Helping a Technical SaaS Turn AI Search Into an Acquisition Machine

Highlights

• Minuttia built Meilisearch’s SEO strategy around a 259-query Keyword Universe, with 69 queries already developed into content pieces as of July 29, 2026.
• Every query was categorized by search intent and customer lifecycle stage, helping prioritize both audience growth and commercial opportunities.
• 109 commercial queries targeted high-intent topics such as reviews, alternatives, comparisons, pricing, use cases, software lists, and product features.
• Minuttia organized strategically important topics into content hubs around topics like RAG, Search and NLP, and product comparisons.
• 60 pages (87% of all content produced) were published within these core topic hubs.
• Content was adapted for Meilisearch’s highly technical audience through practical elements such as code snippets.
• Three original research and thought-leadership pieces were produced to strengthen Meilisearch’s authority rather than generate immediate organic traffic.
• The SEO foundation also supported Meilisearch’s visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini, and other AI search platforms.
• In Q3 2026, Minuttia began developing a dedicated AI search content pipeline focused on earning citations, mentions, and recommendations rather than Google rankings.
• The pipeline includes AI-focused content ideas generated using Minuttia’s proprietary AI Search Content Generator.

Minuttia’s early work with Meilisearch was defined by two critical factors:

• Meilisearch operates in a mature category with established competition and a highly technical audience.
• Google search visibility and traffic were the initial objectives at the beginning of the engagement since AI search optimization wasn’t in demand at the start of 2025 but became more important as Meilisearch’s technical audience uses these platforms to find software and make decisions.

 

With these factors in mind, Minuttia started developing a roadmap by covering four pillars that would lay the foundation for a strong SEO/AEO strategy.

The result of these efforts is Keyword Universe—a detailed keyword database. The current version of this database (as of July 29, 2026) includes 259 queries, 69 of which have been turned into content pieces.

All queries were also categorized by the following search intent types:

• Informational
• Commercial—Tier A
• Commercial—Tier B
• Job-To-Be-Done
• Linkable Asset

 

Here’s how the queries in the Keyword Universe were distributed across all five search intents.

Source of Data: Meilisearch’s Keyword Universe by Minuttia

Note

Commercial—Tier A refers to queries like 'email marketing software' or 'best content marketing tools.' Commercial—Tier B targets queries like 'slack alternatives,' 'hootsuite vs later,' or 'how to cancel hubspot.' Finally, Job-To-Be-Done (JTBD) refers to the queries with the case-specific scope (e.g., 'rag cost calculator').

Each query was also assigned to a specific lifecycle stage. As you can see from the graph below, the focus initially went to the Unaware and Product-Aware stages for two reasons:

• Unaware: to target the audience who hasn’t heard about Meilisearch before.
• Product-aware: to bring in new sales opportunities, e.g., to convert open-source users into Meilisearch Cloud users.

Source of Data: Meilisearch’s Keyword Universe by Minuttia

This refers to the fact that Meilisearch previously wasn’t represented at each lifecycle stage.

This is the first stage of bringing Meilisearch to where our target personas live. First, it’s showing them Meilisearch for the first time, then helping them research Meilisearch, and then helping them work with Meilisearch.

Going back to search intent, one of the main goals was to establish Meilisearch as one of the core players in the Enterprise AI Search category.

One of the ways to achieve this goal was to build visibility around commercial queries broken down into the following taxonomies:

• reviews
• alternatives
• comparisons (e.g., Meilisearch vs Algolia)
• pricing
• best software category listicles and more

 

In the Keyword Universe, the above taxonomies currently include 109 commercial queries in total.

Source of Data: Meilisearch’s Keyword Universe by Minuttia

Some of the queries from these and other taxonomies were turned into topic clusters united into hubs based on important business areas.

For example:

• RAG (a.k.a. Retrieval-Augmented Generation)
• Search & NLP (a.k.a. Natural Language Processing)
• Comparison

 

As of July 29, 2026, 60 pages (87% of the entire scope of the content pieces produced by Minuttia) were published under each of the above hubs:

It’s important to note that all 69 produced content pieces, including self-promotional articles, were handled with two core factors in mind:

• Meilisearch’s target audience is highly technical, and
• Starting in January 2026, Google tightened its standards for self-promotional listicles, with affected sites losing 29–49% of organic visibility.

 

Thus, for some pieces, where applicable, Minuttia produced content with code snippets, e.g., for faster Meilisearch implementation based on a given use case.

Image Source: Meilisearch

Regarding the self-promotional pieces, Minuttia has created an SOP for this content type, laying out the rules that are currently being actively implemented into Meilisearch’s content strategy.

Example guidelines for Minuttia’s Content Team:

• The bias should be disclosed upfront (in the form of a disclaimer)
• The writer should use first-person plural instead of third-person singular because it creates an illusion of an independent editorial review
• Absolutes (“best,” “top,” etc.) should be excluded

 

In addition to the queries in the Keyword Universe, Minuttia also produced three original content pieces—two Personal Narratives and one Survey.

Original content pieces haven’t been created for traffic. Their task is to build Meilisearch’s authority in its category through an unbiased research piece and its founder’s thought leadership content.

All the above efforts built a strong SEO foundation for Meilisearch, and their execution was delivered in close contact with Meilisearch’s internal team.

Sometimes, I ask for an extra level of explanation, argumentation behind certain decisions, why certain strategies were chosen, why we want to allocate time for doing this instead of that. And I do think we have a good feedback channel going.

A structured approach to SEO also created a solid backbone for the company’s presence across AI search engines.

To further strengthen this presence, Minuttia started developing an AI search content pipeline in Q3 of 2026.

The content ideas for this pipeline aren’t focused on organic search. Their main task is to increase Meilisearch’s likelihood of being cited, mentioned, and recommended in AI search experiences (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini, and so on).

For this purpose, Minuttia has created an AI Search Content Ideas SOP that governs the process of generating AI content ideas and breaks down all potential content pieces into 11 categories.

As of July 29, 2026, Minuttia generated AI search content ideas for 7 of these categories:

These efforts have already started bringing tangible results.

“I know that we do get different-size customers and different personas (SLG customers and smaller customers) who told us they heard about Meilisearch from LLMs. Maya Shin, Head of Marketing at Meilisearch.

Finally, Minuttia set up a reporting mechanism to track the above-described processes with:

• Impact Report (proprietary)
• AI Search Visibility Tool (proprietary)
• A dedicated Notion board to track deliverables
• A dedicated Slack channel for ongoing communication

 

Additionally, Minuttia set up bi-weekly calls with Meilisearch’s team to discuss the progress.