Glean reports ~87K monthly organic visits. Strip out people searching “Glean” and it’s ~12K. 87% of the traffic is people who already knew the name.
All 87K look identical on a growth slide.
Funds diligence financials, retention, burn. Organic usually gets a glance at the traffic chart, if that. Which is a miss, because you can check all of it from the outside, and it answers the one question paid can’t: does demand keep coming when the spend stops?
Here’s the checklist I run. Every input is public.
The checklist
1. Branded split
Split the traffic into people searching the company’s name vs everything else. If 80%+ is name searches, there’s no real SEO engine. There’s a brand, and the “organic channel” on the slide is just that brand showing up in a different chart.
Pull it in Semrush organic research: the domain’s keyword list, filtered branded against non-branded. Two minutes. The fast proxy is the homepage’s share of total organic, which is where the Glean figure below comes from. The two numbers match because they measure nearly the same thing.
Why 80 and not some other number. Across the nine companies in my YC dataset, the homepage holds between 26% and 84% of total organic. Glean sits alone at 84%. Gusto is next at 64%. Nothing lands in between, so the line goes in the gap.
2. Concentration
What happens if one thing breaks? In my YC dataset, Deel’s homepage alone carried 35% of the company’s total organic traffic. One page. You’d flag a company where 50% of revenue came from one customer. Same flag here: one page, one referring partner, one subdomain they don’t own.
3. The 24-month curve
Pull two years of traffic and look at the shape, not the number. A steady upward slope means there’s a system. Flat with occasional spikes means every gain was a one-off: a launch, a press hit, a lucky post. Read it like retention. Slope beats size. Vanta at 68K growing 70% a year is a better story than 300K that’s been flat since 2023.
These are single-month readings, July 2025 against July 2026, and that window is not the one the March version of this data used. Monthly estimates are noisy. On a three-month window Faire reads flat rather than down 23%. Trust the direction at the ends of that chart more than the exact number in the middle.
4. Revenue-adjacent vs vanity
Look at the top 20 pages. Are they things a buyer reads right before buying, or is the blog ranking for trivia? Strip the trivia out of my YC dataset and Gusto’s 1.10M monthly visits is really ~650K. Two companies with the same traffic number can be 10x apart in the revenue that traffic actually supports.
5. AI exposure
“What is X” and “how to X” searches now get answered by AI directly. No click. Webflow has 18.3 million backlinks and their blog still fell from ~126K to ~53K monthly visits in a year, because that’s exactly the kind of content AI eats. That figure measures the webflow.com/blog/ folder in the US database, not the whole domain and not worldwide.
To size it on a target: pull the top 20 pages, then count how many of them win on “what is” or “how to” queries. That share is your exposure estimate.
Grade this by stage. A seed company with 90% branded organic is normal. They have a brand and not much else yet. The same number at Series B, from a company calling organic a growth channel, is the flag. Same rubric, different passing grade.
Running Glean through it
Take Glean, the example from the top. On the slide: ~87K monthly, +6% YoY. Flat, but not alarming.
The homepage carries 87% of the traffic. 25 blog posts combined pull 4%.
Dominant branded search is an asset. It means word of mouth works and people arrive already knowing the name. It just isn’t the asset the slide is claiming. The organic line reflects brand demand Glean built elsewhere. It doesn’t generate new customers on its own. Those are different assets and should be valued differently.
Green flags, red flags
The whole checklist, condensed to a single read:
One input the public data won’t give you: how many people ship content. Traffic divided by content headcount separates a real engine from an expensive one.
This is the read I run before touching any organic program: for funds looking at a deal, and for founders who want to know what their own traffic chart is saying before someone else pulls it apart.
Organic won’t make or break most deals. It’s just one of the few places you can see, from the outside, whether growth is built or bought.