Why AI Is Having an Outsized Impact on Outseta's Growth

We're now six months into 2025 and if I've learned anything via my marketing experimentations this year it's this—AI is having an outsized impact on Outseta's growth. We're growing MRR about 2.5X faster than the rate that we did in 2024 and the hard truth is we've done very little (at least that was deliberate) to realize these gains.

When I look at responses to our "How did you hear about us?" survey that we send to new customers, the results are overwhelming:

"ChatGPT."

I talk to lots of other SaaS founders and almost all of them have seen ChatGPT popping up with increased frequency as a source of new customers. But in our case, ChatGPT (and more broadly AI focused searches) have gone from a non-existent source of customers to far and away our most common source of new customers—all in under six months. Almost every lead coming in these days is from ChatGPT.

So what gives? What happened? And how can we further take advantage of this?

As I've been seeking to understand this over the last few months, the answers have become increasingly clear.

The Death of Web Traffic

Before I dig into Outseta's situation specifically, I want to start by looking at what's happening in the world of online marketing from a macro perspective. The video below from Rand Fishkin is the best overview of this topic that I've found, but I've summarized the main points below.

Major Points

• For the last 20 years digital marketers have focused on using search engines (Google) and social media sites to drive referral traffic to their websites—both are increasingly focused on keeping you on their sites instead.
• As a result, customer attribution is becoming more difficult than ever before.
• Brands need to now "take a leap of faith" more than ever and create great content, without the ability to track its impact as directly.
• That content needs to be published in places that are influential to your buyers.
• Established brands that have invested in content production will win more than ever before.

I believe this all to be true. And while SEO best practices are generally best practices for getting found in AI tools as well, the playbook has changed with this shift. The days of building SEO-optimized listicle articles targeting specific keywords to drive top of funnel referral traffic back to your site is slowly coming to an end. Instead, brands who think long term and publish content across the web on sites, communities, and social channels that influence their audience are winning and getting discovered that much more—even if attribution remains murky. It's much more about building trust and credibility—rather than a high volume of referral traffic.

With this in mind, I was able to start understanding how this shift has played into Outseta's hands. We're now an 8+ year old company—an eternity in the world of tech start-ups. And we started publishing content the same day the we started writing code.

I've written before about how I never focused on SEO in writing any of that content—instead, I thought of that content as an investment in our brand. Of the 120+ posts published to our website over 8+ years, exactly two of them were written with SEO in mind in any meaningful way. I wasn't optimizing for keywords—I was simply writing when I felt that I had something to say.

I had my reasons for this (which I'll explain in the next section), but I can assure you that when I shared this sentiment with other marketers and SEO specialists many of them essentially turned their heads in disgust. The entire point of publishing content on your site is to rank for keywords relevant to your target audience, right? I'm the first to tell you that my lack of emphasis on SEO wasn't foresight of any sort on my part—but it's clear that the long term approach on high-quality, brand-oriented content is now starting to pay dividends. Our content—while not driving much referral traffic to our site in terms of non-branded search terms—has proliferated and been shared broadly across the types of sites that influence our audience. It's given AI tools a huge volume of content on which to understand what Outseta is and who it's for.

Our site has always been unique in that it has strong domain authority—a measure of it's "credibility" of sorts—but relatively low traffic from non-branded keywords. Simply put, with AI search tools that "credibility" is starting to pay off.

Why traditional search was not well suited to our product—but AI search is

Now to more directly state why this changing landscape has benefited us so much—the truth is "traditional search" has always been a bit tough for us at Outseta. In a traditional search engine like Google, you have a single shot at entering a search term a query. Maybe "CRM" or "Subscription Billing" or "Best email marketing platform."

But what is Outseta exactly?

The truth is we're all of these things—and keywords like "CRM" or "Subscription Billing" or "Email Marketing" are insanely competitive keywords. We'd be trying to rank in search engines against companies like Salesforce, or Hubspot, or MailChimp—frankly that would be a losing endeavor. It's why I made a deliberate decision not to focus our content on such keywords and instead focused on writing content that would be positively associated with our brand—even if that was "squishy" and hard to measure.

While keywords like "SaaS starter kit" or "Membership software" were a better fit, the truth is Outseta doesn't neatly fit into any well understood software category—and the keywords that best describe our feature set are too competitive to be worthwhile.

This is where AI search is different—rather than entering a single search query, users are having a full blown conversation with ChatGPT as they talk though their needs. Yes, they might start with a search for "membership software" but then they expand on what they actually need.

They might need software that works with Stripe, they also need a CRM, and they are wondering if they need to integrate with a transactional email tool like Sendgrid as well. If it works with Webflow, even better. And they'd like to be able to protect not just pages or folders of content, but any individual element on a web page, too.

While this more expansive line of questioning is not well suited to a traditional Google search, it's the strength of ChatGPT. And for once, the breadth of what we offer at Outseta is actually playing into our hands.

ChatGPT understands our product and business in enough depth to understand that we are one of the few products that can serve all these types of needs—and we're being recommend not only often but in situations where we're truly uniquely suited to the needs of the customer.

The quality of the leads coming from ChatGPT has been outstanding, and I attribute this to the depth in which it understands our product—based on 8+ years of publishing detailed content. That's tough to earn overnight! I've seen this first hand as I've started to ask customers coming from ChatGPT to share their search conversations with me. While a generic search for "membership software" often returns a laundry list of potential options with a fairly weak comparison grid, as additional context and requirements are added ChatGPT has almost always identified Outseta outright or as one of two alternatives as a "best-fit" for the project at hand.

I think there are a few obvious takeaways here:

• ChatGPT is extra helpful to companies whose product don't fit neatly into a well established software category
• ChatGPT is extra helpful to to companies that sell more feature rich, platform based solutions
• ChatGPT is extra helpful in helping people with complex requirements for digital products suss out the best tools to deliver such products

While these thing typically hurt companies (and buyers) in a traditional search based environment, ChatGPT can actually turn these attributes into strengths.

So what next?

As I said—I wish I could take credit for some brilliant, long term marketing strategy here but I really can't—this all just soft of fell in our lap and started helping us unexpectedly. But we're certainly doing what we can to harness this that much more:

• We're increasingly looking for opportunities to publish our content on other influential sites
• We've made our knowledge base content available in markdown format which is more easily digestible to LLMs
• We've moved from rendering out knowledge base with javascript to using static HTML (again easier for LLMs to consume)

But ultimately I see this as a hugely positive trend. As we enter the era "where anyone can build anything" it's clear that more people than ever are chasing short terms wins and tactics. We've all heard the stories of wild growth trajectories and overnight successes.

But it's increasingly clear that companies that think long term and invest in their brand will have a marked advantage—and products with robust functionality, more complexity, and that are less easily "categorized" also have an opportunity to be better understood in AI search versus a traditional search engine.