Sell Platforms, Not Point Tools

01 /The Concept

AirOps built an AI-powered SEO platform – meaning automated creation of content that indexes in search engines and drives organic traffic to clients' websites.

Rather than building its own AI model, the team focused on the algorithms and business processes around optimization. The platform connects to more than 40 third-party AI models, any of which can handle the content generation itself while AirOps handles the strategy and workflow.

The platform doesn't start with content generation – it starts with topic discovery. The AI analyzes search results across queries relevant to the client's business and identifies two types of opportunities:

- Competitor weaknesses. Topics where few competitors appear on the first page of results.

- Client strengths. Topics where the client already gets organic traffic, suggesting value in expanding keyword coverage in adjacent areas.

All discovered opportunities are ranked by estimated incremental traffic and potential conversions – both calculated automatically. Marketing teams can focus their energy where the expected return is highest.

Content generation comes next. AI-drafted pages go through human review before publication – marketing professionals have final say.

Critically, the platform is designed to support a continuous SEO business process rather than a one-time content sprint. It tracks performance for every published page, continuously surfaces new topic opportunities, suggests improvements to existing pages, and recommends removing underperformers.

The results are measurable: one client saw 20x organic traffic growth within two months of starting; another saw an 18% lift in conversion rates from product pages.

AirOps was founded in late 2022 and raised $7M in spring 2023. It just closed a new $15.5M round.

02 /Why It Matters

When AirOps raised its first $7M, it was building a broad no-code AI platform for non-technical users – covering business process automation, data analysis, and content generation as one of several capabilities.

The founders assumed content generation was a solved problem. Dozens of AI writing tools already existed, including several SEO-specific ones.

Talking to real customers revealed two surprises. The actual quality of AI-generated content from most tools was too low for professional use. But that turned out to be the smaller problem. The harder one was management: tracking page performance, publishing new content, pruning what wasn't working, maintaining coherence across hundreds of pages. The bigger the content library, the bigger the problems – and "content management at scale" was a problem none of the existing tools were solving.

And many potential customers weren't deeply motivated by "efficiency." What they cared about was customer acquisition. Organic search is one of the most cost-effective acquisition channels available – and the promise of a platform that could systematically own it was far more compelling than a generic AI productivity tool.

So the founders made a sharp call: focus exclusively on SEO, and reposition from tool to platform.

The AirOps story surfaces a few durable principles. Customers buy what's important, not what's useful – and those are different lists. In the early days of any technology wave, buyers purchase the technology itself; once the hype settles, they purchase results. The market's vocabulary shifts from "I want to use AI" to "I want to win at SEO." And at the end of that shift, what companies actually want isn't a tool – it's a platform that supports a continuous, integrated business process. That reframing, from tool to platform, was the real product decision.

AirOps is also careful about how it frames the human role. The pitch isn't "fire your marketers and let AI do it." The platform is sold to marketers as a tool for personal leverage. As the blog puts it: "AirOps turns ordinary marketers into growth leaders powered by AI."

Or as the co-founder frames it: "By 2027, AI will handle 95% of marketing tasks. But strategic thinking, creativity, and taste – that's what will distinguish great marketers who still own the remaining 5%."

AI sets a new floor. People who can only perform at AI level will be replaced by AI. People who can do better than AI should offload the routine work and raise their ceiling. And as AI improves, that ceiling keeps rising.

FirmPilot ([related review](/review/ne-nuzhno-horosho-nuzhno-luchshe)), which raised $7M, follows the same model – an SEO platform purpose-built for law firms.

Ghost ([related review](/review/vremja-massovogo-perehoda)) started with the same architecture, initially specialized for fitness studio websites. Since then it has removed the explicit vertical focus from its site and is moving toward a general platform – though the homepage video still features a gym owner.

Digital First AI ([related review](/review/novyj-uroven-jeto-tozhe-revoljucija)), which raised $4.9M, is pushing even further – building AI that generates full marketing strategies across channels, not just SEO content, by pulling from a library of curated best practices.

03 /Opportunities

AI content generation feels almost commoditized at this point – any high schooler can crank out an essay with ChatGPT.

So there are plenty of tools. The problem, as AirOps proves, is that tools aren't products. A product that a business will actually pay for requires: (a) quality that delivers measurable results, and (b) a platform that supports an ongoing, integrated workflow.

The SEO market is large enough that there's still room to enter with an AirOps-style product. That's one concrete direction.

The more general opportunity: find categories where businesses have started adopting AI tools but are still running fragmented, unmanaged workflows. Then build the platform that wraps those tools into a coherent process.

The principles hold across domains:

- Quality and outcomes above any comparable alternative.

- A platform that sustains a continuous, integrated business process.

- A pitch that empowers the humans who use it – not one that threatens to replace them.

What other domains beyond SEO are waiting for this treatment?