Today, we’re launching the Graphite Platform, an SEO platform built for topics and powered by AI.
Technology has played a key role at Graphite since the beginning.
From day one, our agency has invested in AI and internal tools to increase our effectiveness. Paired with our experienced team, technology has allowed us to consistently deliver the type of impact that changes the growth trajectory of clients such as Masterclass, Honey, BetterUp, and Calm.
After proving impact across many beta customers, we are excited to bring this technology to market as a self-serve platform. It incorporates all the learnings we’ve collected around what drives impact– the top 5% of SEO work that actually matters. The result is a more guided experience that enables any marketer, writer, or leader who believes in SEO to successfully grow the channel.
For many years, SEO success has required a topical approach. While an individual keyword is just a fragment of a user’s intent, a topic (or cluster of keywords) is a more complete view of what the user is looking for. A strong understanding of topics – and where you have topical authority – is pivotal to systematically create high quality, high performing content.
While Google has long shifted to topics, existing SEO tools are still keyword-based. It requires a lot of tedious and manual work for humans to transform keyword data into a usable topical SEO strategy. Even with a lot of effort, there’s a human limit to how strategic and accurate you can be.
When we started Graphite, we decided to build a modern toolkit that could amplify our efforts at every stage of the Topical SEO workflow.
Research – a database that provides comprehensive topic data in seconds
Prioritize – a topical authority score that shows which topics are more likely to rank and get traffic
Monitor – a straightforward way to track content cohorts and the ongoing performance for a topic
Write – a feedback loop that analyzes content based on topics so we can consistently rank for hundreds of keywords with a single article
Optimize – a system that continuously surfaces enhancement opportunities
At the heart of the Graphite Platform are a thoughtful series of custom AI components that make Topical SEO significantly more powerful. Many critical SEO tasks require large amounts of data entry and analysis. This makes them better suited for AI rather than humans.
For example, a skilled SEO professional might cluster a handful of keywords into a topic. In comparison, AI clusters hundreds (sometimes thousands) of keywords into a topic by processing large datasets and figuring out which groups of keywords share similar search results.
Our focus on AI has resulted in a more complete semantic understanding of user intent, significantly beyond what can be inferred from a simple keyword approach. And as our AI learns what actually drives outcomes, it improves with ongoing feedback loops.
Embeddings model of 200M+ keywords and billions of SERPs to create our Topic Graph.
Embeddings model to navigate our Topic Graph and calculate a domain’s Topical Authority for any topic.
Embeddings model that identifies relevant content for internal linking.
Deep learning model to score content quality based on how well it covers a topic
Machine learning classifier to identify the specific page types for a given query
LLMs with custom prompt engineering to generate SEO content briefs and title tag recommendations
Today, the attention on AI applications for SEO has mostly been focused on generative AI and LLMs. This is actually a very small part of our platform. I see much larger potential for AI to answer key strategic questions. What should my strategy be? How can I accelerate impact? We’re already seeing this pay off. In February, we published a research paper showing that our proprietary Topical Authority score is helping our customers drive faster search visibility.
It’s common for SEO efforts to have no impact. Teams struggle to build momentum because existing solutions do not make it easy to move in the right direction. One of our beta customers, Fourthwall, recognized the potential of SEO, but did not feel confident in their ability to capture the opportunity.
Here’s how Will, CEO of Fourthwall, describes their situation a few months ago:“Before using the Graphite Platform, we knew SEO should be a growth driver for our business, but we lacked expertise and made several unsuccessful attempts. Our content either did not perform or, if it did, we could not figure out how to replicate it.”
In 6 months, Fourthwall has made significant strides with the Graphite Platform. Non-branded traffic has increased by 1400% and search revenue has increased by 936%.
SEO can feel like a mysterious black art, but it’s actually very systematic. Figuring out what drives impact requires rigorous analysis, ongoing testing, and the reproduction of results across many cases. This requires significant time and resources.
My hope is that the Graphite Platform can be your shortcut to impact. It builds on all the learnings and impact we have driven at Graphite over the last 4 years.
If you’re interested in how we can help, you can apply for access here: graphite.io/platform
