Fifteen years ago, Lem and I started BrightEdge because we saw a huge gap in digital. Brands were investing to produce and optimize content but had no way to predict what would make that content findable by their customers. I had myself run websites and knew how hard it was to figure this out. 

Lem and I are both engineers and we worked hard to build the DataCube, the first reverse index of the internet. I will never forget how it felt when our first customers shared with us how we had helped them. It was exciting to hear about BrightEdge working as we had designed it – and even more exciting to hear about new use cases that our customers discovered on their own. 

That is because SEO is by its nature holistic. Every element of a page influences how it ranks in search: the title, the content, how fast it loads, everything. Our dream has always been to create that holistic platform that helps marketers win at every aspect of search. And so that early success of DataCube inspired us to build ContentIQ as part of our solution in 2017, allowing for cross-team governance and SEO technical analysis on an enterprise scale. We also created pixel parsing, allowing for a truer vision of top ranking SERPs. And with Autopilot, we created the only machine learning solution that improves search performance. 

Now, we are so excited to announce that we are extending our holistic platform even further by joining forces with Oncrawl. BrightEdge and Oncrawl have combined because holistic SEO is not easy. Getting it right requires high quality enterprise data with multiple technical capabilities. At BrightEdge, we have a comprehensive SEO suite and adding Oncrawl’s advanced technical SEO capabilities through data science will represent the future of enterprise SEO.   

Oncrawl pioneered big data infrastructure in crawl technology as well as semantic analysis of SEO data, allowing for much more control and visibility. Oncrawl has rapidly become a must-have for advanced SEOs and has won numerous awards.  Oncrawl leadership shares our dream of holistic SEO and has built a following of SEO ambassadors in the industry.   

Through technical innovation, Oncrawl is positioning itself to be the driving force behind making data science core to SEO programs. With this new combination, BrightEdge and Oncrawl now provide customers with the most flexibility in SEO deployments. For SEO, some scenarios require technical crawlers to be integrated into a broader platform for things like site governance and ongoing SEO hygiene. Other scenarios demand highly customized crawls and data modeling to pinpoint what optimizations need to occur. Accommodating both is complicated for enterprise organizations, especially if they need to leverage multiple toolsets to address all these use cases. 

We are truly excited – I have never encountered a team with a vision like this. Oncrawl is as committed as we are to building AI and machine learning that helps marketers. Together we bring you the most comprehensive SEO and data platform.  

Thank you and looking forward to the next fifteen! 
Jim