Pace
The ad management platform for performance agencies: AI budget pacing, overspend guardrails and client reporting across Google, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn and Microsoft Ads.
Challenge
Pace launched into one of the most crowded corners of SaaS. Every tool it competes with has a funding round and a decade of content behind it: Optmyzr, Opteo, Acquisio, WordStream. The useful head terms were claimed years ago.
The starting numbers were stark. A brand-new domain with a Domain Rating of 12 and roughly 500 referring domains. In February 2026 the entire site earned 116 Google impressions for the month. That’s about four a day.
There was no budget to buy links and no appetite to wait three years for authority to accrue. The brief: make a new domain visible in a market owned by funded incumbents, without the authority every standard SEO playbook assumes you have.
Solution
We didn’t fight for the head terms. We built for the searches the incumbents were too big or too conflicted to serve, and shipped the first wave inside a few weeks from late March.
The strategy ran on four kinds of pages:
- Category language nobody had claimed. Pace’s sharpest edge is budget pacing, so we published pacing guides for Meta, TikTok and Google plus a round-up of pacing tools. They sit on page one today, between positions 6 and 8.
- Comparison and alternatives pages for the tools buyers already know. Position 7 for ‘optmyzr alternatives’, position 5 for the Opteo review, page one for ‘acquisio’ itself. A new site can win these because the incumbents can’t objectively review each other.
- Free calculators that earn impressions on head terms a young blog can’t touch. The CPA calculator ranks at position 6 for ‘cpa calculator’.
- Original research. A Meta ads statistics page is now the biggest single page on the site: 5,757 impressions in the last 28 days at an average position of 6.8.
- 118,507Organic impressions · Google + Bing
- 49×July vs March
- #1For ‘pace ads’ · 68% CTR
- 2,477Best day · 18 June
- 8,728AI citations · Copilot & Bing
Result
Every figure below comes straight from Pace’s Google Search Console, 1 February to 12 August 2026; the AI citation and Bing impression numbers come from Bing Webmaster Tools.
- The ramp: 116 impressions in February, 889 in March, 3,067 in April, 12,515 in May, 35,275 in June and 43,641 in July. July is 49 times March.
- Six figures in four months: the cumulative total passed 100,000 in the first week of August and sits at 118,507 all up: 113,949 from Google plus 4,558 from Bing.
- Branded demand from nothing: ‘pace ads’ now ranks first with a 68% click-through rate. In February, nobody was typing it.
- Positions, then clicks: average position across the site improved from the low 20s in April to about 12, and clicks grew from four in February to 190 in July.
There’s one more signal we like. GA4 began logging an ‘AI Assistant’ traffic channel in June, and Bing Webmaster Tools puts numbers on it: since late March, Pace’s pages have been cited in Copilot and Bing AI answers 8,728 times, up to 26 different pages in a single day. Citations in early August run about eight times the rate in early April, and Bing search impressions climbed the same way, from a handful a day to over a hundred. This isn’t a Google-only story. Four months, no link spend, and Pace now shows up where its funded competitors used to be alone.