TL;DR
Discovered Labs worked with incident.io on a combined SEO and AEO strategy. Content started publishing in late November 2025. Within four months, organic meetings booked grew 22%, with a 50% month-over-month jump from January to February. AI visibility climbed from 38% to 64%, and top-3 keyword rankings expanded from 142 to 228.
The problem
incident.io had built a strong product in a competitive market. Over 1,200 companies, including Netflix and Etsy, relied on their platform for incident management. But when potential customers asked ChatGPT or Perplexity about incident management tools, PagerDuty dominated the recommendations. incident.io was barely visible.
The team recognized the problem. They had been experimenting with homegrown LLM prompts, but without a clear strategy for what to optimize or how to structure content for AI retrieval. The market was shifting fast. Opsgenie was sunsetting, driving a wave of migration searches. Buyers were increasingly using AI assistants to research and compare vendors. The companies that moved early on AI visibility would own the citations. Those who waited would have to fight harder for the same ground later.
incident.io needed a partner who understood both traditional search and the new mechanics of AI retrieval, and who could move quickly.
“It's clear that working on AI visibility is as important now as SEO was in the 2010s... I believe early adopters will win the Answer Engine Optimization battle, so it was important for me to find a partner who would help us see results quickly.”
Tom Wentworth, CMO, incident.ioOur approach
1. Measurement: AI visibility tracking
Before any content was published, Discovered Labs set up AI visibility tracking across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. The baseline told the story: incident.io sat at a 38% visibility score, trailing PagerDuty and several competitors across 10 core topics.
For the first time, incident.io could see exactly which buyer queries they were missing, where competitors dominated, and how AI models were distributing recommendations in the incident management category.
As part of the initial consistency audit, we also identified legacy content that conflicted with incident.io's current positioning — including a piece from 2022 that was sending mixed signals to both search engines and AI models.
Legacy content from 2022 flagged during the consistency audit
“Before Discovered Labs, we were using homegrown LLM prompts, without a clear strategy for what to optimize for or exactly how best to structure content.”
Tom Wentworth, CMO, incident.io2. CITABLE content: topical authority for search and AI
Discovered Labs built a content strategy around incident.io's core categories: incident management, on-call scheduling, AI SRE, and alternatives to PagerDuty and Opsgenie. Each topic pillar was designed to establish incident.io as the definitive source, not just for Google, but for the AI models pulling from those pages when answering buyer questions.
The content followed Discovered Labs' CITABLE framework, a methodology built for AI retrieval. Every piece was structured with clear entity relationships, answer-first formatting, and block-level organization that AI models can extract and cite. The strategy also targeted commercial keywords where incident.io had zero visibility, creating rankings from scratch for high-intent queries like “pagerduty alternatives,” “opsgenie retirement,” and “best incident management tools 2026.”
The approach scaled without burdening incident.io's internal team. One of the first articles published became the #1 most-cited page across all competitors in the category — outperforming every piece of content tracked in Profound.
First published article outperforming all tracked competitor content in Profound
Alongside content, Discovered Labs ran a technical SEO audit with in-house engineers to identify and resolve issues affecting crawlability and indexation. The findings were implemented directly, without adding work to incident.io's engineering team.
In-house engineers supporting with technical SEO audit implementation
“Your ability to create content that's on-brand has allowed us to scale output much faster than expected without putting an additional burden on our team.”
Tom Wentworth, CMO, incident.io3. Reddit seeding: third-party validation
AI models don't just trust what a company says about itself. They weigh what others say about it across the web. Our research shows Reddit influences 27% of ChatGPT's answers, making it one of the highest-trust sources for AI recommendations.
Discovered Labs ran a third-party validation strategy, creating genuine and relevant mentions in the subreddits where incident.io's target buyers were already active: DevOps engineers, SRE teams, and engineering leaders discussing incident management, on-call tooling, and PagerDuty alternatives.
These mentions served two purposes: direct visibility to potential buyers browsing Reddit, and trust signals that reinforced incident.io's authority in AI search results.
Top-ranked comment in an ICP-rich subreddit discussing incident management tools
The results
Content started publishing in late November 2025. Within four months, organic meetings booked grew 22%, with a 50% month-over-month jump from January to February. AI visibility climbed from 38% to 64%, peaking at 66.4%. Top-3 keyword rankings expanded from 142 to 228. incident.io was gaining ground while every tracked competitor was flat or declining.
“We're in a highly competitive space, with many potential customers looking to migrate away from legacy tools. It's important that we are mentioned when potential customers are looking for alternatives to their existing tooling.”
Tom Wentworth, CMO, incident.ioThe AI visibility strategy was producing tangible buying signals. A VP at a prospective company discovered incident.io after asking Claude for alternatives to their existing tooling — exactly the kind of organic discovery the strategy was designed to create.
A prospective buyer discovered incident.io after asking Claude for alternatives
Organic meetings booked: +22% (+50% month-over-month)
Organic search conversions grew 22% over the engagement period. January to February saw a 50% month-over-month increase in meetings booked from organic search. The content strategy was building a pipeline of buyer-intent traffic that converted.
AI visibility: 38% to 64%
AI visibility peaked at 66.4%. For 10 core topics tracked, incident.io now ranks in the top 3 for 9 of them and top 2 for 8. One of the first articles published is still the #1 most-cited page across all competitors in the category. incident.io was gaining ground while competitors were flat or declining over the same period.
Top-3 keywords: 142 to 228 (+61%)
The keyword footprint expanded across incident management, on-call, AI SRE, and competitor alternative queries. Average position moved from 15.2 to 9.7, shifting incident.io from page 2 to page 1. New content was driving rankings for terms incident.io had never appeared for, including "pagerduty alternatives," "opsgenie retirement," and "best incident management tools 2026." Across all Discovered Labs articles, the average ranking position was 5.8, placing them squarely on page 1.
