The context
Softonic is one of the largest software download platforms in the world: a portfolio of six sites with over 1 billion users a year. At that scale, a template change reaches hundreds of thousands of URLs in hours and every point of traffic is millions of visits. As SEO Manager, my job was to grow that traffic in a market where Google changes the rules every few months.
The problem
The catalog covered about 100,000 applications, a fraction of the software people search for every day. There was a huge opportunity to capture unmet demand, but writing useful content at that scale by hand was unworkable on cost, speed and quality.
The system
I designed and led a large-scale content generation program, the company’s highest-impact initiative in that period:
- Demand detection: semantic and programmatic keyword research to map what software people searched for and couldn’t find in the catalog.
- Our own models, before ChatGPT: the program started when commercial LLMs didn’t exist yet. We trained our own generation models, with their quality pipelines, when almost nobody was producing AI content at this scale.
- Production with quality control: generation and review pipelines that kept the editorial standard without people becoming the bottleneck.
- SEO architecture: templates, internal links and structured data so every new page added authority to the whole.
- Agile methodology: sprints, per-batch metrics and decisions made from performance data.
The result
In two years the program went from 0 to 20 million monthly organic sessions, and the catalog grew from 100,000 to over 1 million pages. In 2024, the portfolio’s organic traffic grew 40% year over year. And the program kept running after I left.