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Services: SEO, Link Building, GEO, Brand SEO
How We Grew a Top 10 CRM’s Google AI Overviews Brand Share 5.9X in 4 Months
CRM CASE STUDY
by Dennis Lazard · May 25, 2026
3.9Х
Growth in Google AI Overviews impressions
5.9X
Growth in Google AI Overviews brand share
3 years
Engagement length
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About The Brand
The Brand is an all-in-one B2B SaaS platform used by millions of companies worldwide to run their sales, marketing, HR, project management and internal collaboration in one place. It sits in the top 10 of the global CRM and business management category, competing for the same buyers as Zoho, HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Monday.com, Asana, Trello and Slack – many of which spend a multiple of The Brand’s marketing budget on SEO and brand awareness in the US.
ESA Digital worked with The Brand across a 3-year engagement, from early 2023 through March 2026. The relationship covered the full lifecycle of a modern B2B SEO programme – starting with classic on-page, link building and ranking work for the US market, evolving through programmatic optimisation of the product and use-case page layer, and culminating in a dedicated GEO and Brand SEO programme as Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity reshaped how enterprise buyers research software. The engagement concluded in March 2026 after the SEO and AI search function had matured to a point where The Brand could take it in-house – the cleanest possible end to a long agency partnership.
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About The Brand
The Brand is an all-in-one B2B SaaS platform used by millions of companies worldwide to run their sales, marketing, HR, project management and internal collaboration in one place. It sits in the top 10 of the global CRM and business management category, competing for the same buyers as Zoho, HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Monday.com, Asana, Trello and Slack – many of which spend a multiple of The Brand’s marketing budget on SEO and brand awareness in the US.
ESA Digital worked with The Brand across a 3-year engagement, from early 2023 through March 2026. The relationship covered the full lifecycle of a modern B2B SEO programme – starting with classic on-page, link building and ranking work for the US market, evolving through programmatic optimisation of the product and use-case page layer, and culminating in a dedicated GEO and Brand SEO programme as Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity reshaped how enterprise buyers research software. The engagement concluded in March 2026 after the SEO and AI search function had matured to a point where The Brand could take it in-house – the cleanest possible end to a long agency partnership.
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The Challenges
A full audit of Noji's web presence and organic potential surfaced six core areas holding the product back from search-driven growth:The Brand competes in one of the most saturated SaaS categories on the web, against incumbents with massive content footprints, established backlink profiles and aggressive paid acquisition. A few specific challenges shaped the engagement:- The category was dominated by Zoho CRM, HubSpot, Pipedrive and Salesforce – brands with multi-million-page content libraries and decades of accumulated topical authority. Competing on traditional SEO alone wouldn’t move the needle fast enough.
- The Brand’s product covers far more than CRM – HR, sales automation, project management, internal comms, AI tools – but its early AI visibility was clustered around “free CRM” queries. Other category-defining clusters (HR automation, sales automation, alternatives) were underrepresented in AI answers.
- AI search was becoming a critical buyer surface. By mid-2025, enterprise buyers were increasingly starting their research inside Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity – and the brands cited in those answers were winning the consideration set before the buyer ever reached a product page.
- Competitor presence in third-party “best of” content was stronger. Zoho, HubSpot and Pipedrive were appearing more often in listicles, comparison articles and “best CRM” roundups – the same content that AI systems were drawing from when generating answers.
- The on-page layer needed structural work to match modern AI citation patterns – FAQ schema, meta optimisation, intent-matched content – before the brand could capture share in AI Overviews and Featured Snippets.
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The Challenges
A full audit of Noji's web presence and organic potential surfaced six core areas holding the product back from search-driven growth:The Brand competes in one of the most saturated SaaS categories on the web, against incumbents with massive content footprints, established backlink profiles and aggressive paid acquisition. A few specific challenges shaped the engagement:- The category was dominated by Zoho CRM, HubSpot, Pipedrive and Salesforce – brands with multi-million-page content libraries and decades of accumulated topical authority. Competing on traditional SEO alone wouldn’t move the needle fast enough.
- The Brand’s product covers far more than CRM – HR, sales automation, project management, internal comms, AI tools – but its early AI visibility was clustered around “free CRM” queries. Other category-defining clusters (HR automation, sales automation, alternatives) were underrepresented in AI answers.
- AI search was becoming a critical buyer surface. By mid-2025, enterprise buyers were increasingly starting their research inside Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity – and the brands cited in those answers were winning the consideration set before the buyer ever reached a product page.
- Competitor presence in third-party “best of” content was stronger. Zoho, HubSpot and Pipedrive were appearing more often in listicles, comparison articles and “best CRM” roundups – the same content that AI systems were drawing from when generating answers.
- The on-page layer needed structural work to match modern AI citation patterns – FAQ schema, meta optimisation, intent-matched content – before the brand could capture share in AI Overviews and Featured Snippets.
Strategic Approach
The 3-year engagement evolved through several phases, but in 2025 the work consolidated into a six-track strategy running in parallel:
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Step 1: AI Overviews tracking and competitor analysis
We built a dedicated tracking layer for The Brand’s presence across Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity – measuring mentions, impressions, share of voice and XFR (impressions per mention, a quality signal) against the same set of competitors every month. This gave us a clear picture of which clusters The Brand was winning, which competitors were vulnerable and where the highest-leverage gaps were. -
Step 2: Link building at scale across priority clusters
Across every month of 2025 we ran a continuous link building programme – placing 8+ articles per month on relevant third-party sites, prioritising placements that fed both traditional rankings and AI training data. The work covered four core clusters: CRM, HR automation, sales automation and AI/copilot tools. Over the year, the programme drove around 80+ guest post placements alongside ongoing insert and digest work. -
Step 3: Brand SEO – seeding in top/best/comparison content
Alongside traditional link building we ran a Brand SEO programme focused on getting The Brand mentioned in the third-party content that buyers and AI tools rely on most – “best CRM” roundups, “alternatives to Salesforce/HubSpot” comparisons, category guides and ratings content. We identified 150+ placement opportunities by tracking where competitors were appearing and where The Brand wasn’t, then ran targeted outreach to close those gaps. -
Step 4: GEO – on-page content built for AI citation
We optimised 8 pages per month across the use cases, articles and product sections – restructuring content to match the question patterns AI systems were being asked, adding FAQ schema and structured data, and tightening meta titles and descriptions for AIO and Featured Snippet eligibility. The goal was to make every priority page as quotable as possible for AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity. -
Step 5: Alternatives and comparison content
A dedicated stream of work focused on the “alternatives” cluster – building and optimising pages targeting “alternatives to [competitor]” queries, where AI systems consistently surface comparison content. This turned out to be one of the highest-leverage clusters of the engagement, with The Brand becoming a regular point of reference in AI answers about CRM and business management alternatives. -
Step 6: Glossary, FAQ and meta expansion
Every month we expanded The Brand’s glossary, added 10 new FAQ pairs and rewrote 10 meta titles and descriptions across priority pages. This compounding on-page work was specifically designed to feed AIO citations and LLM training data, and it directly contributed to the SOV growth seen in the final quarter.
The Results:
Result 1: Google AI Overviews brand share grew 5.9X in 4 months
From September to December 2025, The Brand’s Share of Voice in Google AI Overviews for the US CRM and business management category grew from 0.19% to 1.13% – a 5.9X increase in four months. By the end of the engagement, The Brand was the 8th-ranked entity in its tracked competitor set, sitting alongside Zoho, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce, Monday.com, Asana and Trello in the core of US AI Overviews answers.
Result 2: Google AI Overviews impressions grew 3.9X – outperforming every tracked competitor
Over the same period, AI Overviews impressions grew from 21,820 to 85,245 – a 3.9X increase. In October alone, impressions jumped +213.7% in a single month – the largest single-month gain of any of the eight tracked competitors. While The Brand was scaling its AI presence, Zoho CRM, HubSpot and Pipedrive all lost ground on the same metric, meaning The Brand was capturing share directly from the category leaders.
Result 3: Full coverage across all three major AI search platforms
By the end of the engagement, The Brand held a top 8 position across all three major AI search surfaces in the US – Google AI Overviews (1.13% SOV), AI Mode in Perplexity (0.23% SOV, 100K+ monthly impressions) and ChatGPT (0.33% SOV, with an XFR of 1,685 – meaning every brand mention generated unusually high-impression results). Few brands in the category had measurable presence across all three.
Result 4: Established as the reference point for “alternatives” queries
In Google AI Overviews, The Brand became one of the most-referenced solutions in the Alternatives & Competitors cluster – appearing in answers to “Zoho alternatives”, “HubSpot alternatives”, “Salesforce alternatives” and “best business management software” queries. By December, the report flagged this as “the dominant cluster of the month” for The Brand’s AI presence, with the platform repositioned by Google AI from “free CRM” to “all-in-one business management platform” – a meaningful upgrade in commercial intent.
Result 5: A 3-year engagement that ended with a clean in-house handover
The engagement ran from early 2023 through March 2026 – three full years of compounding SEO, link building, GEO and Brand SEO work across the US market.
Working with ESA Digital has been fantastic! They bring deep industry knowledge and used it to build a strategy that delivered exceptional outcomes for our mobile app and our wider expansion. Their data-driven approach and excellent client service mean they consistently go above and beyond to meet our specific requirements. We've accomplished so much together and couldn't be happier with the results!
Andrew Bondarenko
CPO & Co-founder, Noji (Exit to DelightRoom)
CPO & Co-founder, Noji (Exit to DelightRoom)
“I met Dennis and his Google team, when they pitched their startup Smartsub. We accepted them to our accelerator program in 2017, Batch 9 and they successfully passed through it. Within a short period of time they managed to develop MVP of their product, design and implement go-to-market strategy launching the product on the US market. Their broad digital business experience and data-driven approach allowed them to make things done.”
Cristobal Alonso (www.startupwiseguys.com)
CEO at SWG (funded Smartsub in 2017)
CEO at SWG (funded Smartsub in 2017)
“ESA team with their Google Ads skills, growth mindset and natural ability to mentoring are able to bring a lot of value to startup ecosystem with so many tech companies in their growth stage and businesses struggling with Google online advertising.”
Monika Synoradzka (www.hugething.vc)
CEO at HugeThing (funded Smartsub, 2019)
CEO at HugeThing (funded Smartsub, 2019)
ESA team had outperformed my expectations working with one of our main SEO clients. They delivered X2-times organic traffic growth for 12 client’s websites, working with technical, content and link-building SEO optimisation in Google, website structure, navigation, technical code and conversion rate optimisation.”
Maria Kristalinskaya (www.bbdo.com)
Head of Retail Media at eBay (GE), Techstars Startup Mentor, ex-BBDO
Head of Retail Media at eBay (GE), Techstars Startup Mentor, ex-BBDO
