BrightEdge, an enterprise SEO platform, has today announced the acquisition of OnCrawl.
BrightEdge and Oncrawl have been in discussions about the future of the SEO industry and the development of the martech community for a long time.
As BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu told Martech Alliance:
"We saw a huge opportunity with Oncrawl for bringing Data Science to SEO. Oncrawl has spent years perfecting SEO and then evolving these data leanings into a truly data science-oriented platform.
We also saw an opportunity to combine forces to give marketers technology that helps them evolve with the web – leverage data science, enterprise data and automation to scale campaigns with speed and precision."
Jim Yu sees this as a unique acquisition for a number of reasons, with the community focus being key.
OnCrawl has traditionally had a community focus, and this partnership brings OnCrawl together with one of the largest SEO communities through BrightEdge's reach, and the adoption of many industries' first solutions.
The aim is to provide greater reach for this extended SEO community and to accelerate OnCrawl's marketing technology efforts.
Under this partnership, OnCrawl will still run independently, under the BrightEdge umbrella. This is different to the common approach where companies are absorbed, and communities can suffer and sometimes eventually cease to exist.
For BrightEdge customers, access will be offered to Oncrawl technologies at no cost, while OnCrawl will have access to BrightEdge's mass AI and automation technologies which will help their communities advance their SEO efforts.
The combination of more websites, more data, and the evolution of web 3.0 represent significant challenges and opportunities in how the internet will operate in the future.
Whereas marketers used to look at how sites interact with users, the interaction between websites and other entities like Meta, Amazon and Google, and machine-to-machine communication is likely to become more significant with Web 3.0
Jim Yu sees this partnership as a way to address these future challenges:
"BrightEdge and Oncrawl have a common DNA and a shared vision for the future for digital technology and marketing. We are delighted to expand industry horizons by acquiring highly specialized search technologies whose creators have the same commitment to innovation and customer success.
We were extremely interested in Oncrawl’s vision of the role of data and AI in the future of data-driven marketing."
Founded in 2007, BrightEdge is currently used by 64 of the Fortune 100 companies, and has offices worldwide. OnCrawl is a technical SEO platform that was founded in 2013, and is used by more than a thousand clients in 66 countries.