• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 19, 2019

BrightEdge has acquired technology from Trilibis that improves website performance, released a platform developed by its own engineers that automates many functions for search engine optimization, and formed a M&A team led by venture capitalist Tom Ziola from Kleiner Perkins to evaluate potential new acquisitions already in the pipeline.

Jim Yu, CEO at BrightEdge, declined to share the details of the acquisition, but said Trilibis raised between $12 million and $20 million to build the technology in the past 12 years. Marketers likely can expect additional purchases in the near future as BrightEdge continues to build out its own technology.

Released this week, Autopilot, which BrightEdge engineers developed, automates many SEO functions for desktop and mobile. The technology eliminates repetitive functions and complex tasks such as linking pages, and optimizing mobile performance and the structure of the site, explains Yu. 

“It didn’t happen overnight,” he said. “We had to climb a mountain.”

Testing required processing more than 345 petabytes of data to build out the automation for Autopilot -- about 57 times the number of photos on Instagram -- as well as crawling 500 billion pages, Yu said.

A new study from BrightEdge supports the changes. Organic and paid search are responsible for 68% of all trackable traffic to websites this year. Organic search traffic grew from 51% in 2014 to 53% today. Paid traffic contributed the remainder.

BrightEdge pulled the data in May 2019 from thousands of domains and tens of billions of sessions. The company excluded direct traffic from the study.

For B2B sites, the numbers were larger compared with B2C traffic, with more than 76% of traffic trackable from organic and paid search. About 64.1% comes from organic visits and 12.3% comes from paid search.