Growth case study
No organic channel to inherit, a full rebrand underway, and a hunch that search itself was about to change.
I treated organic search as a product, not a marketing afterthought
When the rebrand from Corvee to Instead began, organic traffic was close to nothing. Three years later it was a durable channel the company owned, grown article by article, from keyword to conversion, and built to keep winning as search moved into AI.
The timing made it interesting. For a while, Corvee and Instead ran side by side in the same category, so I had to grow Instead's audience without pulling from Corvee's. When it was time to retire Corvee, its hard-won traffic had to move too, mapped over carefully rather than through one blunt redirect.
So I made content the strategy. I published consistently across a mix of articles, guides, and deadline pages, and collaborated across departments to keep every piece accurate as tax legislation and products changed. That steady, trustworthy publishing is what made the channel compound, and when buyers began asking AI tools instead of searching, I carried the same approach into generative engine optimization.
The approach
Turned quarterly keyword research into a consistent publishing cadence, the engine behind most of the organic growth.
Ranked the brand in classic search, then pioneered generative engine optimization so its content gets cited by AI answer engines, not only crawled by Google.
Added attribution across every article and resource, so I could see the real impact each one had and which pieces turned into qualified leads.
Ran the channel on evidence, using Google Search Console and GA4 explorations to read what was compounding and reinvest there season after season.
The result
Betting on AI search before it was obvious
While most brands were still optimizing for Google, I was optimizing for the models replacing it. I pioneered generative engine optimization so the brand would be found and cited by ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot, and within a year AI-search referrals grew 17×. Instead ranked first for its own name and reached the first page for “AI tax software,” visible in the exact places buyers had started to ask.