more competitive. Companies need to diversify their acquisition channel strategy, even as they invest in SEO content while they can. We’ll continue to dig into the data on how companies are doing that in upcoming data reports.

If you’d like to receive upcoming reports like this one, sign up for our newsletter.

We’ve all launched pieces of content that have failed to resonate. Luckily, your content flops probably didn’t bomb as badly (or as publically) as Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

The 2023 Harrison Ford vehicle was everything you want to avoid in a big content investment. Hideously expensive and with a plot that failed to resonate with the target audience, the movie tanked at the box office, losing Disney an estimated $143 million. That’s one ROI meeting we’re glad we didn’t have to attend.

There are lessons here for content leaders thinking about creating benchmark reports, the blockbuster assets of B2B SaaS. Get buy-in from budget gatekeepers before you get started, keep control of spend and, most importantly, find a theme that resonates deeply with target audiences.

Easy, right?

Errm, wrong. Content marketers face tons of challenges when creating any sort of research asset, including benchmark reports, data reports, and state-of-industry reports. Getting buy-in from exec and data teams, analyzing the data when you do manage to gather it, distribution, tracking ROI on such a large content investment… all of these were highlighted as especially challenging by content marketers we spoke to.

That’s why the Campfire Labs’ team caught up with four of the industry’s top content marketers and asked them how they think about, and execute on, benchmark reports. We spoke to:

• Tracey Wallace from Klaviyo

• Jimmy Daly from Superpath

• Lauren Lang from Uplevel

• Nicole Bennett from Vena Solutions

They gave us their best advice on commonly felt areas of friction, including how to get buy-in from execs, how to craft insights that resonate with your audience, and why ROI is often the wrong metric to track.

Challenge 1: Getting leadership buy-in

No getting away from it—content that requires extensive research is expensive. Anecdotally, we spoke to content marketers who’ve spent up to $60,000 on one research report, with average spend hovering around $27,000.

When you’re splashing that kind of cash, most folks at the company will want to trace a direct line from the report to revenue. But research reports are rarely lower-funnel, product-aligned assets, even when they’re based on proprietary product data. Take the Mixpanel 2024 benchmark report as a classic example—its findings are based on proprietary data, but the report itself is product-agnostic.

The higher up the funnel a research report is the harder it is to track direct revenue. ROI becomes diluted through multi-touch attribution in which lower-funnel pieces of content or sales materials may get more credit for closing deals.

This can make it hard for leadership to buy in to research reports as a line item on the content budget.

Solution: Focus on education and diplomacy

For Nicole Bennett, Content Manager at Vena Solutions, education is the key to getting buy-in for brand-aligned content, particularly as AI’s impact on content accelerates.

“Things are changing in the SERPs because of AI overviews, and you can't guarantee what traffic you'll get from search in the future. So [content’s] job is to help the wider team realize that we can’t neglect brand. It’s a process of education.”

To get buy-in from demand teams and execs who are used to direct attribution, Nicole tries to educate about all the recycling and repurposing opportunities that a research report creates.

“People want to see leads come off a report, but it’s so much bigger than that. We’re planning to spin off thought leadership, video content, social content, and event-based content off our next research report. So even if a report doesn't directly generate a ton of leads, its satellite content can.”

Finally, Nicole recognizes you have to give demand and exec teams what they want sometimes too. “As content marketers, we need to be prepared to track some tangible metrics of success off reports. Even if it's not leads, what can we use to quantify if this is a successful project or not?”

Challenge 2: Data collection & analysis

This is a biggie. For data-based reports, content marketers are hampered by a lack of:

• technical knowledge needed to access proprietary data from SaaS tools or data warehouses;

• relationships with an in-house data teams to support data extraction and analysis;

• data analysis skills.

For survey-based reports, a limited pool of respondents and low engagement, plus failure to ask clear questions that surface insights, are the biggest blockers to success.

Solution: Build relationships to increase survey engagement

Superpath founder Jimmy Daly has been running surveys with his 20,000+ strong community for several years. He recommends putting in the hard work with respondents way before you ask them to complete a survey:

“I tease our annual salary report way before I launch the survey. I'll ask a couple of people to fill out the survey form as a test. There's quite a bit of discussion that happens in the Slack group about it before launch. So there are all these little ways I try to get buy-in from people before asking them to complete a survey. It's really hard to get people to engage with survey questions if you don't already have some kind of brand relationship with them.”

If you don’t have an engaged community to leverage, Jimmy notes that you can kickstart survey responses by creating a feeling of being part of something bigger. “Two years ago, we did a thing where we, like, for every response, we donated $1 to a charity that helped young people who were interested in writing. So there was a tie-in to our community. We had 500 plus respondents that year, the most we'd ever had in one survey.”

Solution: Invest in external experts

If you can afford it, work with external providers to gather, clean, and analyze trends in data. And, as Tracey Wallace from Klaviyo notes, the budget for that doesn’t necessarily have to come from content marketing.

“Early in my career, when I first started doing big research assets, we hired an agency to help and I think we paid them like $50k. That’s a lot of money. But it came from our PR and brand budget. Those teams very much understand the benefits of having proprietary data like that.”

If you can’t wrangle the budget for external help, Tracey recommends using solutions like SurveyMonkey or Qualtrics, that find adequate respondents and package the data in easy-to-parse visuals.

“My advice for folks who are struggling with data collection, building out surveys, asking questions, and all that jazz—find somebody who can help you.”

Challenge 3: Crafting unique insights that resonate

Few content marketers are lucky enough to be members of their own target audience. Those of us who don’t market to other marketers need to work harder to understand the conversations and concerns of our target readers or buyers. There’s always a risk you fail to read to the room. And when you’re spending $30,000 on a piece of content, that risk is higher stakes than on cheaper marketing assets.

Solution: Lean into topic, stance, originality

Lauren Lang, who heads content at Uplevel, recently had a research report go viral, with 1,500 downloads and a 500% increase in web traffic. Impressive, and even more so when you factor in that her target audience is engineering leads, an audience notoriously suspicious of marketing.

Lauren used a 3-part conceptual framework to inform her report design—topic, stance, and originality.

“We chose a topic that we knew our audience was talking about—AI copilots for engineering teams. We don’t have a horse in that race (Uplevel doesn’t have a specific copilot dashboard) so we were able to take a strong, data-informed stance on the topic. And that helped us be original and say what no one else is saying, but engineers might be thinking—that AI copilots don’t actually seem to make tech teams more efficient yet, despite the hype.”

The key, according to Lauren, is really to know your specific, niche audience, the conversations that are happening right now with them, and then maybe how they'll react to different aspects of that conversation.

Tracey at Klaviyo has similar advice. “You have to have a journalist’s instinct to find those truly resonant storylines. For instance, at a former job during COVID, when a lot of folks were getting laid off, we decided to do a report on the freelance revolution. Even the government had put out a report about the growth of freelancing, and we bounced off that news cycle.”

Challenge 4: Demonstrating ROI… or not

Return on investment sometimes seems to be a sensitive subject for content marketers. Several factors complicate tracking content ROI, including:

• A lack of integration between tools in the marketing stack;

• The use of last-touch attribution models;

• Lengthy sales cycles involving multiple content (and marketing/sales) interactions

It’s not that research reports exacerbate these challenges. It’s more that research reports are expensive, as noted above, and therefore more subject to questions about expected (and real) ROI.

Solution: De-couple reports from ROI, and follow up with BoFU

Surprisingly, the four content leaders we spoke to didn’t track revenue metrics as their main KPIs for their recent research reports.

“These reports are typically about top-of-funnel lead gen, for me,” says Tracey Wallace. “ Yes, you're getting someone in who is interested in the data, and you probably have some information in [the report] on how your business can help solve specific problems related to the data. But should a salesperson be calling that person when they download it? No, because [the reader] is not at that point yet.”

Tracey recommends creating several lower funnel lead gen assets off the original report, such as checklists, webinars, or verticalized versions for niche audiences. And the ROI of those assets can be attributed back to the original report.

“These reports aren’t necessarily driving immediate ROI. They're driving brand credibility. They're getting you additional backlinks. They're getting you thought leadership opportunities. You should be talking about that data throughout the year and referencing back to it. But often they’re more of a trust signal than something that's going to drive immediate revenue.”

That can sometimes be a tough conversation to have with other folks in the company, as Lauren from Uplevel acknowledges: “If you're doing a brand play based off a research report, and you get asked, ‘How is this going to influence pipeline? What's the ROI on this?’ You’re expected to extrapolate out, like, ‘well, we're going to get x number of media mentions, and you'll be able to talk about it at a TED talk’, something like that. It's a challenge for a lot of content marketers to make those arguments.

Lauren’s advice is to level-set with decision-makers early on, and balance top-of-funnel assets with a commitment to invest in bottom-of-funnel supporting content. “You need to help them understand that this isn’t going to directly drive demo requests, probably. There’s a lot of balancing that needs to happen—I’m doing a lot of bottom-of-funnel content based on our viral report.”

Build reports that resonate

The content leaders we spoke with reveal the nuanced approach needed to create impactful benchmark reports—reports that resonate with audiences, justify the investment, and build long-term brand credibility. From gaining buy-in to crafting insightful, relevant data stories, each step requires a strategic balance of education, relationship-building, and authenticity.

As you look ahead, a practical next step is to choose one challenge your team often faces—whether it’s getting buy-in, managing data, or setting ROI expectations—and refine your approach. For instance, if getting buy-in for reports is tough, consider starting with a ‘recycling map’ that shows how one report can fuel multiple assets across the funnel. Begin small, iterate, and remember: the bigger-picture goal is always to build a content ecosystem that not only reaches but truly connects with your audience.

"Why isn't our product showing up in ChatGPT's recommendations?"

This is probably the most common question we’re asked at Campfire Labs in 2025. And for good reason: Marketers understand that as generative AI reshapes how potential customers discover solutions, being invisible to these systems means missing critical opportunities.

The good news? You don't need to crack some mysterious algorithm to become visible. Through our work helping companies adapt to this new reality, we've identified five straightforward tactics that will improve LLM visibility—without requiring you to abandon everything that's already working in your marketing strategy.

1. Create detailed product content pages

Some B2B companies have focused so heavily on thought leadership content that they've neglected to publish clear, detailed information about what their products actually do (although of course there are lots of examples of companies doing the opposite). This common mistake means that LLMs have no definitive source of information about what your product actually does. They can't find authoritative information about these products. And so they hallucinate.

When one of our clients discovered they were showing up in ChatGPT with incorrect information about how they compare to competitors, we recommended creating a series of product comparison pages. These pages not only help correct misinformation in LLM results but also rank for search terms that drive significant organic traffic.

Tactical tip: Create dedicated, detailed pages that clearly explain:

• What your product does

• Who it's for

• How it solves your customers' problems

• Feature breakdowns

• Clear comparisons with alternatives

Find out how we helped Vena close deals with competitor comparison content.

2. Build a well-structured, easy-to-crawl website

Just like with traditional SEO, technical structure matters enormously for LLM visibility. Creating an organized site that is easy for an LLM to navigate and understand increases the odds that your content is included in training data and real-time search.

It’s easy to overlook technical aspects of optimization, focusing solely on writing quality. But schema markup, proper site organization, and structured data play a crucial role in helping LLMs understand and accurately represent your content.

Action step: Ensure your site uses:

• Schema markup (especially Organization and FAQ Page schema)

• Clear site hierarchy with logical navigation

• Structured data for product features, pricing, and comparisons

• Well-organized HTML with semantic headings and clear page structures

Real-world example: 300% lift in LLM traffic after a GEO overhaul

Nexus Marketing ran a Generative Engine Optimization audit for Double the Donation that included:

• Adding Organization, Author, and FAQ schema

• Improving their About page with real-author bios for E-E-A-T signals

• Cleaning up technical SEO and social profiles for consistent brand data

The result: a 300% increase in user sessions from ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity in five months. This example shows how creating a crawlable structure and building E-E-A-T authority can increase LLM visibility.

3. Get your messaging distributed widely across the web

When LLMs see your product mentioned near relevant terms across multiple websites, they make stronger semantic connections. This co-occurrence pattern helps establish your product as relevant to specific pain points or solutions.

The training data that powers these algorithms comes from the entire web, not just your site. If your product is mentioned alongside relevant terms often enough, LLMs will pull your product out when people are talking about related pain points or solutions.

Action step: Invest in:

• PR outreach to get coverage in industry publications

• Co-marketing campaigns with complementary products

• Guest posting on high-authority industry blogs

• Getting industry thought leaders to mention your product in their content

4. Invest in building site authority

If you think about how tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity work, they're often just searching the web and then summarizing the results. That means traditional SEO still matters tremendously.

Companies that invest in successfully ranking for relevant terms in traditional search engines will also show up more frequently in LLM results. When someone asks ChatGPT "what are the best HR software tools for startups," it's likely running a search and summarizing those results.

Action step:

• Produce high-quality content that earns backlinks

• Focus on ranking for terms your ideal customers are searching for

• Don't abandon traditional SEO best practices

• Think about how people phrase questions differently in conversational LLMs versus search engines

Real-world example: Big-brand citations drive real referral traffic

After ChatGPT launched its web search capability, referrals to 14 major publishers grew eight-fold in six months. The New York Post received 760,000 visits from ChatGPT in January 2025 (0.5% of its total traffic), with The Guardian and Forbes close behind, according to Search Engine Journal.

LLMs consistently favored publications that are:

• Frequently cited by other trusted sites (demonstrating authority)

• Technically accessible for OpenAI's crawler

• Rich in well-structured article metadata

5. Structure content around natural language patterns

LLMs are built around natural language processing, meaning how you structure your content matters. Unlike traditional keyword-focused SEO, consider how the semantic relationships between concepts in your content help LLMs understand what you're about.

This doesn't mean keyword stuffing or trying to game the system – it means writing in a way that clearly establishes the relationships between concepts, problems, and solutions in your domain.

Action step:

• Organize content thematically rather than focusing solely on specific keywords

• Consider how people phrase questions conversationally when querying ChatGPT

• Create content that addresses the variations in how people might ask about your product

• Focus on natural language over technical SEO-speak

These tactics are no-regret investments

Even if these tactics don't immediately improve your LLM visibility (though they will over time), they'll help you acquire customers through other channels and make your content easier for humans to navigate.

These are "safe investments" that will deliver ROI regardless of how exactly LLMs evolve. They align with the timeless principles of creating valuable content, making it easy to find and understand, and distributing it widely.

Don't wait for perfect information

The companies that grow in this uncertain landscape won't be the ones waiting for perfect information about how LLMs work. They'll be the ones experimenting, measuring results, and adjusting tactics based on what they learn.

As one of our clients put it: "It still feels like a black box to me on how that information is getting in there." But that's okay – Google's algorithm has always been partly a black box too, and that didn't stop smart marketers from figuring out what works.

The marketers who succeed with LLM optimization will be the ones who start implementing these tactics today, rather than waiting for perfect clarity that may never come.