About Zapier
Zapier is a leading AI automation and orchestration provider. Zapier provides a complete AI toolkit in one comprehensive system, with AI agents, MCP and SDK solutions, and 9,000+ integrations all connected in one orchestration layer that safely handles OAuth and governance. Zapier is also home to one of the world’s most sophisticated in-house SEO / AEO teams.
About Petra Labs
Petra Labs is an end-to-end AI visibility partner that bundles together highly customizable AEO software with a managed end-to-end service. In today’s rapidly changing AI ecosystem, Petra provides the high-touch support brands need to navigate their AEO spend and strategies.
Introduction
Long before AI search evolved to become what it is today, Zapier was pioneering strategies for driving organic traffic to their website. It is not an exaggeration to say that Zapier wrote the playbook on programmatic SEO. An industry leader in SEO like Zapier requires an approach to AI search that is just as sophisticated, if not more sophisticated, than the bar already set by their internal SEO experts.
Plus, AI search is an increasingly important channel for Zapier’s team, as buyers in the AI automation space are turning more and more to LLMs not only to help them make decisions on what platform to select but also to ask informational ‘how-to’ questions which function as opportunities for Zapier to show up in LLM responses.
Zapier’s size and scale add to the challenge. Zapier is a complex enterprise operating across multiple marketing surfaces and in numerous product categories. That complexity makes it easy for LLMs to misrepresent information about Zapier’s products and makes managing Zapier’s presence in AI search all the more difficult.
With AI search being so critical for Zapier, it was clear that they needed a high-touch partner with strong expertise that was up for such a challenge. In particular, the Zapier team wanted to build out a more robust, data-informed approach to AI search. After trying a few vendors, the Zapier team brought in Petra Labs to provide a more hands-on, bespoke approach. In the months since, Petra has collaborated with multiple Zapier teams to drive improvements in Zapier’s AI search performance, both directly through hands-on execution and indirectly by integrating data from Petra’s proprietary platform into Zapier’s internal operations.
Enterprise AI Marketing Software + Full Strategy
Petra Labs’ AI visibility software is engineered to provide brands and enterprises with the high-fidelity data needed to create an approach to AI search that actually drives growth. Petra’s platform runs thousands of prompts at a high sample size to achieve statistically significant results for AI search visibility, sentiment, and citations. Petra’s software also offers product level alias resolution which captures visibility of brands and sub-brands, providing a level of granularity that enterprises need in their day-to-day operations. Crucially, unlike most AEO platforms, Petra’s proprietary platform also identifies final citations by vendor, which allows us to isolate the most impactful citations in a large and noisy dataset.
But, software alone is not enough. For a large enterprise like Zapier, the stakes of AI search are high. Even a small increase or decrease in AI visibility can significantly impact pipeline. And for such a complex enterprise spanning many subbrands and product categories, creating a unified, global AEO strategy that updates in real time is difficult. And ensuring that the insights and analysis are customized to Zapier is even more difficult.
That’s why Petra deploys a team of AEO experts, empowered by the Petra Labs Agents Platform, that work alongside the Zapier team to help set the strategy in real time. AEO touches all parts of the marketing org, and we work hand-in-hand with PR, content, social, YouTube, editorial, performance marketing, and more.
One of the most impactful strategies we’ve been able to deploy with the Zapier team involves identifying companies outperforming on AEO relative to their traditional SEO and real-world market share. We then used our final citations by vendor feature to isolate the common patterns that are shared by those companies to orchestrate a unified strategy across PR, YouTube, and content. Our software stores every action taken by us and our clients in our AEO system of record, enabling our operators to then measure the impact of each of those initiatives and map them back to real business outcomes in real time.
Execution and Owning the Outcomes
Petra Labs doesn’t stop at strategy. We take ownership of all the recommendations we make, turning strategy into results for your brand. We think of your brand as our own brand. That’s why our operators dedicate time to learn how you work and earn your team’s trust so that we can take tasks off your plate. For Zapier, that includes recommending and drafting on-site and blog content, running earned media and PR outreach, writing content for community initiatives, and more.
With Zapier, Petra also collaborated with the content team to learn how to write in Zapier’s specific brand voice, earning the trust to produce content Zapier publishes on its own blog. This isn’t just convenient; this streamlined workflow allows Petra to help Zapier get content live soon after it’s recommended so that Zapier can capitalize on the tailwinds emerging from LLMs.
Attribution to Real Business Outcomes
One of the hardest problems for brands is deciding how to allocate time and resources to different types of AEO strategies. This is usually dependent on their ability to attribute and disaggregate the impact of all their initiatives on the business outcomes that matter most, and map those back to the cost levers associated with them as well.
The detailed view into attribution that Petra Labs provides helps Zapier decide where to invest across channels, creators, and content based on real evidence. Petra ties its simulation and visibility data with your brand’s own site traffic and LLM referral data to identify which pieces of content are driving real traffic and net new users to your site.
With Zapier, for example, Petra works closely with the content team to guide their efforts and YouTube video investment, and provides real-time data via our API to help Zapier’s team measure the impact of those videos and adapt their strategy to what drives the most ROI.
Experimentation
So much of AI search is still uncharted territory. New model updates come out every few months, and new approaches to AEO are evolving every day. That’s another reason why having a partner like Petra is beneficial: while the Zapier team handles their day-to-day content operations, Petra’s team runs experiments to investigate data anomalies, test the effectiveness of existing content, and identify opportunities for new strategies to improve Zapier’s AI visibility.
For example, when LLMs started misrepresenting Zapier and hallucinating information about its products, the Petra team ran a custom experiment and traced it to LLMs confusing other companies’ documentation with Zapier’s own, and recommended an ad-hoc solution to address these misrepresentations.
An ongoing partnership scaled to Zapier’s enterprise
Petra’s partnership with Zapier continues to evolve day by day. AI search changes constantly, and the advantage goes to enterprises like Zapier that treat it as an ongoing discipline rather than a one-time project.
For many enterprises, AI search is their fastest growing channel, but it’s also the hardest to understand. Many brands are applying a traditional SEO approach to AEO that is falling short. Petra Labs is the only AEO platform combining strategy, execution, and attribution, tying interventions to net new leads and revenue for clients. That’s one of the reasons why enterprises like Zapier who are looking to make a step change in their performance in AI search select Petra Labs as their partner.