Six weeks to launch, eight months to a growth engine: how Pencil's sprint became compounding organic growth

One site, three audiences.
The site had to keep moving as fast as the product after the sprint ended, so the build treated the marketing team as the primary user: modular sections, scalable CMS templates, a component library that assembles into landing pages with no dev cycle. The migration shipped with a redirect strategy that protected existing SEO equity. GA4, GTM and conversion routing were configured from day one.

Fourteen months later, Pencil's marketing team still ships landing pages without waiting on a developer. That single operational fact is how a six-week sprint became a growth engine.

Written for humans and the machines that answer them.
By 2026, nearly a thousand sessions a month arrived at trypencil.com from AI assistants. Those visitors met Pencil inside an answer before they met the website. The content hierarchy was built for both readers: descriptive headings, clear definitions, question-led formatting, structured schema throughout. A person scanning the page and an answer engine parsing it reach the same conclusion about what Pencil is and who it serves.

Design that demos the product.
Pencil makes ads, so the site shows ads. The hero runs a video slideshow of real AI-generated creative behind a prompt-style interface that mirrors the product itself. The brand's scribble carries through the whole site as a deliberate design element. A visitor watches what Pencil makes before reading a word about it.

One direction was rejected along the way. A richer animated navigation was designed, then paused when video-heavy cards caused lag in testing. The lighter floating navigation won on UX.

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The moment

The kickoff call was April 3, 2025: Will Hanschell (CEO), Sumukh Avadhani (CTO) and Tobias Cummins (COO) on Pencil's side. Scope was locked within a week. Design started April 14. The site went live June 14, ahead of the June industry event it had to be ready for. Six weeks, kickoff to live.

The launch set the baseline. Everything below happened after it.
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What happened

Organic search sessions grew 155% from July 2025 to February 2026. The mechanism is the CMS restructure, the redirect strategy that preserved existing equity, and the content hierarchy that gave every buyer segment its own indexed surface. Noco's evidence ledger shows 11,450 organic sessions in August 2025, the first full month after launch. The March 2026 peak was 39,151. The published figure is conservative against the underlying data.

LLM-referred traffic grew 522% since launch, from 157 to 981 sessions per month. The mechanism is the answer-engine content structure. We treat this figure as directional; the reasons are in the next section.

The marketing team ships landing pages with no dev queue. No percentage attached. It is the mechanism behind the organic number: new pages go live on the marketing team's schedule, and the indexed surface keeps growing.

The engagement expanded. The results justified more investment, and the PRO subscription grew into PRO+ effective May 2026. The site kept pace with the product because someone kept working on it.

The honest part

AI-referral measurement is imperfect. Assistants strip or obscure referrer data, some of that traffic lands as dark traffic, and month-to-month numbers swing more than classic organic search. The 522% figure is real in our analytics. It also starts from a base of 157 monthly sessions, which is exactly the condition where percentages flatter. So we treat it as a directional signal and let the organic sessions number carry the growth claim. We would rather publish one hard number and one honest one than two impressive ones.