Botify, provider of search engine optimization tools and apps, today announced that it raised $55 million, bringing its total raised to date to $82 million. CEO Adrien Menard says that the funding — a series C, led by InfraVia Growth with participation from Bpifrance, Eurazeo, and Ventech — will enable the company to grow its platform, develop its partner ecosystem, and expand its global footprint as it focuses on product R&D.

With an increasing number of businesses shifting to online as their primary channel, ensuring high placement in web searches has become a priority. There are 80,000 searches done per second, driving 53% of web traffic today. But it’s a moving target. Google alone made 4,500 algorithm updates and changes last year to Google Search.

New York-based Botify provides a platform to discover and fix problems with the aim of making sites more discoverable by search engines. Working with major search engines and internet infrastructure companies to ensure compliance with guidelines, the company develops and maintains AI-enabled analytics and automation tools that leverage more than 1,000 metrics to understand a website’s content, search engines’ behaviors, and users’ intent.

Botify was founded by Menard, Thomas Grange, and Stan Chauvin, who previously worked together at a digital marketing agency. As Menard explained, the trio came to the conclusion that companies were focusing too much time optimizing content and keywords without knowing if Google and other search engines were even crawling their webpages.

“Almost half of the pages of large, enterprise websites are not crawled by Google. When a page is not crawled or seen by Google, it will never rank in search engines, and therefore cannot drive traffic or revenue,” Menard told VentureBeat via email. “This is how Botify was born — some of [our] first customers included eBay, BlaBlaCar, and Expedia in France. [We] entered the U.S. market in 2016. Fast-forward to today, and the U.S. now accounts for more than 60% of [our] revenue.”

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