10 SEO, AEO and subdomains · 26 pages · 35k words
Search
How the players win attention in Google and in AI answers. The section draws on a crawl of 33 competitor domains: full sitemap inventories, robots.txt rules for AI crawlers, llms.txt and markdown pricing files, and every subdomain in certificate logs. On top sit tactic-by-tactic analysis, thirteen player teardowns and a playbook for an entrant.
The raw crawl is on the scoreboard. Start with the read.
The read
What works, what is saturated, and the keyword map.
Search: the read
Cold-email vendors win attention through brand, community and other people's comparison pages, not through page count. 21 of 33 ship llms.txt that almost nothing reads, the people-directory era has ended in 410s, and the open ground is EU law in local languages, agency operations and reply handling.
The keyword landscape
Cold email is a small search market with one head term (~14.8K/mo) and brand terms bigger than the category. Vendor blogs own the English clusters. The EU and legal clusters are owned by lawyers and Overloop, and Dutch, French and Spanish buyers mostly search in English.
Tactics
Programmatic pages, free tools, comparisons, templates, subdomains, affiliates, content engines.
Programmatic SEO
Seven competitors run templated page families at scale, from ReachInbox's ~19.7M declared /people/ URLs to Saleshandy's 574 agency pages. Size does not predict results: Clay's rich company dossiers rank first for their queries, while the thinnest families carry stale branding, copy-pasted ratings and personal data.
Free tools as SEO and lead magnets
Fifteen competitors publish free checkers, generators and calculators, Salesforge with 29 and Saleshandy and Smartlead with about 20 each. Instantly and EmailBison publish none. The tools are near-identical DNS lookups wrapped in 1,700–4,700 words of SEO copy; nobody ships an EU-compliance or reply-handling tool.
Comparison and alternatives pages
Salesforge publishes 592 English vs/alternative/review pages, more than the next two vendors combined, and most of its vs pages compare two rivals rather than itself. Instantly names Smartlead in 10 URLs; Smartlead names Instantly once. Honesty varies from Amplemarket's conceded TCO maths to PlusVibe's feature table with no prices.
Glossaries, template and prompt libraries
Ten competitors run libraries of 100–750 pages each: lemlist's 239 email and 149 prompt templates, Instantly's 329 prompts, Hunter's 574 templates, PlusVibe's 641 glossary terms. Most are templated thin pages with visible defects. The 2026 shift is from email templates to prompt, Claude-skill and n8n/Make libraries.
Subdomain strategy
Certificate logs show how competitors are built. EmailBison's 698 names are mostly one EmailEngine instance per customer; ReachInbox and Zapmail run sharded EmailEngine fleets; Smartlead spans AWS regions. For SEO, the help centre is the big asset: Instantly and lemlist index 263 and 373 Intercom articles, while Smartlead's sits on Notion with 23 URLs.
Affiliate and review-site SEO
Across 63 results for seven head queries, other vendors wrote 27 and independent affiliates or media nine. Instantly wrote none and Smartlead two. Brand queries for Instantly fill up with wrong-product directories and parasite spam, and G2 shows Instantly with 4,157 reviews to Smartlead's 451. In our search tool Reddit never appeared.
Content engines
Instantly has the biggest blog (1,402 posts, about half dated 2026) but gets ~78% of visits direct; Salesforge publishes the most across six domains with the highest AI-phrase density. Sitemap lastmod dates are bulk re-stamps, not publishing. Video, office hours and courses (Smartlead 96 sessions, Clay 101 livestreams) do more than blog volume.
Answer engines
llms.txt, agent-readable pricing, AI crawler policy — and who AI answers actually cite.
llms.txt, pricing.md and AI crawlers
21 of 33 competitors ship llms.txt and 7 ship a markdown pricing page for AI agents, but crawl logs show almost nothing reads them. The files that matter are robots rules that let answer bots in and pricing written so an agent can quote it correctly.
Who AI answer engines recommend
AI answers about cold email software are built from listicles, and in this category most listicles are written by vendors ranking themselves. Instantly, lemlist and Smartlead appear on almost every list. EmailBison and PlusVibe are nearly absent, and nobody owns the GDPR, Europe or reply-desk prompts.
Player teardowns
Each competitor's footprint, what ranks, AEO posture, subdomains and weak spots.
Instantly: SEO teardown
Instantly runs a 1,400-post Ghost blog, a 329-page prompt library and the deepest llms.txt in the segment, but most of its traffic is direct and it loses its own brand-versus-brand searches to rivals.
Smartlead: SEO teardown
Smartlead's site is built on its partner ecosystem: 135 case studies, 104 certified-partner pages, 96 office-hours recordings and a benchmark section drawn from 850M emails, with the most explicit AEO instructions in the segment.
EmailBison: SEO teardown
EmailBison has a 67-URL marketing site and no llms.txt, but 698 certificate-log names that expose its real architecture: one EmailEngine gateway per tenant, white-labelled onto agencies' own domains.
PlusVibe: SEO teardown
PlusVibe (ex-pipl.ai) runs the purest programmatic play among the volume tools: about 3,000 unique template pages for company headcounts, a 750-tool directory and a 640-term glossary, many of them thin, mis-templated and still branded pipl.ai.
Salesforge and the Forge: SEO teardown
The Forge runs six product domains totalling ~13,000 sitemap URLs, uses them to review almost every competitor and agency in the market, translates its programmatic pages into three languages, and pushes AEO further than anyone with prefilled 'Ask AI' prompts.
ReachInbox: SEO teardown
ReachInbox's robots.txt points to 1,584 sitemap files of /people/ profile pages, roughly 20M URLs by our arithmetic, hosted on a public storage bucket, while the pages themselves sit behind a bot challenge and the site earns little search traffic.
lemlist: search teardown
lemlist's growth runs on its founder and its brand more than on Google: 4,868 sitemap URLs, but three-quarters are English pages under French, German and Spanish URLs, and Semrush puts organic traffic at only ~76K a month.
Apollo: search teardown
Apollo's famous people-and-company directory is gone: every /people/, /companies/ and /directory/ URL now returns 410 Gone. What remains is a 1,700-page 'insights' glossary, role and industry lead pages, and an open-door AI-crawler policy.
Saleshandy: search teardown
Saleshandy runs the most deliberate SEO machine among the budget sequencers: a 574-URL agency directory, 132 industry 'email list' pages, ~25 free tools, a comparison-heavy blog, and the best-documented AI-crawler policy in the group.
Hunter: search teardown
Hunter's search engine is its free tools on head terms ('email finder', 'email verifier') plus 6,228 'websites using X' technology pages. Its domain-search results are deliberately noindexed, and robots.txt says yes to AI search, no to AI training.
Clay: search teardown
Clay has the largest sitemap in the market: 33,939 URLs, mostly 20,677 'dossier' pages ('Who is the CEO of X?', 'How much did X raise?') most of them stamped in a single June 2026 wave. Its real moat is still off-site: a ~20k-person Slack, Clay Clubs, a university and a conference.
Woodpecker: search teardown
Woodpecker runs a classic WordPress content site: a ~1,100-URL blog, 103 glossary entries, 93 templates and 20 'alternative' landings. It has the weakest search numbers in this group (~13.6K organic visits a month, Semrush) despite a 101K-subscriber YouTube channel and a GDPR-first European story.
The long tail: SEO at a glance
Nineteen smaller players in one table: sitemap size, what they build, their AEO files and subdomains, plus the handful of tactics worth noticing, from Klenty's train-no/search-yes robots rules to AgentMail's agent-addressed llms-full.
Playbook
The SEO and AEO plan for an EU-native entrant.
Search playbook for an EU-native agency platform
Own five small, high-intent clusters (EU law per country in local languages, agency operations, reply handling, deliverability diagnostics, migration from Smartlead, Instantly, EmailBison and Woodpecker) with a public ruleset, three free tools, honest comparison pages and a subfolder site with real i18n. Roughly 70 pages in 90 days, measured by cluster.
AEO playbook: being the answer
To be named when someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Claude for a GDPR-compliant or EU cold email tool, publish the reference answer (a sourced country ruleset and machine-readable compliance facts), let retrieval bots in, get named on the GDPR blogs, listicles, G2 and Reddit threads engines cite, and ship an MCP server. llms.txt is hygiene, not strategy.