Is SEO Dead? Here's What the Data Says.

SEO content died on November 30, 2022. Or at least, that’s what was meant to happen. 

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 banking infrastructure provider 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.

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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:

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

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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:

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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.

We've made our data accessible to everyone, just drop us your email and we'll send you the link.

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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

We've made our data accessible to everyone, just drop us your email and we'll send you the link.

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