3 Examples Of Product-Led website positioning

Final week, I despatched out an replace on my market website positioning difficulty, and it might be an entire miss if I didn’t do the identical for the subject of product-led website positioning, as a result of they’re straight associated.

On this difficulty, you’ll get:

• An intensive have a look at what product-led website positioning is, what it isn’t, and the place it’s beneficial.
• Three major modalities of product-led website positioning.
• Three real-world present examples, with notes about why they’re working within the present search panorama.
• The highest watch-outs for product-led website positioning packages primarily based on modality.

And premium subscribers will get entry to:

1. My guiding guidelines for product-led website positioning and
2. An interactive evaluation touchdown in your inbox this week that may information you in making a high-level plan to refine your product-led strategy. Join full entry so that you don’t miss out.

Additionally, a fast because of Amanda Johnson, who partnered with me on this one. Enhance your expertise with Progress Memo’s weekly knowledgeable insights. Subscribe totally free!

Some firms, not all, can take a hyperscalable strategy to natural development: product-led website positioning.

Whereas most websites drive website positioning site visitors by company-generated content material (i.e., content material libraries), product-led website positioning permits sure websites to scale touchdown pages with content material that comes out of the product.

This product-forward technique can reduce the burden in your staff to generate pages for a content material library, and it opens the gates to website positioning A/B testing, scaled inner linking methods, and constructing development loops.

On this submit, I spotlight 5 totally different examples and varieties of product-led website positioning.

Steerage right here has additionally been totally up to date to replicate the latest modifications in search, together with the influence of AIOs, AI Mode, and LLMs, in addition to how these modifications have an effect on a product-led website positioning strategy.

The time period product-led website positioning (or PLSEO for brief) was first coined by Eli Schwartz in his ebook of the identical identify.

PLSEO is an natural development technique the place your website positioning practices are targeted on bettering the discoverability, adoption, and person expertise of your product itself inside search outcomes, as a substitute of specializing in rising natural visibility by conventional content material advertising and marketing efforts.

In plain phrases, the content material comes out of your product as a substitute of writers.

A couple of examples:

• TripAdvisor: hundreds of thousands of programmatic pages supported by evaluations (UGC).
• Uber Eats: hundreds of thousands of programmatic pages supported by eating places (stock).
• Zillow: hundreds of thousands of programmatic pages supported by properties (stock).

The important thing distinction from marketing-led website positioning is {that a} product or development staff considers website positioning within the improvement of the product itself, surfacing user-generated content material or different stock straight into (Google) Search.

In contrast to company-generated content material, product-led website positioning leverages person interactions, integrations, or knowledge to create content material.

It’s an aggregator technique, that means it solely works for firms that “mixture” (suppose: gather and group) items like evaluations, suppliers, areas, and extra.

Product-led website positioning has been fairly the thrill, particularly amongst SaaS firms, but it surely typically will get misunderstood.

Product-led website positioning isn’t:

• Depending on manually crafting each touchdown or content material web page: In contrast to conventional website positioning approaches, the place every touchdown web page is fastidiously crafted by content material groups, product-led website positioning typically makes use of programmatic or automated strategies to generate giant volumes of pages straight from product, stock, or person knowledge.
• Solely targeted on concentrating on queries for advertising and marketing angles: Whereas typical website positioning practices would possibly begin with creating content material round key phrase analysis or audience-based question discovery, product-led website positioning begins with in-product alerts (e.g., what customers construct or work together with) and surfaces that as content material.
• Counting on mounted pages: Conventional website positioning typically entails making a finite set of cornerstone belongings or subject clusters, increasing content material from there. Product-led website positioning, nevertheless, frequently scales because the product (or person base) grows – every new UGC, integration, or product addition routinely provides indexable pages.

Some firms perform a product-led website positioning technique with user-generated content material (UGC), whereas others would possibly use integrations or apps.

Right here, I’m going to supply a glance into three major modalities of product-led website positioning – and with three real-world, present examples.

• UGC-driven PLSEO (like Figma, Traveladvisor, or Cameo): Neighborhood members create new belongings – design recordsdata, shout-out profiles, wikis, and many others. – and every submission spawns its personal touchdown web page. Over time, these pages accumulate long-tail key phrase protection with out editorial groups writing every one.
• Provide-driven PLSEO (like Zapier, IMDb): On this mannequin, the product itself “provides” knowledge – integrations, API endpoints, or statistical datasets – that routinely translate into website positioning pages.
• Locale-driven PLSEO (like Doordash, Reserving.com, or Zillow): As listings go stay or replace (a brand new restaurant, a lodge’s availability), a corresponding city- or neighborhood-specific web page is generated. These pages seize “close to me” and different native key phrases.

A web site would possibly select to make use of a number of modalities, relying on its choices, however I’ll additionally dive into what strategy may go finest primarily based on what you are promoting sort or objectives.

Necessary notice earlier than you dive in: All marketplaces are product-led website positioning performs, however not all product-led website positioning performs are marketplaces. For a deep dive into market website positioning practices, try Efficient Market website positioning is extra like Product Progress.

With UGC-based PLSEO, person contributions (templates, profiles, evaluations) develop into the first website positioning gasoline.

Design instrument Figma is an archetypal instance of an website positioning aggregator that drives product-led website positioning by user-generated content material.

The scaling mechanism for Figma is the group, the place customers can add and promote templates for all kinds of use instances, from cellular app design to GUI templates.

As you may see within the screenshot under, Figma’s natural site visitors is exploding.

Picture Credit score: Kevin Indig

Should you do a fast test of Figma in your most well-liked website positioning instrument, you’ll discover the next:

• The primary URL reveals that, globally, Figma’s natural rankings and site visitors have held or grown barely because the intense modifications throughout the search panorama.
• The natural rankings and site visitors of the /group/ and /templates/ subdirectories have both held or elevated, relying on the actual nation.
• The variety of complete pages on the location has stayed about the identical.

What this seemingly means:

• For Figma, its UGC product-led website positioning strategy is holding sturdy after the rise of LLM chat use for search, together with Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode.
• This website positioning strategy is tough to duplicate, which creates a development loop for Figma that’s onerous to compete with.
• A UGC-driven strategy helps overcome present search challenges. Figma has a numerous variety of useful kits and templates that AI-driven search and LLMs can depend on of their sourcing and proposals. (A fast search of “what are the perfect free UI kits?” in ChatGPT gave me an inventory of 10 suggestions, and 7 had been from Figma. In Google’s AI Mode, I obtained two to a few “better of” lists that had been simply Figma free kits.)

Notion or Typeshare comply with the identical strategy:

• With information administration software program Notion, customers can create their very own wikis and permit Google to index particular pages, or entire workspaces.
• Typeshare is a social posting instrument that routinely provides social content material to a mini weblog that customers can resolve to index in Search.

High Use Circumstances For UGC Product-Led website positioning

This sort of website positioning excels for websites and companies that may constantly scale content material primarily based on what customers contribute or work together with, together with:

• SaaS firms the place customers can create their very own templates, designs, or workflows to share and promote.
• Code snippet sharing websites or platforms.
• Data-sharing boards or wiki platforms (just like the HubSpot Neighborhood).
• Evaluation and suggestion aggregators – marketplaces like G2 and TripAdvisor.

For supply-driven product-led website positioning, keep in mind: The product itself “provides” knowledge. That’s the content material that produces pages for optimization.

A superb B2C instance of this (and a web site that you simply’re seemingly aware of already) is IMDb.

IMDb’s large repository of film and TV metadata – forged lists, launch dates, scores, and filming areas – produces website positioning pages that rank for movie lovers’ long-tail queries.

Each time new knowledge (e.g., “new Netflix launch 2025”) is ingested by way of AWS Information Change or companion feeds, IMDb’s platform auto-generates or updates the corresponding title web page, making certain recent content material for searches like “when is [Movie Title] popping out on streaming?”

Plus, IMDb advantages from a lift with a facet of UGC from person scores and commentary.

This data-supply-driven strategy turns product updates into steady website positioning alerts.

Picture Credit score: Kevin Indig

Should you do a fast test of IMDb in your most well-liked website positioning instrument, you’ll discover:

• The primary URL reveals that, globally, IMDb natural rankings and site visitors have held or grown barely because the intense modifications throughout the search panorama.
• The natural rankings and site visitors of the /boxoffice/ and /calendar/ subdirectories have both held, elevated, and even skyrocketed, relying on the actual nation.
• The variety of complete pages on the location has decreased barely within the final 12 months, by about 23%.

What this seemingly means:

• For IMDb, its supply-driven product-led website positioning strategy is holding sturdy after the rise of LLM chat use for search, together with Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode.
• This website positioning strategy is tough for different websites to duplicate, which creates a development loop for IMDb that’s onerous to compete with. IMDb’s international knowledge provide is strong and onerous to beat.
• A supply-driven strategy helps overcome present search challenges. As a result of IMDb is conscious of date-driven, rating-driven knowledge modifications, it gives a superb supply of up to date, stay data for conventional looking and LLMs to floor in conversation-based searches.

High Use Circumstances For Provide-Pushed Product-Led website positioning

This sort of PLSEO excels when you’ve gotten distinctive, defensible datasets and a templating system to publish pages at scale, capturing long-tail and high-intent queries with out handbook content material creation.

Examples of orgs that would profit from this modality embody:

• Safety and vulnerability databases that may auto-publish advisory pages for every newly found vulnerability (like Snyk).
• Actual-time pricing and compensation websites (suppose Glassdoor or fintech charge comparability websites).
• SaaS merchandise that gather person conduct or efficiency metrics (e.g., “Common web page load instances for Shopify shops”).

The locale-driven PLSEO modality leverages hyperlocal or geo-specific stock – eating places, properties, accommodations – to create website positioning pages for each location or zip code.

Meals supply service Doordash scales natural site visitors by aggregating eating places and varieties of meals, just like Uber Eats or Instacart.

Picture Credit score: Kevin Indig

Since meals supply has a powerful native intent, close to me queries are important. Doordash addresses that with an in depth checklist of metropolis pages.

The fitting web page structure and content material are key for websites that scale by product stock.

• Doordash’s metropolis pages include eating places, textual content, and FAQ.
• Restaurant pages themselves comply with the same sample: They cowl meals to order, evaluations, and FAQ.
• One other vital issue? Inside linking. Metropolis pages hyperlink to close by cities; restaurant pages to eating places in the identical metropolis.

Doordash has additionally created pages for faculties (order close to a campus), accommodations (order close to a lodge), and zip codes to cowl all potential person intentions.

Different examples of product inventory-driven websites are actual property web site Zillow or coupon code web site Retailmenot.

Should you do a fast test of Doordash in your most well-liked website positioning instrument, you’ll discover:

• The primary URL reveals Doordash’s natural rankings and site visitors have declined considerably after which held within the U.S. market, however have grown barely since January 2025 in some international markets.
• It has diminished its complete variety of pages by ~30%.

What this seemingly means:

• For Doordash, its product stock, product-led website positioning strategy is holding sturdy after the rise of LLM chat use for search, together with Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode.
• A part of this sustained presence (regardless of a difficult website positioning panorama) is probably going as a result of funding within the model, increasing globally, and lowering unimportant pages and matters to their enterprise.

I predict that search engines like google and yahoo and LLMs will proceed to offer favor to hyperlocal content material, which is tough to match.

These product stock websites which might be centered on location (like Doordash, Zillow) or hundreds of thousands of merchandise have the best infrastructure to do it effectively.

This explicit strategy to product-led website positioning can work effectively for companies that may programmatically generate search-ready pages from their product or itemizing stock, together with:

• Meals supply & native ordering platforms.
• Actual property marketplaces.
• Ecommerce retailers with expansive catalogs.
• Journey & lodging aggregators.
• Automotive itemizing portals.

Whereas product-led website positioning can drive the creation of website positioning development loops round what you are promoting – ones which might be tough on your rivals to duplicate – this strategy doesn’t come with out some massive challenges.

Preserve the next in thoughts:

1. Websites utilizing PLSEO approaches have to be careful for website positioning hygiene, spam, and web site upkeep points.

Stock modifications (menus, listings, hours, availability) on the location can preserve content material recent – a bonus for each basic website positioning and potential LLM coaching inputs.

Nevertheless, the hygiene and upkeep required to maintain these pages functioning and correct are important. Don’t make use of this follow with out the right infrastructure in place to take care of it over time.

And if you happen to depend on UGC? It’s mission-critical to have good QA processes and spam filters in place to make sure content material high quality.

2. website positioning aggregators, particularly marketplaces, have been considerably impacted by the rollouts of AI-based search.

PLSEO isn’t exempt from the influence of Google’s AIOs, AI Mode, and LLM-based search. In fact, many aggregator marketplaces have been disproportionally affected.

One of many greatest challenges, particularly for product-led UGC website positioning performs, is that all of your onerous work might go unclicked.

Creating programs to do this type of website positioning at scale is labor-intensive.

It’s extremely seemingly that AIOs, AI Mode, and LLMs will reference the person generated content material with out you incomes the natural site visitors for it.

Nevertheless, constructing a powerful, trusted model by group, publication mentions, and shared hyperlinks can earn extra mentions in LLMs.

As a result of I lately reworked my in-depth information to market website positioning, I’m going to avoid wasting you some additional scrolling right here.

Should you’re involved in the perfect use instances and strategy market website positioning from a product development mindset, take a leap over right here for some nice examples and a full framework: Efficient Market website positioning is extra like Product Progress.

3. Don’t reduce corners on the depth of knowledge supplied in favor of scaling.

For a lot of websites, the important thing to scaling product-led website positioning is deploying a programmatic strategy.

However programmatic touchdown pages ought to nonetheless include a depth of knowledge, have sturdy technical website positioning, and fascinating content material with adequate person worth.

Should you don’t have these assets and practices in place, together with the right processes to take care of pages over time, then it’s seemingly programmatic website positioning isn’t on your org.

With the rise of AI-based search, LLMs like ChatGPT, in addition to Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, are shifting towards understanding and presenting data in additional conversational and context-rich codecs, which programmatic pages typically lack.

One other watch-out? If these programmatic pages are extremely templated with a lot of parts, they’re typically lots for a human reader to absorb directly. And that may result in poor UX if not finished appropriately.

4. Future problem: An internet surfed by AI brokers.

Whereas it’s seemingly we don’t should be apprehensive about this right this moment, we have to begin brainstorming adapt our content material creation for what the online might appear to be tomorrow.

In what methods would your product-led website positioning strategy want to vary to adapt to AI agent site visitors, whereas additionally prioritizing human UX?

If customers begin utilizing queries and instructions like “order my favourite dish from the Indian meals restaurant I went to final month and have it delivered,” or “give me 3 for-sale listings of two mattress, 2 bathtub condos in my space that I didn’t overview final week,” to ship an AI agent to your web site, how would your PLSEO practices have to adapt?

What about PLSEO practices that floor distinctive integrations, templates, and workflows?

If AI brokers develop into customers of merchandise and software program themselves – and due to this fact even have the power to generate their very own apps, integrations, and product workflows as wanted – people, and even their AI counterparts, then skip the necessity for this search completely. (Manufacturers that solely depend on some of these searches might say goodbye to natural site visitors and visibility.)

I don’t have the solutions right here – I’d argue nobody does proper now. So, no want for fast alarm or dramatic modifications.

But it surely’s vital to start out investing time and testing to contemplate what your model may have to vary for an AI agent future.

Adopting a product-led website positioning technique can unlock substantial development – and development that holds and is sustained regardless of the rise in AI-based search – but it surely’s not a one-size-fits-all answer.

When executed effectively, PLSEO turns your product (or product knowledge) into an ever-expanding library of website positioning belongings.

As a substitute of relying solely on a content material staff to crank out new weblog posts or touchdown pages, you leverage in-product alerts – person contributions, integrations, stock feeds – to routinely spawn indexable pages.

However earlier than beginning or remodeling your product-led website positioning program, it’s worthwhile to have the best motions in place. For this website positioning strategy, there are various important shifting components – and every one is vital.

Featured Picture: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal