How Zapier Became the 5th Most Cited Site in AI

Ross Hudgens (0:10)

Bringing you a unique pod today, talking through a case study with Zapier. So Zapier is an amazing AI workflow tool, automation integration software that probably everyone listening to this has heard of, amazing company and wanted to talk about them in particular, about the green light because they are one of the most cited domains in LLMs. So if you're on the B2B front, the SAS front, almost certainly, you have seen Zapier in your citations, very possibly in your top 10, in many of them, just due to the overall impact.

Talking about today because have a more detailed version of this case study in my upcoming book on GEO, Publishing with Wiley on October 12th, but wanted to give a truncated view, talking through why I think Zapier is so successful at what they do, and why it's worth going into more detail about. So first, overall, their visibility is quite strong just from the transactional bottom funnel prompts they specifically care about. They're in that 80 percent range across most of those. So that's the first proof point that, hey, this company may be worth considering in terms of its overall GEO, LLM excellence. Another piece is just when we do back up, and this is the component I'm talking about, we did a study with Peak that looked at a thousand transactional prompts across different industries. But within all LLMs, we saw Zapier in that 20 range of actually most cited domain. So as a commercial SaaS entity, that is quite impressive, all things considered. To have the commercial site, not a social media site, not a review site, appear in that area is incredible. So that's the first component, but if we drill into B2B in more particular, we see them even higher. We actually see them fifth behind G2, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit. This may need some updating for present tense, but is relatively recent with that study that we did with Peak that drilled into this in particular. So what makes them, I think, stand out in many ways is they do have a big integration library. So they can integrate with so many tools via their Zaps, and as part of that kind of orchestration, that means that they aren't directly competing with them. And if you're not directly competing and you also enable so many SaaS tools out there to be more effective, this means that the library of opportunity is quite broad, and also not as competitive when we create content online. So the average website in B2B is creating these listicles, the BestEx Roundups, to drive more LLM visibility and also pipeline through organic search, of course. So, Zapier embraced this strategy in how they do content creation in particular. But what they also did beyond these BestEx articles is also build versus articles. So they have many different competitor versus competitor plays on their content experience that are worth digging into and seeing more of. They were able to cover the majority of the high-volume landscape in the space, and as a by-product, when people are in this shopping consideration, the idea is that Zapier is introduced into that conversation as a way that that tool or other tools may interact with it to drive more value. And of course, this is a way that they have a unique position in the marketplace where almost every other B2B is mentioning themselves and mentioning themselves biassly on these articles. So truly the only good review platform online for B2B is G2 and their family review sites and then Zapier in terms of who is actually doing it quality. Of course, I am biased because we're a small part of that content creation story for them.

But it's, I think, very, it shows up in the numbers. There's a reason why they're number five in that list is because they do these reviews, they do these roundups, and they have a unique content strategy that matches their product offering. So that gives them that ability to produce these and produce these at scale in a pretty powerful way. So as part of that, they have embraced a recent study that G2 put out. We also found in our own correlation analysis is quite prominent as well.

What drives the most LLM visibility from a CLICS standpoint is actually those sites that have more versus articles. So Zapier is a clear indicator of this, and they have a good percentage of those, but that G2 study in particular is showing that right after Bessex articles at 33% of how people compare according to G2 survey and data, 31% is via that X versus Y corpus of context. So a lot of people aren't doing those Bessex articles, so hopefully this is evidence if you have some internal consideration around this that is causing pause. Of course, additional data points that this is really important to do may be helpful to get you across that line. So we put out these articles for them. They're high-quality, they're premium, they're not just poor stock photo above the fold with a screenshot. We are seeing custom design images kind of putting the assets in comparison.