Userpilot: Why SEO stopped being enough, and how they rebuilt acquisition with ABM in 2026

Episode notes

This episode focuses on Emilia, who runs marketing at Userpilot — a product growth platform now at eight-figure revenue, 80+ people, and 1,200+ customers from Adobe and DHL down to early-stage SaaS. She wrote a book on content marketing and built Userpilot's engine on exactly that: organic and SEO that peaked at 235,000 blog visitors a month. Then she co-built an ABM platform, Zen ABM, because the channel that made the company couldn't take it where it needed to go. Two things happened at once. First, the business outgrew the channel: as Userpilot moved upmarket and raised pricing, inbound SEO traffic became impossible to steer — you can't choose whether a large enterprise or a two-person startup searches your keyword, and conversion rates from organic were declining. Second, the channel itself started shrinking: the blog peaked at 235,000 visitors a month in May 2024 and then, in Emilia's words, "started declining and declining" as AI Overviews and Google algorithm changes took traffic. Emilia needed a predictable way to land larger accounts before conversions followed the traffic down.