+166% AI Search Traffic: How Esri Compounded Organic Growth Year Over Year

The challenge

Esri is the category leader in location intelligence. But market leadership in a product doesn’t automatically translate into search leadership, especially across a region as fragmented as APAC.

The organic programme was steady but not compounding. Traffic was holding, not climbing. Across markets as different as India, Japan, Indonesia, and Australia, the same generic approach was being applied to very different search behaviour. And as buyers began moving their early research into AI engines, there was no plan to capture that shift.

Esri needed organic to behave like a growth channel again, and to start showing up where its buyers were increasingly looking first.

Our approach

We treated this as an extended marketing team for demand gen, not a content vendor. The work split across foundation, content, and conversion.

Pillar 1: Technical and UX foundation

You can’t compound growth on a shaky base. We fixed the foundation first.

• Resolved website-wide technical issues that were holding back crawlability and rankings
• Fixed UX problems that were costing engagement and conversion on otherwise healthy pages
• Optimised 56 product and industry pages, the pages closest to a buying decision
• Ran continuous existing-blog optimisation so the back catalogue kept earning, not just new posts

Pillar 2: Content built for APAC intent

APAC is not one market. India, Japan, Indonesia, and Australia search differently, and we built for that.

• Published 22 new blogs targeted at the queries driving qualified APAC traffic
• Mapped keywords to regional intent rather than running a single global keyword list
• Prioritised the categories and regions showing the strongest traffic and lead signals
• Strengthened internal linking so authority flowed to the pages that mattered most

Pillar 3: Conversion and AI visibility

Traffic that doesn’t convert is a vanity metric. We built toward leads and toward the AI-search shift at the same time.

• Integrated Factors.ai for visitor intelligence and Microsoft Clarity for session-level conversion analysis
• Used that data to map the user journey and improve conversion rate, not just traffic
• Structured content for AI retrieval so Esri began surfacing in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini answers
• Tracked AI-engine traffic as its own channel and optimised toward it deliberately

The results

Every core metric moved up year over year, comparing Apr 2025 to March 2026 against the prior twelve months, and the AI channel moved up hardest.

Organic and direct sessions grew 25% year over year, and new users grew 33% — a sign the programme was reaching fresh audiences, not just re-engaging the same ones.

The standout was AI search. Sessions from AI engines grew 166%, users grew 186%, and new users grew 228%. As buyer research shifted into LLMs, Esri’s visibility shifted with it instead of being left behind.

Why it worked

Three things drove the outcome:

1. Foundation before volume. Fixing the technical and UX base first meant every new blog and optimised page had room to compound. Publishing onto a broken foundation would have wasted the content.
2. APAC intent, not a global template. India and Japan don’t search alike. Building per-region content and keyword maps is what turned a flat programme into a 25% YoY climb.
3. AI search was planned for, not stumbled into. Structuring content for LLM retrieval and tracking AI traffic as its own channel is why the AI numbers grew triple-digits while competitors were still treating it as an afterthought.