1. Building Organic Traffic From Zero in a Competitive Niche
Duckfund is a US-based fintech platform offering soft deposit financing for commercial real estate investors. After pivoting to CRE in late 2023, they needed to build organic visibility fast — and sustain it as AI search reshaped how their buyers find financing options. This is the story of how they dominated both.
Client brief
In late 2023, Duckfund pivoted its entire business to focus on one product: CRE soft deposit financing. With no existing content authority in the segment, we needed to build relevant organic traffic from scratch — quickly.
Strategy
We identified “low-handing fruit” keywords (good traffic but low competition) relevant to CRE investors and property flippers — topics that were easy to rank for quickly, and that built the topic authority needed to compete for harder terms like “soft deposit financing,” “earnest money deposits,” and “gator lending.”
Every article was supported by backlink building and guest posting to accelerate rankings for the most competitive keywords.
Results
Within six months, organic traffic grew 300% — from roughly 800 visits per month in late 2023 to over 3,000 by May 2024.
As of June 2024, Duckfund ranked Top 3 for 18 blog posts linked to targeted keywords, including #1 rankings for valuable ideas such as ‘how much is commercial land worth’ and ‘how to flip commercial property.’
A key part of the acceleration was a state-level localization campaign — targeting keywords like “how much earnest money is required in Illinois.” Lower competition, faster rankings, and a growing body of topical authority would later make the harder keywords achievable.
The Duckfund article ranking #1 for “how much is commercial land worth” — one of the more competitive terms in this space — is a good example of how journalistic-quality research with original data and graphics can win rankings that pure volume-play content can’t. Read it here.
It provides a good example of how journalistic-quality research and graphs/charts can help rank #1 for competitive terms.
As of June 2024, Duckfund also ranked #1 for ‘what is gator lending’ (with a featured snippet) and ‘soft deposit financing.’ (See screenshots below and in the following section for ‘soft deposit financing’)
2. Turning Organic Traffic Into Bottom-of-Funnel Conversions
Client brief
Organic search had become Duckfund’s top traffic source. The next priority was ensuring that traffic was converting — targeting the specific searches CRE investors make when they’re actively looking for a financing solution.
Strategy
We identified bottom-of-funnel keywords tied directly to Duckfund’s product — searches made by investors evaluating their financing options — and built product-specific SEO content around them.
This included topics such as earnest money, soft deposits, and CRE financing with no money down. All of those were written utilizing interviews of industry experts, as well as insights from Duckfund’s CEO.
Results
Duckfund ranked #1 in the US for two core transactional keywords: “soft deposit financing” and “sign now pay later.”
We also ranked #2 for “how to buy commercial property with no money down” — a keyword that maps directly to Duckfund’s core product promise. Investors searching this term are exactly the buyers Duckfund is built for.
That article became the top-converting page on Duckfund’s site — generating 14 new B2B customers (measured as successful sign-ups) in the first two quarters. In a segment where individual deals range from $50,000 to $1 million per property, that’s a meaningful number.
Across the full site, organic traffic drove 70+ B2B customers in the same period — meaning this single article accounted for 20% of total sales. Read it here.
3. From Google to ChatGPT — Becoming the Top CRE Financing Source on AI Search
The Duckfund campaign was built on SEO fundamentals: the right keywords, the right content format, and the right backlink strategy.
The same content depth and topic authority that drove these Google rankings also positioned Duckfund well on AI search.
Client brief
By 2025, Duckfund wanted to extend their organic advantage into AI search — specifically ensuring their brand surfaced when CRE investors asked ChatGPT for financing recommendations.
Strategy
We studied the content types ChatGPT and other LLMs were drawing on to generate answers in the CRE financing space. The pattern was clear: listicles, comparison content, and community-sourced discussion — particularly on Reddit — were driving AI citations.
We responded on three fronts: publishing listicle-format content on Duckfund’s own site, securing a placement on a high-authority third-party site, and building a deliberate Reddit presence in CRE investor communities.
Two of those pieces became the most-cited content on ChatGPT for CRE financing — one owned article on Duckfund’s site, one earned placement on a third-party domain. Together, they gave us direct influence over how ChatGPT answered questions in the space.
The time from publication to AI citation: less than a month.
Results
By September 2025, Duckfund’s GEO strategy was generating measurable high-value leads directly through ChatGPT — including a $500,000 CRE financing deal sourced entirely from an AI-generated recommendation.
At the time of writing, Duckfund is by far the #1 cited domain for CRE soft deposit financing on ChatGPT in the US.
Results Update: 2026
GEO results continue to compound. Over the 90-day period from November 2025 to January 2026, Duckfund’s average ChatGPT visibility grew from 22% to 38% — meaning their brand now appears in more than a third of all ChatGPT conversations related to CRE financing in their target market.
More significantly, their average position improved from #2.7 to #1.6 — placing Duckfund as consistently the first or second brand mentioned when ChatGPT recommends a CRE financing provider. No competitor comes close: the next closest brand holds 14% visibility and an average position of #4.
The chart reflects 90 days of tracked data across ChatGPT prompts relevant to Duckfund’s market. The blue line is Duckfund. The gap speaks for itself.
That dominance extends beyond ChatGPT. March 2026 data now shows Duckfund holding the top retrieved URLs on Gemini as well — with their listicle “5 Best Earnest Money Deposit Providers for CRE Financing in the US” generating 243 retrievals on Gemini and 88 on ChatGPT, ranking first on both platforms simultaneously.
The result is a brand that appears first, or near first, when a CRE investor asks any major AI tool who to call for financing. That is the compounding advantage GEO was designed to build — and Duckfund now owns it across the two most widely used AI search platforms in the US market.
