Why Zapier Dominates ChatGPT and Google Search

Napkin math on Zapier's SEO revenue

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Hello, guys. I wanted to break down Zapier's SEO strategy. I'm just going to give you here exactly the thing that you're probably curious about. How much revenue is Zapier doing through SEO? So, ChatGPT estimates that they do about 230 to 250 million ARR in general. I'm sure that's coming from certain sources that could be really interesting to look into. We're not going to look at that.

But looking at napkin math, basically, we assume 7 million organic visits a month, 1% to free sign up, 15% free, and then paid, $300 average customer value. Basically, they're adding about 3 million 3 million US dollars ARR each month only through SEO. And that's about 37 million ARR created annually from new SEO traffic alone under really conservative assumptions. And honestly, that number is probably way, way, way higher.

It is probably a huge part of why Zapier has been able to grow the way that they have becoming a massive company. And specifically, they've been able to do that with awesome profit margins. And when you think awesome profit margins, you think SEO. You don't think paid ads. The reason is that paid ads typically tend to be very expensive for businesses because cost customer acquisition costs are just so incredibly high.

So, I'm going to show you how actually did Zapier accomplish that. Right? Quick recap.

What Zapier is and why SEO fits it

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What is Zapier? Zapier is an AI automation tool best known as the OG AI automation tool app the best AI automation tool. I use it. Probably everyone you know uses it. It is phenomenal. But we all know that it takes a bit more than building an awesome product. You also need to know how to get people to actually use your awesome product. So, let's go into Ahrefs.

Inside Ahrefs: domain rating and keywords

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Ahrefs is the ultimate SEO data bank. And it will basically show us everything. It's a lot of numbers. Let me talk you through the ones that actually matter. Here we have their backlink profile. DR is domain rating start is from 0 to 100. Closer to 100, the better. 91 is a bit ridiculous. It's incredibly high. Even a website that's very highly trusted by Google, bbc.com has a domain rating of like 93. Something like Forbes has a domain rating of 94.

But a just a beginner website will have a very norm normal domain rating. I think even Instagram. Oh, wow. I've never seen a rating of 100. But anyway, that being what it is, let's go back. Let's go to Zapier. And they have 136,000 organic keywords that they rank for. And then the top three 38.3,000. That means that for almost 40,000 keywords, they rank on the top three of Google. Let's take a look at what those keywords are.

And why they are making so much money through SEO. Something we're going to answer later on. Basically here, we want to go and look at intent, commercial, transactional. And we're going to even take a look at non-branded keywords. And let's even just go for the US. Now, what have I done? I've optimized this for only showing bottom of funnel keywords. They're keywords that actually convert into paid.

Not necessarily for them, but still these are keywords that are getting them the most traffic from bottom of funnel. Some of the keywords getting them the most traffic. And we know this because Ahrefs gives you a traffic estimation of how many people are going to this page specifically from organic. This number is inaccurate. In some of my testing, I've seen sometimes it's actually times 10, times 20. It can be very different.

It can even be less, but that's something to keep in mind. It is really just for an apples-to-apples compare well, apples-to-apples comparison instead of kind of going in the dark. So, here we see they are ranking for wireframing software with a blog about best of best wireframe tools. They rank for best cloud storage with a blog article about best cloud storage apps. We can go into that.

And basically, that's very interesting because it's not really something that they rank for themselves or they would put themselves first, but they're still getting a lot of traffic for that. And so, you can see them on the times that still Zapier is like mentioned throughout the article. And likely that's because of their integration pages. So, saying something like Dropbox connects to Zapier, oh great. I want to check out Dropbox because I'm checking out the nine best cloud storage apps in 2026.

Let me now also go into Let me now also go into Zapier. I'm going to show you top pages. That's my favorite part. Top pages basically tells you how many pages that Zapier has and which are the biggest pages. This is so huge because we can see a lot of changes that are happening.

We can see what something was in the past because there's also historical analysis of this and we can really see what are let's say the money articles for Zapier.

Money articles

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I love to think about money articles. What are money articles? Money articles are articles that bring you a ton of revenue. A money article can bring in 10,000 in like additional MRR just from one article alone. I love the concept of money articles. I mean, I invented the concept of money articles mostly because I want people to know that it's about quality. It's not about quantity.

You can have 200 posts piece of content that you have pushed out and that don't rank at all, that don't aren't even getting indexed, and they will do nothing for your SEO. Whereas, you can have one piece of content and your landing page, and maybe that extra one piece of content brings you 200k MRR every single month, and we have this with some clients of ours. Wouldn't you much rather have that one money article as opposed to anything else?

Yes, you would. So, let's go and take a look at what posts, what articles bringing Zapier the most traffic. Of course, it's their landing page. And you can see that's only about 12% of traf- of all the traffic on their website, according to the estimations, going to the landing page. Then, we have the best keyword research tool. That's very interesting because that's kind of them going into SEO's territory. We see Semrush logo here, Google Ads logo.

Very interestingly, they don't have Ahrefs, which is very, very I guess it's it's about free keyword research tools here. And then, if they go into best free keyword, yeah, still free. Do they have a paid section? I guess they don't. Very interesting that they don't have Ahrefs. Maybe that's something about their webmasters or backlink exchange people. Or maybe just Zapier having a partnership with Semrush or they use Semrush or something. But, you'll see a lot of these listicles.

Listicles and win-win placements

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Funnily, they have a lot to do with how well the like kind of teams get along and how important it is to actually have great partnerships and great networks and great connections in the SEO industry because let's say a client of ours joins in, and we sign them, one of the first things that we're going to do is we're going to see across all of our roster of clients who is actually we that we could do a backlink exchange with internally because we control both content CMSs and we will only do it if it's in the best interest of both.

And so let's say one of our clients, let's say Cal.com, they're a client of ours and we have another company signing on that maybe does sales, something like that. And so Cal.com has great B2B capability and so B2B sales capability and so we'll be able to see, okay, that's awesome. Do a listicle and place both of them for each other on the second position.

That means Cal gets a winning position, a second position, number two in and blog from a sales company and the sales company gets a winning listicle as a number two from Cal.com which also is very, very helpful. And so that's really how you create these win-win positions and Zapier, of course, is some of the king of that because all of these top pages are listicles.

Why ChatGPT cites bottom-of-funnel content

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Why are listicles important? Listicles are so important because when you are looking into what are the best AI automation tools and you ask ChatGPT, ChatGPT is always going to be sourcing bottom of funnel content and you can see how they do that here. So you just ask for anything in ChatGPT and it's going to give you a bunch of answers, great. Sometimes you get are able to click into it.

So they did that now where you can basically click into things and you will give you an outbound link. Before it was more of an entity. This is great news because you can actually attribute a lot more clicks to ChatGPT directly or other AI visibility tools if they also implement this directly from your Google Analytics and wherever you are getting your analytics. But here's the best part. We're talking about why Zapier is doing so many bottom-of-funnel articles, best-of listicles, etc.

This is some of the reason why. Besides converting really well, ChatGPT also overwhelmingly picks sources that are bottom-of-funnel. So you ask for something in your industry, whatever it is, you go to sources, and you see only these listicles. You see Firewall Best AI Workflow Automation Tools in 2026, TechRadar article, Gumlet versus n8n Best AI Automation Tools, Best AI Automation Tools, Best n8n Alternatives. So very interesting Gumlet here. Gumlet, of course, is another AI automation tool.

And what they've done when I click into it is write, "What are the best n8n Alternatives?" they launched this in March. Omid wrote a great article, and of course they put themselves as number one because why wouldn't they? They are a wonderful n8n Alternative, and they've done this for SEO reasons.

Nitpicking a competitor's page

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So let's say I am nitpicking. What I see here, what I really like, I like that they have breadcrumbs. That's great for internal linking. Let's see if they also link to other related articles. They did, and that's awesome. Some other things that I would like to see is I would love to see more FAQ. I would like to see FAQ schema added to that as well.

That typically helps a bit, and I'd like to see something like a bio here on this page because I really, really helps for E-E-A-T. I really like a sticky navigation bar. They can sometimes be a bit more difficult to implement, but honestly, they are so worthwhile for for people to be browsing, and the UX is so much better, and just like very friendly. So that's really good for engagement. And so yeah, there you go.

Now you know why Zapier is building all of these pages. What you'll notice, too, genuinely, is that they've done a wonderful job. Here, by the way, see that bio? And so, that's that's like a tiny little thing, but in a lot of SEO, it's the tiny little things that really stack up. Do they have a bio maybe at the bottom? No, they didn't. It's these tiny little things that really stack up. And of course, Zapier is best in class.

You'll be able to see a lot of these really strong SEO tactics used on their blog. They even have some, you know, call to action to do email capture. They have all of these tags that I'm sure great also for internal linking. All of these internal links on the website. And so, that's really, really strong. You'll see here also, let's go to another article that will actually bring them like direct conversions. I don't think any of these do, to be honest.

AI video generator, AI image generator, online whiteboard, SEO tools. Out of curiosity, I'm going to go and check if they mention Ahrefs. They do mention Ahrefs here. But I guess not in the in that other article. Rank Tracker, they've been doing a lot of SEO content, I guess. I guess they've been doing that for a long time. Social media management tools. Here. Cool. I'm going to go past this a bit. Great. So, I found this article.

It's called best AI productivity tools. And it is increasing. I guess it is maybe like they just did a content refresh or something.

Content refreshes and fresh content

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You can see here also like when they've done the last changes. So, when you when it comes to this type of structure, you want to be doing a lot of content refreshes because content refreshes are much more important for AI visibility than pushing out new content. So, a content refresh is when you make updates, make changes to a piece of content that in order for it to be more fresh. Why is fresh content important?

ChatGPT tends to much more take from newer content. And so, the newer that your content is, the more often that it's refreshed, the more likely that you will actually be picked up as a source by GPT and you have your tool recommended as a solution. You can see here the kind of changes that they've made. It's very in-depth. It's very detailed. I love looking at this kind of stuff.

I can even see when they started when they launched this article specifically on this slug. And then I can see how many changes they've made throughout time. Really great for your inner detail-aware detail-aware girly because it's just really good to see the amount of work that goes into this from like real human writers, but also the payoff that you get. So, best AI productivity tools. Let's let's take in this.

What one article is worth

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Let's put this in ChatGPT and let's get an estimation of how much revenue they get from this article alone. So, here we go. I'm going to put that in ChatGPT. Can you help me estimate how much revenue Zapier gets from this article alone? Give me the revenue estimation per month and also per year and also in total. It's been live since 2024. You can assume it's always had the same amount of traffic. So, here really what am I trying to do?

I'm trying to help you understand I'm trying to understand how much money Zapier has really made from this specific article. I think that's very interesting because it helps you understand how you can invest in content and what the potential payoff could be of that. So, current traffic 21,000 per month. It's been live for 2 years. Estimated visits 500,000. Estimated revenue per month 1,000 to 21,000. I guess that's a huge amount of difference.

Zapier uses this article what percentage of readers become paying customers. So, at the lowest at the lowest this is a very wide range. At the lowest this one article has made 24,000 dollars for Zapier. At the minimum. This is the absolute minimum. And then at the best it's made half a million in revenue for Zapier. Which is very interesting because you're basically saying that if I push one piece of content, I can make 250,000 dollars out of that.

From this one piece of content. And that's something that could feed what like three families. Where wherever you know you may be based. But that's very interesting to know the power of SEO and of traffic. Because this is traffic that you put it out there and yes you do content refreshes. But you mostly put it out there. So yeah, conservative stats math 0.05%. Okay, that's interesting. You can pause it if you want to read the whole thing.

Affiliate links and closing thoughts

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But the thing that I want to kind of leave with is that Zapier has tens, hundreds of money articles, and that's really how they get to the amount of revenue that they do. On top of that, I think that a lot of these may also be affiliate links. I don't know if they are. It's a bit hard for me to tell right now. But, I think that a lot of them Are they? I don't A lot of them are affiliate links.

I hope at least that they are affiliate links. In my SEO dreams, I hope that they are affiliate links because that would mean that anytime people find a solution, a tool through Zapier, and they convert to that tool, Zapier takes a cut out of that. And that means that an article, if it ranks highly by itself, let's say that, you know, best keyword research tool, anytime that And Zapier Semrush has a great affiliate program.

Every time that Semrush, you convert to Semrush, you would basically be helping Zapier get revenue, and so that's also how you can self-fund an SEO team. And that's very interesting, of course, in terms of being able to generate revenue through SEO, and not only for your own business, but also for other businesses, and then still that can come back to you. So, that was kind of my little 20-minute review of Zapier. Let me know if you have any questions.

I love to talk SEO. We I'm the founder, by the way, and I'm the founder of Rankingonai.com. We do SEO and AI visibility for companies like Cal.com, like Suno. I've previously built and bootstrapped and exited an AI photography SaaS that we only did revenue really through SEO, which is really why I started my love and journey for SEO. Please subscribe. I'll be doing a lot more of these. Let me know if you have any questions. And this has been super fun.

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