GoCodes GEO Case Study: 164% New Customer Sales & AI Citation Leadership
164% Increase in New Customer Sale Growth
2.2 Average Position when Mentioned in LLM Response
Buyers stopped clicking. Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode began answering asset tracking questions directly. GoCodes watched top-of-funnel search traffic vanish. Not to a competitor, but to AI.
Worse, GoCodes was barely present in the answers replacing that traffic. At baseline, only 9 of 50 ICP buying questions produced an answer naming GoCodes.
GoCodes engaged Exalt Growth in September 2025. GoCodes became the most-cited asset tracking vendor in LLMs within six months. New customer sales grew 164% in the first half of 2026.
Overview
- Situation: AI answers replaced informational search traffic across the asset tracking category.
- Cause: A flat 1,000+ article repository, broken schema, weak entity corroboration, and no high-intent pages.
- Intervention: Retrieval surface rebuilt first, brand entity corroborated second, transactional content third.
- Result: 1st in category citation share, average position 2.2, net new revenue up 164%.
- Timeline: Engagement started September 2025. Citation leadership before end of Q1 2026. New customer sales increase confirmed end of H1 2026.
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Key Metrics
Company Profile
About GoCodes
GoCodes is a bootstrapped, founder-led asset tracking platform. The product bundles patented QR labels with software and hardware. Tracking runs across QR, GPS, Bluetooth, and RFID.
GoCodes has operated for 14 years without outside funding. Founder and CEO Todd Penny had not treated that longevity as a positioning asset.
"Part of the reason GoCodes has survived, and it was an interesting point you made, we're a founder-led bootstrap company that's been around 14 years, and I suppose that is quite unusual. I'd never really thought about it that way."
Bootstrapped survival in a venture-funded category is a durability signal. Most competitors in asset tracking have raised outside capital. GoCodes has outlasted several venture-funded asset tracking competitors.
Mid-market trades and industrial teams make up the core GoCodes market. GoCodes serves hundreds of companies across 13 industries.
Named GoCodes accounts include Intel, Cleveland Clinic, Sony Pictures, Toyota North America, Hyatt, Principal Financial Group, Bombardier, Northeastern University, Virginia Tech, and Jack Daniels.
The GoCodes Wikidata entry (Q139677762) records the company, founder, and product facts referenced on this page.
The Challenge: Invisible in AI Answers About Asset Tracking
GoCodes faced a structural break in how buyers discover software. Top-of-funnel search traffic was not slowing. It was vanishing. AI Overviews and AI Mode now answer informational queries directly. The lost traffic did not move to a competitor. It disappeared.
The site carried deep structural debt
Over 1,000 articles sat in a flat, untiered repository. Topical authority was diluted across unfocused content. Schema was applied incorrectly, weakening clarity for AI systems. High-intent commercial pages were largely missing.
The deeper problem sat in AI discovery
Only 9 of 50 ICP buying questions returned an answer naming GoCodes. GoCodes was absent from the other 41 questions.
The commercial picture matched the visibility picture. New customer sales were flat to declining when GoCodes approached Exalt Growth in 2025.
"We were in a tough spot of a decline when we reached out and you got on board."
Declining traffic and declining sales arrived together. Neither was caused by a competitor taking share.
The Approach
Diagnosis came before execution. That baseline reframed the problem. GoCodes was not losing rankings. GoCodes was missing from the AI answers buyers now read first.
Three causes emerged from the diagnosis:
- 1. Content was not structured for machine retrieval
- 2. The GoCodes entity was weakly corroborated across the open web
- 3. High-intent commercial pages did not exist
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The approach followed from that. Rebuilding the retrieval surface came before producing anything new. Architecture and technical debt came first. Entity corroboration came second. High-intent content came third.
The approach ran in strict order
- Rebuild the retrieval surface. Fix architecture, schema, and technical debt before publishing anything new.
- Corroborate the entity. Align GoCodes facts across Wikidata, 12+ directories, and third-party profiles.
- Publish high-intent content. Launch transactional and comparison pages into a repaired architecture.
Sequencing mattered. Publishing into a broken architecture would have wasted the GoCodes content budget.
The asymmetry was never about company size. It was about which layer is contestable.
Classic search rewards authority accumulated over years. Backlink authority on that timeline was closed to GoCodes. AI retrieval weighs entity clarity, structure, and citable claims. Those signals can be engineered in months. Exalt Growth moved the GoCodes budget to the contestable layer.
Reallocation only works when the client accepts the trade. Top-of-funnel content had built the GoCodes traffic base over a decade. Cutting investment there required Todd Penny to agree the channel was gone.
"I'm over top of the funnel content. The idea of building an audience through top of funnel that eventually is going to engage just doesn't seem appropriate in this world."
"To me, the future is AI, AI, LLM. I don't see a world where organic keyword-based search is ever coming back. If we're going to invest, then the top priority should be on AI and LLM, because that's where the future is going to be."
That agreement made the sequencing possible. A client still defending legacy traffic will not fund a teardown of it.
A bootstrapped company can outrank funded competitors in AI search. AI retrieval weighs entity clarity and citable claims over accumulated backlinks. GoCodes outranked funded incumbents in LLM visibility within six months.
One wedge stood out. Publishing claims that exist nowhere else, in extractable sentence form, is what earns AI citations. GoCodes ships a single-vendor hardware and software stack. Patented QR labels and proprietary field data belong to GoCodes alone. First-hand product and field data cannot be restated by anyone else. Concentrating that material under a clear topical structure makes it retrievable.
The Patent as an Entity Signal
Most vendors treat a patent as a product differentiator. It is also an entity corroboration asset.
GoCodes holds US8973813B2 patent for its “System for facilitating return of lost property”. That patent record exists in a public registry, independent of the GoCodes website. Registry records are exactly the kind of third-party source AI systems weight heavily.
A patent number is a verifiable, machine-readable fact tied to a named company. Nothing else on a SaaS site carries that combination.
Exalt Growth surfaced the GoCodes patent across four layers. Product pages carry it as a capability claim. Comparison pages carry it as a differentiator. Schema carries it as a structured property. The Wikidata entry carries it as a referenced statement.
The same fact now corroborates the GoCodes entity in four places instead of one. Repetition across independent surfaces is what raises citation confidence.
Patented QR labels moved GoCodes from a claim about product quality to a verifiable claim about identity.
The Exalt Growth Operating System sequenced the work.
Technical Foundation and Architecture Rebuild
A full entity and content teardown ran first. The flat 1,000+ article repository was restructured into hub-and-spoke.
Hub-and-spoke restructuring of 1,000+ GoCodes articles concentrated topical authority for AI retrieval.
Why architecture drives citation position
The chain runs in one direction. A flat repository dilutes topical authority across unfocused pages. Concentrated topical authority raises semantic relevance for a specific buyer question. Higher relevance raises citation rate on that question. Higher citation rate raises average position when GoCodes is named. Architecture is not a hygiene task. Architecture is the input to citation position.
Hub-and-spoke also gave the GoCodes product entities a home. Patented QR labels, GPS, Bluetooth, and RFID tracking now sit under named hubs. Each hub maps to a buyer question rather than a product keyword. That mapping is what lets retrieval systems connect a GoCodes capability to a specific asset tracking question.
Technical debt required systematic clearing. GoCodes had 57 pages and 455 images returning 404 errors before the September 2025 rebuild. Another 172 redirect chains were wasting crawl budget and got resolved. LCP on mobile exceeded 13 seconds on key pages. GoCodes mobile LCP fell from over 13 seconds to 3 seconds by June 2026. CLS was fixed across core templates.
High-Intent Transactional Content
Exalt Growth launched 25+ net new transactional and comparison pages for GoCodes. Every page followed a brief balancing intent, conversion, and citability.
- - Solutions covered core product functionality
- - Use case pages addressed key user pain points in depth
- - Industry pages targeted key verticals of construction, civil engineering, higher education, nonprofit and medical.
- - Competitor comparison pages provided a clear and honest resource for switch-intent queries highlighting that GoCodes is the superior solution.
- The pages produced a second outcome outside search. GoCodes sales reps adopted them as live reference material on calls.
"A lot of them are helping the sale process with the sales reps now. Someone says, well, how does GoCodes work? Well, there's a webpage for that. You don't have to pull it off the top of your head."
Pages written for machine retrieval read cleanly to buyers. Both audiences want a direct answer to one question.
Off-Site Entity Corroboration
The off-site add-on aligned GoCodes directory profiles across 12+ platforms. Those platforms included G2, Capterra, Software Advice, SourceForge, GetApp, Crunchbase, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Directory profiles function as entity corroboration nodes that feed AI citation confidence. Exalt Growth also improved the GoCodes Wikidata entry (Q139677762). Corroboration is the one authority signal a challenger can build in months rather than years.
Reddit Amplification
Reddit sits inside AI training data and live retrieval surfaces. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google’s AI search features all pull from Reddit threads. Buyers were already comparing asset tracking tools there. Those threads named competitors and rarely named GoCodes.
The discovery system
Exalt Growth monitors 54 subreddits for GoCodes. Coverage spans trades, IT, facilities, manufacturing, and maintenance communities. Every crawl runs three search passes:
- Pass A: global relevance queries across the full monitored set
- Pass B: subreddit-scoped queries against the highest-yield communities
- Pass C: fresh-thread queries to catch conversations still under 48 hours old
Surfaced threads then pass a classification step. Thread type, community register, and buying intent decide whether a comment gets drafted.
Discipline over volume
The GoCodes crawl yield is deliberately small and specific. A typical crawl surfaces two to five qualifying threads out of hundreds scanned. Most surfaced threads get eliminated before a comment is drafted. Elimination is the point.
Volume-based Reddit programs get accounts banned and brands mocked. Restraint is what kept the GoCodes Reddit channel usable for six months.
AI Visibility Instrumentation
Exalt Growth measures AI search visibility against a fixed set of buying-intent questions, not total citation volume. Total citations have no denominator and scale with page count. Measurement ran against that fixed metric set from the first week of the engagement.
Ten signals were monitored and tracked continuously across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews:
- - Prompt coverage against ICP purchase-intent questions
- - Citation share across the prompt set
- - Mention rate versus citation rate
- - Category rank among all tracked vendors
- - Average position when named
- - Platform split, measured per engine
- - AI impressions and clicks from Bing Webmaster Tools
- - LLM answer structure and demand modelling
- - Entity-relation mapping of search demand and competitor supply
- - Semantic mapping of AI answer surfaces
The measurement stack
Five sources produce every GoCodes number: Promptwatch, KeywordGraph, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, and a custom prompt environment.
Engagement Scope
The GoCodes engagement ran in three stages.
- Diagnostic, August to September 2025. Technical audit, content and entity teardown, prioritized roadmap.
- Implementation, September to December 2025. Architecture rebuild, technical fixes, entity-first schema, transactional pages.
- Growth retainer, January 2026 onward. Content scale, entity corroboration, Reddit amplification, continuous instrumentation.
Delivery stayed lean and hands-on. Exalt Growth led the audit, architecture, page briefs, schema, and draft copy. The GoCodes dev team shipped server-level fixes. GoCodes design owned visuals. Cadence ran on weekly check-ins, Slack, and async Loom walkthroughs.
What GoCodes Achieved
Since the engagement began in September 2025, GoCodes grew new customer sales 164%. That compares the first half of 2026 to the first half of 2025. The GoCodes sales team reports its most qualified SQLs to date.
AI sources accounted for 30% of attributed GoCodes pipeline between January and April 2026.
Half of all new GoCodes sign-ups now name AI as their discovery source.
The GoCodes sales team reports the highest lead quality in company history.
Business Outcomes
AI discovery moved from edge case to default inside nine months. Todd Penny reported the shift from the GoCodes consult intake data.
"It feels to me that on the consults, from being 10, 20%, it feels like it's 50 to 70% right now. It's getting to be very much commonplace that that's where they're finding us. And it's growing over search significantly."
AI Visibility
Average position is the metric most AI visibility reports skip. Citation rate says whether a brand appears. Position says whether the brand is the answer or the footnote. GoCodes moved from average position 6 to 2.2 in AI answers.
The competitive gap closed faster in AI than in classic search. Todd Penny tracked both surfaces independently and reached the same conclusion.
"While in traditional search, the gap is really wide between us and our top competitors, in AI and LLM the gap's much smaller or we may be ahead. Which kind of leads me to believe we've got off to a really solid start with the AI LLM focus and making good ground there."
Classic search rewards authority accumulated over years. AI retrieval rewarded work GoCodes completed in six months.
Site and Content Signals
How the Number Was Measured
Founder & CEO Todd Penny reported 164% new customer sales growth in the GoCodes H1 recap. That compares the first half of 2026 to the first half of 2025.
Attribution in this market is rarely clean or single-threaded. Product, sales execution, and market conditions all moved during the same period. The Exalt Growth search and AI visibility work was a core contributor, not the only one.
That distinction matters. A case study claiming sole credit for a revenue number is asking for trust it has not earned.
How the Engagement Expanded
GoCodes has renewed and widened the scope at every decision point since September 2025.
The relationship started small. A short consulting engagement produced the technical audit, content and entity teardown, and prioritized roadmap. Nothing was implemented at that stage. GoCodes bought the diagnosis before buying the treatment.
That diagnosis converted into a three-month implementation. The signed scope committed to roughly 14 to 16 new transactional and comparison pages.
January 2026 turned the project into an ongoing growth retainer. Content production scaled and AI visibility instrumentation became continuous rather than periodic.
The retainer decision followed a strategy review. Exalt Growth presented the case for reallocating budget from classic search to AI retrieval.
"I read your report there. It made a lot of sense to me. I think now we can confirm that we're definitely on the right course and we want to continue on the journey that we're on."
GoCodes added off-site entity corroboration and Reddit amplification as separate scopes in 2026.
GoCodes offered to act as a reference before Exalt Growth asked. Todd Penny volunteered it in June 2026 while sharing mid-year sales figures.
"If you want to reference it in a case study, or you want to use that metric with other opportunities, happy for you to do that. And happy to talk to anybody that wants to talk about our experience up to this point in time."
What Todd Says:
Todd Penny reviewed and approved the figures on this page.
"Thanks for the help we've had over the last six, nine months. And we're really seeing the results of that now. So Nadine and I both really appreciate what you've been able to do with us." - Todd Penny, Founder and CEO, GoCodes
From the Clutch Review:
"Very fast and proactive delivery of work products. Overall very smart, flexible and responsive."
"Ability to learn our business in real-time and apply unique in-depth skills and experience to solve our digital marketing challenges."
Work With Exalt Growth
Exalt Growth is a SaaS SEO and generative engine optimization consultancy for funded software companies. Exalt Growth builds AI-native search systems for Seed to Series C SaaS companies.
Every company has one layer where the gap is closeable. Finding it is the work. Book a strategy call.
Exalt Growth is listed on Clutch and other offsite platforms.
Definitions
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of making a brand retrievable and citable inside AI-generated answers. GEO optimizes for entity clarity, extractable claims, and third-party corroboration rather than backlinks.
Entity corroboration is the alignment of a brand's facts across independent third-party sources. Wikidata entries, review directories, and business profiles act as corroboration nodes that raise AI citation confidence.
Retrieval surface is the portion of a website an AI system can reach, parse, and extract. Broken schema, JavaScript-hidden content, and redirect chains all shrink the retrieval surface.
What This Means for SaaS Companies
Your competitors already appear in AI answers. The open question is whether a brand is recommended or compared against. Entity signals compound over time. Third-party corroboration accumulates. The companies that build for citability now hold the advantage.
Our Results
- Dovetail - How we 10x organic growth
- Cascade - Creating a category through product-led SEO
- Exalt Growth - How we became the #1 AI recommendation for SaaS SEO & GEO
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does generative engine optimization take to show results?
GoCodes moved from largely absent to category citation leader in AI answers within six months. Business results followed within nine months of the September 2025 engagement start with Exalt Growth.
Does generative engine optimization drive revenue?
Generative engine optimization drove measurable revenue for GoCodes, a bootstrapped asset tracking software company. GoCodes grew new customer sales 164% in H1 2026 versus H1 2025. AI sources accounted for 30% of attributed GoCodes pipeline between January and April 2026.
How do you measure AI search visibility?
Exalt Growth measures AI search visibility against a fixed set of buying-intent questions, not total citation volume. GoCodes tracks 50 ICP questions across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. Measurement runs through Promptwatch, KeywordGraph, Bing Webmaster Tools, Google Search Console, and a custom tracking environment.
How do you become the cited source in AI answers?
Publishing claims that exist nowhere else, in extractable sentence form, is what earns AI citations. Exalt Growth corroborated the GoCodes entity across Wikidata, 12+ directories, and third-party profiles. GoCodes reached first position for citation share in asset tracking within six months.
Can a bootstrapped company outrank funded competitors in AI search?
GoCodes is bootstrapped and outranked funded incumbents in LLM visibility and citations. AI retrieval weighs entity clarity and citable claims over accumulated backlinks. GoCodes improved average position when named from 6+ to 2.2, the best of any tracked vendor.
Which SEO agency does GoCodes work with?
GoCodes works with Exalt Growth, a SaaS SEO and generative engine optimization consultancy. Exalt Growth has run the GoCodes search and AI visibility program since September 2025.
What does Exalt Growth do?
Exalt Growth is a SaaS SEO and generative engine optimization consultancy for funded software companies. Exalt Growth builds AI-native search systems for Seed to Series C SaaS companies. Services cover technical SEO, generative engine optimization, transactional SEO, content development, and off-site entity corroboration.
Who founded Exalt Growth?
Jack Boutchard founded Exalt Growth. Jack Boutchard leads SaaS SEO and generative engine optimization engagements at the firm. He has run the GoCodes program since September 2025.
