AthenaHQ

Rootly

How Rootly Became

Top-Recommended Incident Management Platform in AI Search

2.5x

Lift in non-branded mentions

$126k

Incremental equivalent media value captured

10x

Increase in citation rate

Customer Story

Rootly

Adam Frank, Head of Marketing

Rootly is the AI-native on-call and incident management platform that helps engineering teams resolve incidents faster, improve system resilience, and streamline on-call operations. Its always-on AI agent copilots automate root cause analysis and identify patterns that drive continuous improvement.

Strong Leadership

Trusted by thousands of companies like LinkedIn, NVIDIA, Replit, Elastic, Canva, Clay, Tripadvisor, and Grammarly.

Slack & Teams Native

The Shift

Buyer Discovery Shifted

Prospects increasingly use AI tools to shortlist vendors without ever visiting traditional search results. In Rootly's category, being accurately represented inside AI answers mattered as much as ranking on Google.

from search→click to ask→decide

Traditional SEO performance was no longer enough:

Rootly could rank for keywords yet still be absent or misrepresented in AI answers
Competitors appeared in AI-generated shortlists by default
AI discovery lacked visibility, measurement, and control

The Challenge

No Visibility Into
AI Representation

No Control Over Citations
or Comparisons

Dark Funnel Signals Only
(sales anecdotes, post-hoc attribution)

High Risk of Exclusion in Evaluation Prompts

Implementation:
Sources-First, Prompt-Driven GEO Strategy

#1Competitive Baseline

Tracked how AI engines described Rootly vs direct competitors across category, alternatives, and implementation prompts.

#2Revenue-Mapped Prompt Selection

Prioritized unbranded, high-intent prompts like: "Best incident management tools, PagerDuty alternatives, Incident management in Slack"

#3Authority Content + Docs Alignment

Built clear, citeable sources aligned to how models retrieve answers.

#4Weekly GEO Operating Rhythm

Review → Identify Gaps → Ship Fixes → Measure Impact.

#5Monthly Re-baseline and Expansion

Expanded prompt coverage once core evaluation prompts were consistently won.

Implementation Snapshot

Owned by a small marketing team

Action Center converted gaps into prioritized fixes

Weekly review of share of voice, citations, accuracy

No deep SEO expertise required to execute effectively

Measurable Results

Improvements correlated with AI referral traffic and sales mentions

2.5x

Mention rate (increase on non-branded prompts)

3% to 30%

Citation rate growth (~10×)

$126k

in incremental equivalent media value

AI answers described Rootly more consistently and correctly

Increased inclusion in high-intent shortlists

Clear correlation with AI referral traffic and sales mentions

How Success Was Measured

Directional improvement across all three signaled real momentum.
Citation quality predicted recommendation rate.

Share of Voice

Presence in category-level AI conversations

Citations

Whether models grounded answers in Rootly-controlled sources

Recommendation Rate

Inclusion as a top option in evaluation prompts

Value Was Measured Across

Defense

Preventing competitors from being recommended by default

Offense

Winning evaluation-stage prompts tied to pipeline

Efficiency

Faster iteration, less wasted content effort

Organizational Impact

GEO became Rootly’s #1 growth pillar

Content, docs, and positioning aligned around AI retrieval logic

AI visibility entered executive-level reporting

Small team achieved outsized leverage without specialist hires

Key Takeaways: How to Replicate These Results

#1Start Revenue-First, Not Broad

#2Prioritize Unbranded Evaluation Prompts

#3Optimize for Citation, Not Traffic Alone

#4Treat AI Search as an Operating Channel

#5Ship Weekly, Re-Baseline Monthly

AI search is no longer experimental.
It is how buyers evaluate, compare, and decide.

Athena gave Rootly a repeatable system to win that surface.

Quick Rootly Shoutout

Here's the Deal

Rootly is redefining how engineering teams manage incidents with AI-native on-call and incident response workflows built for speed, reliability, and scale. Trusted by modern engineering orgs, Rootly helps teams resolve incidents faster, reduce downtime, and turn every incident into a source of continuous improvement without adding operational overhead.

What’s Inside the Product?

Rootly delivers always-on AI copilots for incident management, including automated triage, root cause analysis, and post-incident insights. Built natively for Slack and Teams, it integrates directly with existing tooling to coordinate response, capture learnings, and standardize best practices, helping teams stay resilient as systems grow more complex.

Why Should You Care?

For teams running mission-critical infrastructure, Rootly reduces mean time to resolution, operational risk, and cognitive load during incidents. It gives engineering leaders visibility into what's breaking, why it's breaking, and how to prevent it next time. Turning incident response from a reactive cost center into a strategic advantage.

Schedules

Alerting

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Finn Lobsien, Content Lead

50% Increase in Demos from AI Search

Lago achieved a 50% increase in demos from AI Search after implementing Athena. With 11x growth in AI Overview impressions and exploding citations, Athena became their command center for GEO.

11x

AI Overview impressions growth (3% → 33%)

2x

Citation rate growth (3.5% → 17%)

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Connor Dault, CMO

6x Share of Voice Lift in 60 Days

Grüns grew Share of Voice from 2.0% to 12.6% in 60 days, with 19% brand mentions and 23x citation rate driven by a prompt-led pillar-and-cluster strategy.

+19%

Brand mention rate growth (4% → 25%)

23x

Citation rate growth (0.3% → 7.0%)

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Bryce Alsten, VP of Marketing

38% MoM Increase in Leads From AI Search

"We moved from 5th to 1st position in AI Search rankings and saw 38.85% monthly growth in leads from AI Search. The 1,561% ROI with 18-day payback exceeded our expectations."

5th to 1st

in AI Search Share of Voice

1,561%

ROI with 18-day payback period

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