2 Years of Byword: Looking Back and Forward

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Lessons learned from 2 years of Byword

Published Date

Nov 13, 2024

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Author

Mack Grenfell

Today marks two years since the first public version of Byword launched, and in that time we've come a hell of a long way. In those 2 years Byword has generated over 2.7 million articles, 5 billion words, and a whole load of SEO traffic.

To mark the occasion, I wanted to share a few thoughts looking back over Byword's existence, and to give you an idea of where we're heading next.

But first, let’s head back to the beginning.

Byword, at The Start

Two years ago, November 2022, I was jet-lagged in a condo in Utah. Having just flown in from the UK, I hadn't managed to adjust to the timezone yet. I woke up at 4am and, with zero chance of getting back to sleep, opened my laptop to check on the newly-launched Byword.

Something seemed off - the servers were going crazy, pumping out articles. My first thought was that someone had found an exploit and managed to get Byword to generate articles without limit. I remember spending 30 minutes, still dark outside, frantically searching through the app's backend, trying to stop the generations and figure out how someone had managed to hack their way in.

Eventually I checked my email and there it was - the first ever Byword payment notification. Nobody had found an exploit; someone had just found enough value in this new, barely-known SEO tool to generate hundreds of articles.

This turned out to be a pretty pivotal moment for Byword - the first real sign that this was something worth dedicating myself to fully. But looking back, it also says something interesting about how the SEO landscape has changed.

How SEO Has Changed

Back then, AI SEO was still new territory. Byword was incredibly basic - you could specify a keyword and (maybe, I honestly can't remember) choose an output language. That was about it.

Today's version looks very different. You can create custom multi-shot writing styles, add contextual internal linking to your site's other articles, and all sorts of other fancy features I hadn't even thought about back then.

This evolution isn't unique to us - every AI SEO tool out there has had to develop more sophisticated features over time. You could view this as just the natural progression of a technical product. As companies in the space get more time and resources, they'll naturally build out their feature sets to compete with each other.

But there's another way to look at it: SEO is fundamentally competitive. Articles don't get traffic just because they're good - they get traffic because they're better than other articles out there. AI SEO tools have to keep evolving if they're going to help produce content that stands out, and Byword is no exception.

The Evolution of Byword

This idea of competition has been driving a lot of our recent feature development.

Take Custom Articles, for example. We built this to help users create content that's more sophisticated than what you get from simple one-click SEO generators. By letting users build articles however they want and integrate their own data sources, we're trying to help them create content that actually stands out on SERPs, especially now that AI-generated content is becoming so common.

But that's just the start of where we're heading.

We're actually in the middle of completely overhauling Byword. We're changing everything from how the app looks and feels to how you go through the process of generating content.

One of the biggest changes is proper domain management. Right now, you use a single account to generate whatever content you want, then have to figure out how it fits with the domains you own and work on. Soon, you'll be able to set up multiple domains, each with its own workspace, settings, and integrations.

This isn't just for people managing multiple sites though. Even if you just have one domain, understanding it properly lets us do so much more. Here's what I mean:

We can detect what integrations you need based on your site setup and help get them configured.

We can scan your domain to understand its content and suggest programmatic SEO campaign ideas before you're stuck for inspiration.

We can flag keywords you don't have content for but could probably rank on with the right article.

We can build custom article templates in the background, generate datasets, and surface them in your account.

We can look at your existing articles to understand how you write and feed that straight into the generation process.

This is where we're taking Byword. Instead of just being an article generator, we want it to be a complete SEO tool that actually understands and learns from your site.

The goal isn't just to make it quick to get started - we want to take work off your plate by handling the parts of SEO that can (and should) be automated. While we're not at the point where Byword (or any other SEO tool) can truly replace a full-time human, we want to push as close to that ideal as we can. This is a big step in that direction.

Looking back at that early morning in Utah, watching those first articles roll out, it's pretty wild to see how far things have come. Not just for us, but for AI-powered SEO in general. The shift from basic keyword generation to actually understanding and working with your site's content ecosystem is a big one.

We'll be rolling out most of these new features toward the end of this year, with plans for a full relaunch at the start of 2025. Can't wait to see what you all do with it.