How collecting brand data since 2015 cost me a business partner
In 2015, paying to collect what Google said about a brand looked like a waste of money. A business partner said so. I kept paying.
In 2015, SEO was keywords. Rank for the query. Count the clicks. A Brand SERP was a vanity screenshot.
I had already learned the expensive version of that mistake. Google still sold me as the cartoon dog after I had left that business. Prospects looked me up and walked. The search result for a name is the business card. If the card is wrong, the meeting never starts.
So I started collecting what search actually said about brands. Every week. Not a score. The page. Then the Knowledge Graph. Then the answers the machines give.
It cost money. Authoritas had the SERPs API that could pull the detail. Most people in SEO in 2015 would have called that a waste of resources. Hugo Scott, my co-founder, did. He wanted the company to sell work, not buy data about brands that were not even clients yet.
I made the bet anyway. In 2015 I collected Brand SERPs by hand and read them. In 2016 clients asked what their competitors looked like, so I collected those too. In 2017 the manual work broke, so I automated it, standardised the read, and widened the set.
Hugo left in 2017, he took the keyword tool, I kept the brand data, and we’re still close friends today. I kept the collection running.
Nobody who started a tracker after 2020 has weekly brand data from 2015. That history is now 25 billion data points on 73 million entities. It is why Kalicube Pro™ can show what Google and AI believe about a brand, and what moved. Ahrefs, Yoast, Semrush and Microsoft have all asked Kalicube to help with their own brand. Authoritas published how Kalicube Pro uses the same API we started with in 2015.
The partner was not stupid. In 2015 the bet looked stupid. The dataset is the proof it was not.
Jason explains. Kalicube applies. Kalicube Pro powers. I am still the architect. The team still collects every week.