Meet Adrien Menard, CEO and co-founder of Botify

As the CEO of Botify, Adrien has had both a global and notable career, co-founding Botify back in 2012 and thereafter relocating to the United States from France. Adrien is passionate about shifting the organic search marketing landscape. He wants to help brands recognise what they could be doing to leverage organic search and how to capitalise on it as a high-impact, performance marketing channel.

I started my career as a product manager, then I went on to become head of sales at iProspect France. In 2012, I launched Botify with my two co-founders, Stan Chauvin and Thomas Grange. I already had a longstanding relationship with both – Stan was my boss at iProspect and Thomas was a client.

Outside of work, I’m married with three children. As Botify continued to grow, we all relocated from Paris to New York, which has been quite the adventure and culture shock, both personally and professionally! As we’ve adjusted to living in a new country, I’ve also had to quickly adapt to a completely different business strategy and style. My people management and communication styles have altered to best empower my employees. That being said, it was a great decision. At times, it’s been tough. But, it’s also proved incredibly rewarding for all of us as we continue to experience a new way of living.

There’s always a lightbulb moment before the beginning of a new venture. What was that moment for you?

Whilst working together, Thomas, Stan and I collectively identified a major flaw in how companies were addressing organic search. They focused too heavily on procuring costly keywords, not giving much thought to the impact Google and other search engines’ crawling capabilities had on visibility.
On average, almost 50% of large enterprise webpages are not crawled by Google. When a page is not crawled or seen by Google, it will never rank in search engines, and therefore cannot drive traffic or revenue. This is why Botify was born. We recognised a huge opportunity to empower enterprise organisations with the necessary insights and recommendations to be found by Google, helping to increase their brand authority in the process.

What does your business offer its target audience?

Botify is all about helping brands be found online. Search engines traditionally ignore half of an enterprise website’s content, meaning large amounts of content and marketing budgets can be wasted on content creation with no return on investment. At Botify, we give companies the tools they need to drive more traffic to, and revenue from, their websites through organic search. Costs of digital advertising are only rising so organic search is more important than ever if brands want to succeed.

What’s different about Botify is we take a URL-first approach. We focus on all a company’s metrics from page crawlability, to revenue, to quantify the direct impact of their organic search.

We also use our clients’ proprietary data to inform SEO problems specific to them. This gives us the ability to provide more accurate, timely and relevant results for our clients. Not only that, but we rely on our clients’ first party-data. This allows us to utilise more sophisticated SEO practices, and not simply scrape search results for insights. We don’t try to trick Google and other search engines, but rather act as the interface between the search engine and our clients’ websites. This approach means we provide value to both parties. We enable search engines to get access to high-quality content, while offering businesses an affordable, legitimate way to rank higher in the searches.

With all the success stories around entrepreneurship and how innovative people have to be to take the leap. How do you think you’ve innovated your sector and why?

Great question! For myself, I was working in the industry and knew exactly the pressures marketers are under, particularly with budgets, and the role organic search can play. So, we created first of their kind products to allow marketers to leverage organic search as a performance marketing tool. This allows them to significantly amplify the outcomes of their digital marketing investments and establish a sustainable competitive advantage. We’ve adopted AI to do this. With SEO professionals using AI to tap into analysis and insight faster, they can instead focus on the more strategic and exciting aspects of their role to help their company’s website be found.

Over half of British and American consumers place more trust in a brand that ranks high in natural or organic search results than one that appears as a sponsored or paid advertisement. By encouraging marketers to think outside the box and prioritise a portion of budget toward organic search, we are helping them to drive both short and long-term results in building sustainable brand authority.

Any new product launches we should know about?

Yes, in early April we launched Botify Assist, a collection of ChatGPT-powered tools. With ChatGPT entering the world of search through Microsoft’s Bing, we have combined the vast intelligence of GPT-4 API with Botify’s proprietary unified data model. This advanced tool will give users access to both a personalised search assistant and AI-powered content optimisation recommendations. That will help them make strategic decisions even faster and implement more content ideas at scale and further help brands be found in this new era of search.

How does technological advancement speak to the strategic direction of your business?

Globally, over the last few years, we have grown significantly. For us, the introduction of Botify Assist, is only the start. We intend to continue strengthening our Botify Intelligence and Botify Analytics tools with additional AI and machine learning capabilities. The technological growth we have experienced mirrors the direction Botify is taking. Our goal is for brands to be seen online and the more our technology advances the more brands will harness the potential of organic search and optimise their growth.

Describe your business in three words.

I can do better than that, I can give it to you in two words: Be Found.

What would be your top marketing tip, to grow a business that is niche?

Whether your business is niche or not, marketers should leverage the range of data at their disposal to make informed decisions. Botify allows all businesses, no matter the size of the organisation, to take control of, and drive value from, their own data to build an organic search strategy that maximises performance. Not only for today’s organic search engines, but future ones as well. This is even more important if your business is niche with a specialised audience. With Botify, organic search can be treated as a true performance channel with precise forecasting and automation capabilities, making it easier and more effective to implement strategies and predict their impact.

How do you believe the evolution of tech will impact your industry over the next 10 years?

Whether it’s AI being adopted within search, or social media being used as a search tool, technology is ever evolving in this industry. In the world of search, you have to be on the right side of the growth curve. That means understanding how new technologies can influence your business, for good and bad, and making sure that you’re able to respond in a way that will strengthen the brand. It’s for this reason that we launched Botify Assist. We know that AI is leading to search changing rapidly and we want to be a part of that journey.

How do you prepare for an AI centric world?

The key to AI is understanding its benefits and leveraging them. We have seen AI influence all industries rapidly, and a lot of scaremongering has come from that. Just the other week, Goldman Sachs said that 300 million jobs are being put at risk because of it. But, I don’t think we should be taking this negative view of it. Instead, we need to be looking at how AI can improve our industries and jobs and implementing that. Some industries, such as search, are already doing that and are reaping the benefits. AI in search helps businesses uncover the opportunities that are traditionally missed, and help you turn those into profits. At Botify, we have already seen over 500 of the world’s biggest brands unlock growth with AI capabilities to increase website traffic and drive revenue. Not long ago, we asked 250 organic search professionals whether they felt that AI was a friend or a foe. 90% of them said that they believe AI is advancing their career because they’re able to focus on the more interesting aspects of their job. If you want to be a leader, rather than a laggard, this is paramount.