How we helped Affinda win 993% more B2B search visibility

A walk through our award-nominated work for Affinda

Somewhere inside a mid-market insurer, a buying committee spent the better part of two years choosing a document processing platform and never once saw the best option available to them.

Affinda built a platform that quietly outperforms most of its competitors, and almost nobody shopping for one could find it. Known for resume and CV parsing, it was close to invisible for the 90-odd other document types it handled. This is the work that closed that gap, and the work that made us a finalist in the 2026 Australian Marketing Institute Marketing Excellence Awards, B2B Marketing category.

Why nobody could find a platform this good

Affinda operates in a market that has perfected the art of saying nothing, loudly. Intelligent document processing (IDP) is crowded with established vendors like ABBYY, Rossum and Kofax, all leading with feature-dense messaging that sophisticated buyers had long ago learned to tune out. Affinda’s platform performed better. Its B2B search visibility had not caught up. A buyer looking for a document automation partner would scroll past the strongest option in the market without ever knowing it was there.

So how does a better product lose to a louder one? By being absent on the terms that matter. Someone searching ‘CV parser’ or ‘invoice OCR’ was more likely to land on a narrow specialist than on Affinda. The platform had also outgrown its own reputation. The market still filed it under ‘the CV parsing company’ while Affinda was quietly solving document challenges in insurance, banking and lending. Add buying committees and sales cycles that run up to two years, and invisibility gets expensive fast.

There is a deeper shift underneath all this. B2B buyers now educate themselves long before they ever speak to sales. They search, they read, they shortlist. And a growing share of them let ChatGPT or Gemini build that shortlist for them. Miss those moments and you are not losing the deal at the end. You are missing from the start.

Enter Content Rebels.

The three decisions made before writing a word

The brief was precise. Work out what Affinda needed to do to be found by more of its ideal clients, then build the content to make it happen. No vanity traffic. Just visibility that maps to real buyers with real budgets.

That started with three decisions most brands rush past.

• Who to ignore. Affinda made a deliberate call to walk away from top-tier banks, mega-insurers and governments with multi-year procurement cycles. Not because those accounts were too big, but because their buying journey fights against product-led growth. Saying no freed the strategy to go deep where Affinda could win faster, in mid-market firms across regulated, document-heavy industries like financial services and commercial insurance.
  
• How those buyers actually search. A layered audit came before a single line of content, so the plan answered real search demand rather than internal assumptions.
  
• Which territories Affinda could credibly own. That last decision became the whole strategy.

The layered audit that set the plan

Layer 1: Performance diagnostics. Google Search Console and GA4 showed 32% of pages underperforming or absent, which set the repair list before anything new was written.

Layer 2: Competitive keyword analysis. SEMrush surfaced the money keywords where narrower rivals were outranking Affinda on searches with clear buying intent.

Layer 3: Fan-out Query Analysis. Mapping the questions each buyer asks next, things like ‘build vs buy IDP’, showed not just what people searched but what they needed answered before they could move forward.

The audit also named the three people who actually sign off on a deal like this.

• The operations leader. Owns throughput and cost, and feels every hour lost to manual handling.
• The technology leader. Holds a veto on security and integration.
• The vertical SaaS product owner. Building document intelligence into their own platform.

One message would have missed all three, so each one got its own.

The Ownables map that made Affinda unmissable

All that research converged into one asset. The Ownables (Semantic Entities) Content Map, a prioritised plan for making Affinda the definitive voice in agentic IDP.

An Ownable is a territory a brand can credibly win, where it can prove real authority, expertise and a point of view no competitor can copy. The plan was not mapped around site sections or funnel stages. It was mapped around nine entities Affinda could own outright, from Intelligent Document Processing to Insurance Document Automation.

Each one became an interconnected cluster rather than a scatter of one-off posts. Industry pages, use case pages, document type pages, guides and articles, every piece reinforcing Affinda’s claim to that territory.

Thought leadership opened the discovery stage, reframing the conversation from product features to business risk with pieces, like ‘Why 95% accuracy isn’t enough’. High-intent solution and document type pages carried the evaluation stage. And one hard rule kept it honest. Every blog post had to link to at least two conversion pages, so attention flowed towards revenue instead of sitting idle.

What the work delivered

The numbers moved fast.

• High-intent keyword phrases in the top 10 grew from 38 to 328.
• Monthly search volume behind those phrases grew from 2,920 to 31,920.
• That is a 993% increase in high-intent B2B search visibility.

Not traffic for its own sake. Visibility on the terms that turn into pipeline.

Category leadership on the terms that convert

By November 2025, Affinda held an organic Share of Voice of 1.97%, more than double RChilli, nearly three times ABBYY and over four times Nanonets. By the end of July 2026, the content had driven 49 keywords to position #1 and 299 into the top 100.

• ‘Insurance document automation’: Affinda took the top spot.
• ‘Best intelligent document processing software’: Affinda broke into the top 10.
• ‘CV parser’ and ‘agentic IDP’: Affinda now surfaces where it had previously been absent.

These are not awareness phrases. They are the exact searches a buying committee runs during a live evaluation.

Cited inside the AI answers

Then there is where most B2B reporting never looks. Affinda’s content earned 182 Google AI Overview citations from a baseline of zero, plus an 87% uplift in AI search visibility across ChatGPT and Gemini. So when a buyer now asks an AI assistant to name the best document automation platform, Affinda is in the answer. In a category where buyers increasingly start inside an AI response, being the name it gives is worth more than a page of ads ever could be.

As Affinda’s AI-first Marketing and Comms Director Aimee Amiga put it, ‘The Content Rebels team are slick writers with a solid understanding of how to use AI well and produce content that wins in search.’

The real win was capability, not rankings

Affinda entered as a document processing vendor competing on features. It left as an AI transformation partner, a position that commands higher-value conversations and pulls in enterprise-grade buyers. Same platform, completely different conversation.

What already worked was protected too. A high-risk site migration preserved 279 high-value URLs and 99.8% of Affinda’s organic click volume, so a year of hard-won B2B search visibility survived the move intact.

And the Ownables Content Map handed Affinda’s internal team the skill to run all of it themselves.

Strip the Search-First Strategy back and it is simple enough to borrow. Decide who you will not chase before you chase anyone. Map the few territories you can genuinely own. And write for the exact searches your buyers run, not the category in general.

How Content Rebels turns Audit into Strategy

Content Rebels turns the audit into a Search-First Strategy by connecting visibility findings to Ownables, content systems and reporting.

Our Search-First Growth Strategy Audit looks at traditional search signals, AI Search visibility, competitor presence and content readiness. Then we show the first moves your team can make with the skills and tools already in the business.

The audit can also point to a human-led AI Content Engine when the gap is production consistency. It can point to Digital PR when the gap is authority. Or Marketing Reporting when leadership cannot see progress. We design, build and scale the response with documentation and training so your team grows stronger through the process. That matters because this work should build internal capability, not create permanent agency dependency.

‘Sarah and her team delivered a forward-thinking search and content strategy that delivered immediate results, securing our visibility in traditional SEO and across LLMs.’

Jack Flewett, Digital Leader and Growth Marketer in SaaS, Affinda

Want to see what this kind of partnership could look like for your B2B business?

This work led us to become finalists in the 2026 Australian Marketing Institute Marketing Excellence Awards, B2B Marketing category, and it is the kind of partnership we have built for B2B clients like Inauro, MGI Australasia and ReStore for Retail. If your platform is better than your search visibility suggests, you have the same B2B search visibility gap Affinda had.

The fix is not more content for its own sake. It is the right content, mapped to how your buyers actually search, built on a foundation that converts. Why stay invisible to the buyers already searching for exactly what you built?

BOOK YOUR SEARCH-FIRST GROWTH STRATEGY AUDIT

Or, download our Search-First Strategy Playbook to see where a Search-First approach could take your organisation. 

The B2B teams who build their search landscape now will be the ones buyers find first for the next decade.