449 → 2,197 monthly sign-ups. While traffic was falling 40% a year.
THE CHALLENGE
Codecademy’s technical articles had been a reliable organic content engine. Until AI started answering those questions directly. Traffic was down 40% year-on-year, and the decline was not going to reverse anytime soon. But traffic was not the only problem. The data showed that of the visitors still arriving, only 0.45% were signing up. Two separate problems, each needing a different strategy to fix.
THE APPROACH
You can’t reverse an AI-driven traffic decline overnight. But a low sign-up rate can be fixed immediately.
I split the work into two workstreams running in parallel:
1. Fix the conversion rate on existing traffic immediately
2. Rebuild the content engine that compounds over time.
WHAT I DID
Short Term: fix the conversion rate
The conversion problem was more of a visibility gap. Readers were landing on these tutorials, getting what they came for, and leaving. Codecademy had many useful courses, but a reader landing on these pages had no reason to discover them.
- •I worked with the engineering team to build contextually relevant course banners connecting readers to courses that matched their intent.
- •I also added FAQs structured to target PAA and AI Overviews (early AEO work before it became standard practice), a table of contents for easier navigation, and implemented schema markup across articles.
Signup rate went from 0.45% to 2.01%. Monthly signups went from 449 to 2,197.
Long term: rebuilding the content engine
I shifted the content strategy question from what can we rank for to what should we rank for.
On auditing the existing content, I saw that Codecademy had real authority on many topics. But competitors were still outranking us on these topics and pulling significantly more traffic.
- •We doubled down on topics where we had authority, because they were winnable.
- •We also expanded into adjacent clusters where Codecademy was launching new courses but had no search presence.
- •When new AI tools launched in the coding space, we moved fast to capture short-term search demand.
- •I also hired, trained, and managed a team of freelancers to scale content production by building AI-assisted workflows. How I built it →
In just 13 months, organic traffic went from -40% year-on-year to +10%.
THE RESULTS
0.45% → 2.01%
Signup Rate
449 → 2,197
Monthly Signups
12,600+
Signups in 12 Months
~10% growth
Organic Traffic YoY
MONTHLY TRAFFIC & SIGNUP RATES
Sign-up rate and total monthly traffic from technical articles, January 2025 —January 2026.
Source: Company Looker dashboard. The real screenshot is added below. I just wanted to 'vibe-code' a graph for fun.
WE SHOWED UP ON AI OVERVIEWS AS WELL
The real Looker screenshot of the data shown above
