Organic Acquisition Due Diligence specialist for acquisition target analysis

a close up of a white wall with wavy lines

"If I buy this company, how likely is its organic acquisition engine to keep working three years from now?" — this is what investors actually want to know. They want to understand how durable is the company's SEO and how defensible is the target companies search traffic.

I help assess the durability, quality, and defensibility of its organic traffic and search rankings. Independent SEO due diligence for investors, acquirers, search funds and founders evaluating businesses dependent on organic search traffic.

Request SEO Due Diligence

I’ll assess the SEO defensibility and provide Acquisition Risk scorecard

Key questions I answer:

How defensible are rankings?

How dependent is revenue on Google?

How difficult is the SEO position to replicate?

What happens if AI Search changes the market?

Is organic traffic actually converting?

Deliverables:

Executive Summary

SEO Due Diligence Report

Acquisition Risk Scorecard

SEO Due Diligence is a distinct objective acquisition-focused analysis

SEO audits tend to find optimization opportunities and ask (for example):

Are there technical errors?
Are meta tags optimized?
Are backlinks healthy?

Business acquirers need answers to different questions:

Is this traffic durable?
Is it commercially valuable?
Is the moat real?
Can competitors replicate it?

So, SEO due diligence is a clear summary of strengths, weaknesses and risks that are relevant to acquirers. It directly answers the question:

“If I purchase this site, what are the risks associated with its SEO?”

What I actually assess

For the targets whose customer acquisition is heavily driven by organic search traffic and SEO positioning, I analyse the overall long-term defensibility of the digital presence in the following dimensions.

Traffic Quality

Questions:

How much traffic is ICP-relevant?

How much is informational noise?

What portion contributes to revenue?

A recent engagement particularly relevant to Traffic Quality assessment involved diagnosing a company that experienced substantial SEO traffic growth while conversions remained flat.

The analysis demonstrated that most of the traffic increase came from non-ICP informational queries (“vanity traffic”), meaning the apparent SEO growth materially overstated the commercial value of the traffic. This type of distinction — rankings vs economically relevant search demand — is often critical in acquisition analysis.

Dependency Risk

branded vs non-branded traffic
concentration of rankings
traffic by page type
traffic by topic cluster

Question:

“If Google removes 20% of rankings tomorrow, what happens?”

Assessment of dependency is gauging an exposure to a risk of sudden drops in rankings across the clusters of pages — does the search traffic concentrate on several types of URLs / clusters or is it versatile?

Many of my clients' sites have the following picture: clicks are concentrated in just a small group of pages. The rest of the site is dormant in search. This evokes the question of their alignment with conversion (revenue). The base case scenario is to have as name different page clusters driving search traffic — aligned with ICP and converting — as possible.

Competitive Defensibility

Can competitors realistically reproduce:

content
links
authority
topical coverage
product data

This is an independent opinion on how vulnerable the business may be to competitors. The main risks may be for the businesses using scaled content creation (using AI), programmatic SEO or a business model that has a high relocation risk.

In this section I analyze the Replication Cost.

Investors constantly think:

“How much money and time would I need to spend to recreate this?”

So, I assess:

Estimated replication difficulty
Estimated replication time
Estimated replication investment

This is important to answer the question: “Is this asset worth acquiring?”

Search Moat

The moat or a defence against [competitors] attack usually rests within the business model or internal organization resources of the organization.

Some businesses rank because they have temporarily executed SEO better than competitors. Others rank because their business model creates assets that competitors cannot easily reproduce.

The objective of Search Moat assessment is to determine whether the company's organic visibility is supported by structural advantages or merely by current rankings.

Examples of weak moats:

Generic affiliate content
Commodity informational articles
Programmatically generated pages with limited differentiation
Easily replicable content libraries

Examples of strong moats:

Proprietary datasets
Unique operational expertise
Strong brands and communities
Network effects
Marketplace dynamics
Exclusive content assets
Deep customer relationships

A key question I seek to answer is:

“If a well-funded competitor entered this market tomorrow, how difficult would it be for them to reproduce the target company's organic acquisition engine?”

AI Search Exposure

Questions:

Can AI summaries replace this content?
Does the site produce maker-specific knowledge?
Is traffic dependent on commodity informational queries?

In my recent article on Commodity content, I make a special emphasis on the fact that generative AI search requirements by Google strongly prioritize non-commodity, unique content that may be called maker-specific, in the sense that it is deeply grounded in site owner’s unique experience and expertise.

In this dimension of analysis I assess the overall risk to search traffic coming from AI Overviews (Summaries) as well as opportunities to be cited in gen AI features and LLMs that come from site’s position and content production pipeline.

Deliverables

Executive Summary

The 2-3 pages summary report focusing on:

strengths
weaknesses
critical risks
recommendation

SEO Due Diligence Report

The structured report on bases on analysis of dimensions 1 to 5 above with a deep dive into:

traffic quality
rankings
backlink profile
competitors
moat assessment
AI disruption exposure

Acquisition Risk Scorecard

A visual decision making tool that quickly highlights where the largest risks and weaknesses reside.

For example:

Factor	Score
Traffic quality	A
Defensibility	B
Concentration risk	C
AI resilience	B
Replication difficulty	A

Typical Findings

Traffic looks strong but converts poorly

Organic traffic is growing, yet the majority of new visitors come from informational queries outside the company's ideal customer profile (ICP). Rankings improve, business performance does not.

Rankings depend on a handful of pages

This is a common SaaS issue when a relatively small number of URLs generate most organic traffic while the remainder of the site contributes little. Any ranking loss on those pages creates disproportionate business impact.

Traffic is largely branded

The business appears SEO-driven, but most traffic comes from users already searching for the brand. This often indicates a weaker acquisition moat than reported. The proportion and severity is case-dependent.

Organic growth is driven by temporary demand

Traffic is concentrated around seasonal, event-driven, or trending topics rather than durable customer demand. This hypothesis is often proven on the sites targeting other brands / events keywords that have a clear near “event day buzz”.

AI search threatens informational content (and the business model)

A significant share of traffic comes from informational content that can increasingly be summarized directly within AI Overviews and LLM-powered search experiences (increasingly common).

Competitors could replicate the position quickly

The business ranks well today, but its content, link profile, and topical coverage are relatively easy to reproduce. The moat is weaker than the rankings may suggest.

The business is overexposed to Google (too SEO-focused)

Organic search represents a disproportionate share of customer acquisition — business overrelies in SEO. While rankings are currently strong, even moderate algorithmic updates could materially impact revenue.

Technical debt masks future risk

Historical SEO success has accumulated despite architectural issues, creating hidden vulnerabilities that may emerge during migrations, redesigns, or algorithm changes.

Relevant Experience

Full background and approach — bohdanlytvyn.com

Bohdan Lytvyn

"WASTELESS GROWTH" BOOK AUTHOR

17 years in SEO and growth strategy. Former Senior SEO Manager at Alibaba's European subsidiary. Worked with B2B marketplaces, SaaS platforms, eCommerce businesses, and digital-first companies across Europe. Based in Paris. Working in English and French.

I don't run an agency that assigns you to a junior team. I'm the person who does the diagnostic, designs the strategy, and delivers the work.

Marketplace SEO at Alibaba / Visable

Large-scale search systems, millions of indexed entities.

A relevant case involved enterprise-scale marketplace SEO systems for Visable (Alibaba Group), where the work focused on large-scale keyword expansion, landing-page generation, internal linking systems, and evaluation of long-term SEO scalability and defensibility.