For four years, Rippling’s organic traffic looked dead. Through January 2022, the company was pulling under 10K monthly visits while Brex, same YC batch, was already at 112,000. If you’d put those two graphs side by side in early 2022, you’d have called Brex the SEO success story and quietly killed Rippling’s program.
By July 2026, Rippling was at 552,000 monthly visits, more than 3x Brex. The flat line became the steepest growth curve in this study, and the most interesting one to dissect.
That contrast is the reason I pulled this dataset together. I wanted to know what each of these nine companies actually built, what’s compounding right now in 2026, and what the data tells you about running an SEO program at an early-stage company where the graph won’t look like progress for two or three years.
These nine companies span Y Combinator batches S15 to S20. Every one is a unicorn or close to it. Some won on programmatic. Some won on editorial. One won on patience. Here’s what I found.
The standings
Here’s where each company sits in July 2026, ranked by current monthly organic traffic. The leaderboard is just the snapshot. The shape of each curve underneath it is the more interesting story, which is what most of this piece is about.
Gusto leads at over 1.1 million monthly visits, almost exactly double the next company on the list. The W17 batch (Rippling, Faire, Brex) tells a more interesting story. Rippling is second highest in the entire study at 552K. Faire has slid to fourth at 281K. Brex, the company most people associate with SEO at YC, is fifth at 172K. Same batch, very different YC startup SEO outcomes.
Then you have the younger companies. Deel sits at 155K despite only launching real organic activity in mid-2022. Glean and Vanta are the smallest, but as we’ll see, they’re moving faster than anyone else right now.
Raw traffic is just the snapshot. The more interesting question is what each one did to get here.
Here’s what the data made clear after running it across all nine. There is no single playbook for organic at this scale. These companies didn’t pick the same architecture, didn’t ship at the same cadence, and didn’t even bet on SEO with equal conviction. What they share is more about commitment than timing. The ones with durable engines made an architectural bet that fit their business and put real weight behind it for years. The ones still flat are still hedging.
Strategy by strategy
The phrase “startup SEO strategy” gets thrown around a lot. What I mean by it specifically is: where the traffic actually comes from. Not what the team says they do. What the data shows they built.
I pulled the top 50 highest-traffic pages on each domain and classified them by type: programmatic, editorial, product, glossary, comparison, landing, or other. The mix tells you exactly what each company bet on. What follows are nine SaaS SEO examples, same starting point, very different outcomes.
Programmatic at scale, paired with brand. 23 of the top 50 pages are programmatic: salary tools, payroll calculators by city and state, paycheck calculators by hourly and salary structure. These pages were built once and have been compounding for almost a decade. The homepage carries 73% of top 50 traffic on its own, which tells you the brand is doing real work, but the programmatic surface is what gives Gusto its scale.
Editorial-led, with a glossary backbone. 30 of the top 50 are blog posts on payroll, HR, security, and operations topics. Six glossary pages add quiet support. Almost no programmatic. The interesting twist is what came after Rippling started taking SEO seriously: the most aggressive content investment of any company here, with traffic moving from under 10K monthly in early 2022 to 552K by 2026. The deep dive on how they did it is below.
Pure marketplace programmatic. 37 of the top 50 are templated pages generated from the marketplace catalog: discovery URLs, category and subcategory pages, brand portals. Almost no editorial in the mix. The marketplace data structure is the SEO strategy. This is the cleanest of all the programmatic SEO examples here: your product architecture is your SEO architecture.
The most diversified strategy of the nine. Templates, the made-in-Webflow showcase, blog posts on web design, plus a help center that ranks for long tail. Webflow built five different organic motors at once and rode them up to a sustained peak near 518K monthly visits in mid-2024, then gave back a third of it. The interesting part is what happened underneath: the blog collapsed while the domain recovered, up 11% year over year. AI search took a bite out of the “how to” web design queries that used to drive the blog, and the other four motors absorbed it.
Editorial heavy, but commercial editorial. 40 of the top 50 are blog posts and they’re not “what is HR” content. They’re tactical operator content: KPI examples, self-evaluation templates, virtual team building. The angle works for Deel because their buyer is searching for operational HR content. The single biggest page is still the homepage at 35% of total organic. The largest blog post, the KPI examples piece, does about 8%. The editorial base is wide rather than propped on one URL.
Editorial with a comparison and product page layer. 41 of the top 50 are journal and spend trends articles covering finance and operations topics. The comparison page (versus Ramp) ranks but barely contributes. Two product pages, the credit card and business account, do real work. The strategy is sound but the velocity has been slow. Brex hovered between 100K and 155K monthly visits for almost four years, and has only recently pushed past that to 172K.
Brand-led with editorial support. The homepage and login pages dominate, then editorial covers the rest. 28 of the top 50 are blog posts on accounting, profit and loss, and finance basics. Nine product pages also make the list, more than any other company in this study. Mercury was flat for years and then broke out, up 45% year over year, the second-fastest mover in the study.
Almost entirely brand. The homepage alone is 87% of top 50 traffic. 25 editorial posts are on the list but they collectively pull only 4% of top 50 traffic. Glean has built a very strong brand presence in enterprise search and AI assistants and most of their organic comes from people searching for them by name. Growth has now flattened to 6% year over year, and the dependency on brand search is real.
The cleanest commercial-intent play of the nine. 24 editorial pages, all in the compliance niche, plus a glossary on regulatory terms. Pages like “what is SOC 2” and “SOC 1 vs SOC 2” rank for queries that founders search when they’re about to need Vanta. Eight product pages also rank. The traffic is small but the intent is high, and the growth rate is the fastest here.
A few patterns jump out across these nine. Very different SEO engines on the surface, but the architectural decisions underneath cluster. Programmatic and editorial both produce real outcomes. The brand layer matters everywhere. And the companies that look most concentrated, Glean on its homepage and Deel on a single blog post, are the most fragile in ways that don’t show up in the headline traffic number.
Velocity, not size
Size is a snapshot. Velocity is the signal. Year-over-year traffic change tells you which companies are actively building and which ones are coasting on work they shipped four years ago.
These are single-month comparisons, July 2025 against July 2026. That window is not the one the March version of this study used, which is why several of these numbers moved. Monthly estimates are noisy at this scale. On a three-month window centred on the same dates, Faire reads flat rather than down 23%, and Webflow reads flat rather than up 11%. Treat the middle of this chart as approximate and the ends as real.
Vanta is the fastest-growing company here. It’s also the smallest. Mercury and Brex follow. Then Deel and Rippling. Gusto, despite being the largest, is now shrinking, and Faire is shrinking faster than anyone.
The interesting question is why these particular companies are accelerating. Vanta and Deel are both pulling on commercial-intent content in well-defined verticals. Compliance for Vanta. Operational HR for Deel. Mercury broke a long flat stretch to become the biggest mover of the year. None of them are doing anything novel. They’re just doing well-targeted work in categories that are growing.
The two companies declining are different cases. Gusto is a large, mature engine giving back a few percent. Faire is down 23% in a year and is the one to study. Two names moved the other way since the March cut of this data: Mercury went from flat to second-fastest, and Webflow, which was the decliner, is growing again.
The eight-year curves
The standings only show you where things are. The trajectories show you how each company got there. Looking at all nine companies across eight years tells a richer story.
Gusto’s curve is the smoothest. They started 2018 already pulling 150K monthly and grew almost linearly for seven years before flattening out this year. The architecture they laid down before 2018 compounded without major shifts the entire time.
Faire’s curve has a peak. They hit 766K in late 2022 and have been sliding back since, down to 281K by July 2026. The decline from peak coincides with broader updates to how Google handles marketplace and discovery pages. The same architecture that let Faire scale to 766K is what’s now exposing them to algorithm changes, and at -23% year over year Faire is the fastest-declining company in this study.
Webflow’s curve is the one that changed most since the first cut of this data. A sustained peak near 518K in mid-2024, a hard fall through 2025, and a recovery to 334K that has it growing again year over year. The cautionary tale isn’t the domain. It’s the blog underneath it, which lost more than half its traffic while the rest of the site made up the difference.
Rippling’s curve is the most striking shape here. Flat for four years, then a near-vertical climb that hasn’t stopped. The story behind it is below.
How long it takes
One of the most common questions early-stage founders ask is how long SEO actually takes. The data has a clean answer.
Webflow hit 100K in seven months. They had a programmatic template gallery from day one and a product that was natively shareable on the web. Faire took 22 months because they needed marketplace inventory before the programmatic surface could rank. Deel took 21 because they entered an established commercial intent space and could rank quickly with sharp editorial.
The slow side is just as informative. Rippling took three years and one month. Glean and Vanta are five years in and still haven’t crossed 100K in the US, though both clear it worldwide. That doesn’t mean they’re failing, especially with their current growth rates. But it does tell you that some businesses don’t have a fast organic path no matter how much you invest.
For founders evaluating whether SEO is working at their company, here is the rule of thumb I’d use: if you’ve crossed 100K monthly organic in under 24 months, your architecture is sound. Past 36 months without crossing it, you should be asking whether the architecture is fundamentally fit for the business, not whether you need more content.
The Rippling story
Rippling’s curve is the most aggressive growth story in this study, and it isn’t a story about luck. It’s a story about a team that decided, sometime in early 2022, to take SEO seriously and then out-shipped everyone for the next four years.
By January 2022, Rippling’s organic looked dead. Under 10K monthly visits, four years in. Brex, same batch, was at 112,000. Most operators would have killed a program that flat for that long. Rippling did the opposite. They leaned in, hard.
What followed is the most aggressive SEO investment in the study. Between January 2023 and May 2024, Rippling went from roughly 110 organic pages to 847. A 7.7x expansion in 16 months. Roughly 46 new indexable pages a month, sustained for over a year. The architecture was hub-and-spoke: cornerstone topics like “Pay Transparency Laws” anchored a state-by-state spoke for every U.S. state, all interlinked. A programmatic surface built on top of editorial intent. They paired that with sharp on-page work and aggressive geo-keyword targeting in markets where they wanted enterprise penetration.
One caution before you read this as cause and effect. The content surge ran alongside a funding round, a much larger sales motion, and a brand that got substantially better known over the same stretch. Some of that curve is demand Rippling created elsewhere and then harvested through search. The publishing cadence is the part other companies can actually copy.
The payoff was fast and durable. Traffic moved from under 10K monthly in early 2022 to 552K by July 2026. By any reasonable benchmark, Rippling out-shipped, out-architected, and out-paced every other company in this study over that same window.
The most aggressive SEO investment produced the most aggressive growth curve. That isn’t luck. That’s the pattern.
The lesson is direct. The companies that win at organic at scale treat SEO as a real investment vector, not a function bolted onto the marketing org. That means committed headcount, committed publishing cadence, and committed architectural decisions held long enough to compound. The companies that “do SEO” by checking a box on a content brief produce the flat lines you see across the rest of this study.
The concentration problem
One last pattern I want to highlight before the takeaways. It’s the fragility hiding inside topline traffic numbers.
Most of these companies look healthier than they actually are because their organic footprint is concentrated in a small number of pages or content types. If those pages or types lose ground, the topline drops fast.
The denominator here is top-50 traffic, not total organic. Brand-heavy companies score high partly because their top-50 tail is thin, so the homepage takes a bigger share of a smaller base.
Three reads from this graph:
- Glean’s homepage carries 87% of its top-50 traffic. Brand search is doing all the work. If brand demand softens, the rest of the SEO surface isn’t substantial enough to catch them.
- Deel’s concentration sits in the homepage, not the blog. The homepage is 35% of Deel’s total organic. The biggest blog post, the KPI examples piece, was 3% in March and 8% in July. The editorial surface is spread across many URLs.
- Not all top-50 traffic is equal. Some of it is strategically valuable (commercial-intent pages near a buying decision). Some is inflated (homepage hits from brand searches, login pages, low-intent queries that convert at near-zero rates).
Strip the inflated traffic out and the picture looks different. Glean’s 87K becomes ~12K of meaningful organic. Gusto’s 1.1M is closer to 650K. Faire’s 281K is closer to 210K. The companies whose top-50 traffic is doing real funnel work are Vanta, Deel, and Brex. Smaller toplines, more strategic.
The lesson: don’t read SEO performance off topline traffic alone. Pull your top 20 pages and ask which ones put a buyer in front of a buying decision. The pages that don’t aren’t infrastructure. They’re decoration.
What this means for SEO in 2026
The Webflow Callout earlier is the sharpest signal in this study for anyone planning a startup SEO strategy in 2026. A category leader with 18.3 million backlinks watched its blog fall 58% in a year while the rest of the domain grew. One company is not a trend. Here is the read anyway: this looks like a category problem rather than a Webflow execution problem, and if that holds, it reaches anyone whose strategy rests on “how to” editorial. Webflow had four other motors to absorb the hit. Most companies have one.
Three shifts I think are underway. The first is the one this data speaks to directly:
1. AI search is eating long-tail editorial. “What is HRIS software,” “how to rebuild your design system,” and most “what is X” queries now resolve in ChatGPT or Google AI Overviews without a click. Editorial built on commercial intent (Vanta on compliance, Deel on operational HR) keeps growing. Editorial built on explanation is bleeding.
2. Content has been commoditized. Every team has the same AI tools, the same playbooks, the same cadence advice. The differentiator is what AI cannot replicate: your product data, your customer workflows, your proprietary datasets, your category authority. Faire wins on its catalog. Gusto wins on calculators tied to actual product data. Glean wins because enterprise buyers know the name.
3. Defensibility has moved upstream from editorial to architecture. The engines that look bulletproof in 2026 are built on structural assets: product data exposed as searchable surfaces, glossary networks tied to commercial intent, programmatic pages built on proprietary data, brand earned through real category authority. The engines that look shaky are content-only.
If you’re making organic investment decisions in 2026, the question changed. Not “what content should we ship.” It’s “what part of our business is structurally a search asset, and how do we expose it.” Most companies have at least one. Very few expose it well.
How to apply this
If you’re a founder building an early-stage company, here’s what I’d take from this. The framework first, then the principles.
The framework. Match your business shape to a primary organic motor. If you are applying this to your own company, ignore the leaderboard and start here. Each row below is drawn from one or two companies in this study, so treat it as a starting point for your own analysis rather than a rule.
No mapping fits perfectly. Some businesses end up running two motors at once, and that’s fine when one is already compounding. But every shape has one obvious starting point, and the mistake most founders make is skipping that question entirely and copying whatever playbook is currently popular.
The architecture you commit to early is the one you'll have for years.
Faire’s marketplace pages, Gusto’s calculators, Webflow’s templates. None of these were retrofits. These were product decisions that happened to also be SEO decisions, and they compounded for almost a decade.
Apply it. Pick one architectural decision your team made early that’s still compounding today. If you can’t name one, your problem isn’t your content plan. It’s that you don’t have an SEO surface yet. You just have content.
Velocity matters more than size.
Vanta at +70% YoY on 68K is more interesting to me than Gusto at -4% on 1.1M. The companies still accelerating are the ones who picked the right architecture and have room to grow into it. Read traffic curves the way you’d read net retention. Slope matters more than absolute.
Apply it. Pull your YoY traffic change. Under 15% and below 200K monthly means you’re maintaining, not building. More content won’t fix that. The architecture probably stopped fitting the business twelve months ago.
There's no average path. Pick your archetype and commit.
Webflow scaled in 7 months. Rippling took 37. Both are unicorns. There is no average path here.
Apply it. Pull your top 50 pages by traffic. If three or more content types are roughly tied for biggest, you’ve hedged. The companies that won here picked one primary motor and let the others be supporting cast. Splitting investment three ways means none of them ever gets enough weight to compound.
Programmatic and editorial both work. They're not mutually exclusive.
Gusto and Faire built programmatic and got scale. Brex and Rippling built editorial and got authority. Both work. The strongest engines here (Rippling, Gusto) eventually ran both. The question isn’t which one to pick. It’s which one to lead with.
Apply it. Search like your buyer for ten minutes. Most buyers do both: templated queries (“salary calculator [city],” “best X for Y in Z”) and concept queries (“how do I X,” “what is Y”). Lead with whichever one your business architecture supports more naturally. Layer the second in once the first is compounding. Trying to build both from day one usually means doing neither well.
Aggressive investment produces aggressive curves.
Rippling didn’t get a 60x curve by being patient. They got it by taking SEO seriously and out-shipping everyone in this study for two-plus years. The companies still flat at year five aren’t waiting for compounding. They’re under-invested.
Apply it. If your SEO program is one PM at 25% time, a contractor on editorial, and a quarterly review, you’re not getting Rippling outcomes. The companies that win staff SEO at the level of their other growth functions. SEO isn’t cheaper than paid. It’s slower. The slope is bigger if you commit.
Concentration is the risk nobody flags.
Glean leans on its homepage. Gusto does too. Webflow has the whole blog category exposed. Healthy-looking traffic often hides the most concentrated risk.
Apply it. Pull your single highest-traffic page. What percent of your top-50 does it carry? Over 50% means you have a one-URL dependency. Not catastrophic. Just worth knowing about before an algorithm update tells you.
If 100K monthly organic feels far away, it's probably the wrong question.
Companies that hit 100K fast hit it because of architecture, not effort. Past 24 months and still not close? Adding more content to a strategy that doesn’t fit your business is the most expensive way to discover that.
Apply it. Stop asking whether you need more content. Ask whether the architecture is wrong for the business. The answer is almost always upstream of the content plan.
One thesis from this study, in a sentence. The best companies didn’t win by publishing more content. They turned product, data, workflows, and category authority into search infrastructure.
The 2026 lens makes this even sharper. AI search is eroding generic editorial. Content is commoditized. The defensible engines now are the ones rooted in something a competitor can’t replicate by writing more blog posts: your product, your data, your workflows, your category authority. If you’re an early-stage founder making organic investment decisions right now, the biggest gain isn’t publishing cadence. It’s deciding which part of your business is structurally a search asset, and putting in the work to expose it.
That’s where I’d start.