FireHydrant provides an end-to-end incident management platform for engineering and DevOps teams. The company had strong product-market fit and excellent customer retention, but struggled to generate consistent top-of-funnel pipeline. Traditional SEO was competitive and expensive in the DevOps space, and paid search CPCs had risen sharply. When FireHydrant's growth team began tracking AI search behaviour among their target buyers, they found that AI assistants had become the primary research tool for evaluating incident management solutions. Partnering with Nevisible, FireHydrant deployed an AI Search Demand Engine programme that grew inbound pipeline by 218% in five months — without increasing the marketing budget.
The Challenge
FireHydrant competed in a market dominated by PagerDuty and Opsgenie, both of which had years of brand equity and extensive content libraries. For a growth-stage company with a lean marketing team, competing for Google rankings on high-volume DevOps keywords was prohibitively expensive and slow.
A Nevisible audit found that FireHydrant appeared in only 8% of incident management AI search queries, compared to 78% for PagerDuty. More critically, FireHydrant was absent from the specific high-intent queries that indicated active buying intent: 'incident management platform for Kubernetes,' 'best on-call management for engineering teams,' and 'PagerDuty alternative for startups.'
The Nevisible Approach
Nevisible designed a 'category wedge' strategy for FireHydrant, focusing on the specific buyer contexts where the company had a genuine competitive advantage: modern cloud-native engineering teams, Kubernetes environments, and companies transitioning from legacy on-call tools.
The content programme produced 16 assets targeting these specific contexts, including a 'Modern Incident Management Playbook,' a 'Kubernetes Incident Response Guide,' and a 'PagerDuty Migration Toolkit.' Each asset was engineered to be highly retrievable by AI models responding to buyer queries in these specific contexts.
The Results
Five months after programme launch, FireHydrant's AI search presence had grown dramatically. The company appeared in 61% of tracked incident management queries (up from 8%), and was the top recommendation for cloud-native and Kubernetes-specific queries in 38 of 63 tracked searches.
The pipeline impact was substantial. Inbound demo requests grew 218% compared to the same period in the prior year, with a new 'AI Search' lead source accounting for 44% of all inbound pipeline. These leads had a 67% higher close rate than leads from traditional channels.
By the Numbers
218%
Growth in AI-driven inbound pipeline
61%
AI query coverage (up from 8%)
28%
Faster time-to-close for AI-sourced leads
"We were invisible in AI search while our competitors had years of brand equity. Nevisible helped us leapfrog the incumbents in the specific buyer contexts where we win. Our pipeline has never been healthier."
FHead of Demand Generation, FireHydrant
FireHydrant
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