So, here it is.
For the past three months or so, I have been quite busy, and I have not had as much time for some things as I used to. But the reason is simple – together with Štěpán, we have been preparing and are now finally launching completely new software.
It is called UpTier, and I have to admit that I am really proud of it.
When I compare it, for example, with the first versions of Editee, it is clear how far we have come over the past few years. Whether in terms of the application's quality, its codebase, its overall architecture, or, most importantly, everything it can do.
I do not mean this as criticism of Editee. Editee was created in a different era, grew gradually, and still works brilliantly today. However, we were able to build UpTier from the very beginning on the experience we gained while developing Editee. As a result, we designed many things completely differently and, in my opinion, significantly better.
More than ten years of experience in SEO
I have been working with SEO, or search engine optimization, for more than ten years.
I also gained some of my experience in the United States, and I still work with one of the largest players in the American and, indeed, global market. This gave me the opportunity to learn from people at the absolute forefront of the industry.
Put simply, SEO is about helping Google understand your website, consider it trustworthy, and show it to people searching for your services or products.
Of course, this does not mean that you can press a single button and rank first the next day. SEO is a long-term process consisting of technical improvements, high-quality content, keyword research, backlinks, website authority, and many other elements.
However, I have consistently verified through my own projects that a properly configured strategy works. Even though I am not currently dedicating one hundred percent of my attention to Editee's SEO, it continues to rank near the top. Most of the time, I am now merely maintaining what we built in the past.
And that, in my opinion, is the greatest strength of good SEO. The results do not have to disappear the moment you stop paying for advertising.
SEO has changed beyond recognition over the past 25 years
When the original Google was introduced in 1998, its database contained at least 24 million pages. One of its main innovations was the use of the link structure between websites, which later became the basis for the well-known PageRank. (Google Research)
Compared with today, SEO back then was relatively simple. It was often enough to repeat keywords correctly, obtain a few links, and have a website that was at least somewhat usable from a technical perspective.
Today, the situation is completely different.
Search engines evaluate a website's technical condition, content, structure, authority, relevance, usability, and whether the information genuinely helps people. Google itself describes SEO as a way to help search engines understand content and users find a website that meets their needs. (Google for Developers)
And now language models and AI search are entering the process as well.
Users no longer have to simply ask Google and browse through ten blue links. They can ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Claude a specific question and immediately receive a compiled answer, product recommendations, or a list of suitable companies.
For business owners, this means one crucial thing:
It is no longer enough to be visible only in traditional search results. Being visible in artificial intelligence responses will become increasingly important as well.
From SEO to optimization for AI
Terms such as GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization, and AEO, Answer Engine Optimization, are now used in connection with visibility in language models.
The term GEO was described in greater detail in a research paper published at the end of 2023. As part of their experiments, the authors found that suitable content modifications can, in some cases, increase its visibility in generated responses by up to 40 percent. At the same time, however, they point out that results vary by industry and query type. (arXiv)
Personally, I do not particularly want to argue about whether we should call it GEO, AEO, AI SEO, or something else entirely.
The essence remains similar: to create a technically sound and trustworthy website with content that people, search engines, and language models can understand. Google also states that the fundamental principles of SEO remain important for its generative features, such as AI Overviews and AI Mode. (Google for Developers)
That is precisely why we do not separate traditional SEO from AI visibility in UpTier. In my opinion, they are two parts of a single strategy.
The problem was not the strategy, but its execution
There has always been one thing about SEO that bothered me.
To implement my strategy properly, I needed Excel, several different analytics tools, keyword research applications, backlink tools, technical audits, rank tracking, content plans, and many other services.
As a result, I had a huge number of subscriptions and data spread across several locations.
The strategy itself worked. But executing it was unnecessarily complicated and, above all, time-consuming.
At the same time, acquaintances, business owners, friends, and family members have long been asking whether I could help them with their SEO.
Honestly, I would like to help many of them. But I do not have the capacity to do so.
Every website is slightly different. Every company has different customers, competitors, technical issues, and business goals. Creating a high-quality strategy means thoroughly reviewing the website, analyzing data, examining the competition, and then evaluating everything over the long term.
When most of the work is done manually, it takes an enormous amount of time.
And this is where UpTier's central idea gradually emerged:
What if we transferred my experience and processes into an application capable of performing a large part of this work automatically?
We originally wanted to create completely different software
Štěpán and I spent several months discussing our desire to create another software project.
One of the reasons was, of course, diversification, but we also reached a point where a new project began to make sense in terms of our capacity.
Editee is now an established application. It continues to evolve, we release updates, and our programmers take care of it on an ongoing basis. This partially freed up my time and allowed me to start working on something else.
Originally, however, we wanted to create completely different software.
In the end, I realized that the best approach would be to solve a problem I know very well and have personally struggled with for many years.
That is how UpTier was born.
What exactly UpTier does
UpTier is an all-in-one platform for SEO and AI visibility.
Its goal is to help companies, online stores, and website owners attract more visitors and customers from Google, as well as from tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Overviews.
Using it is simple.
You add your website to UpTier, and the application attempts to learn as much as possible about your business. It crawls the website and analyzes its technical condition, content, structure, keywords, backlink profile, and a wide range of other data.
It then begins recommending specific steps you should take.
Not general advice such as “write better content,” but, wherever possible, specific tasks for your website and business.
Just to give you an idea – when conducting a technical SEO analysis, I normally use a checklist containing approximately one hundred different checks. And technical SEO is only one part of the overall strategy.
In addition, you need to include, for example:
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keyword and topic analysis,
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competitor monitoring,
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current ranking checks,
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content strategy,
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internal linking,
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backlinks,
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website authority and trustworthiness,
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measuring visibility on Google,
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tracking mentions and citations in artificial intelligence tools.
UpTier brings this data together in one place and attempts to transform it into clear, understandable recommendations.
My strategy transformed into an application
I gradually transferred practically all the know-how I have gained since around 2012 or 2013 into UpTier.
So this is not just another tool that shows you charts and leaves you to figure out what they actually mean.
I wanted to create an application that would behave more like an experienced SEO specialist. It analyzes the situation, sets priorities, and recommends what makes sense to address first.
A large part of the work will happen automatically.
This includes, for example, preparing content plans and creating SEO-optimized articles. In this area, too, I use my own strategy, which has worked extremely well for me over the long term and which, in my opinion, is still used by very few people.
Of course, I will not reveal all of the know-how in detail. I consider the way we combine the individual components to be one of UpTier's greatest competitive advantages.
However, users will not need to know all the processes hidden in the background. Their main task will be to follow specific recommendations or allow the application to handle certain activities.
A small MVP ultimately became a much larger application
The original plan was to create a small MVP, a basic version of the product that would allow us to validate user interest.
But during development, I gradually kept adding more features.
I would always reach a point where I realized that without a certain component, my strategy would not work the way I needed it to. And once we had automated one area, it made sense to add another as well.
As a result, even in its first version, UpTier is already significantly more extensive than we originally planned.
Over the course of several months, I programmed and designed the entire application according to how I myself would want to use such a tool. Our graphic designers are now completing the visual details, and we are fine-tuning the final parts of the entire interface.
But functionality was the most important thing to me from the very beginning.
I did not want to create merely an attractive dashboard with a few charts. I wanted to create a tool that would genuinely tell people what to do and also help them carry out the work.
We are not abandoning Editee
I would like to emphasize once again that UpTier is not being created at Editee's expense.
Editee continues to operate and evolve, and a separate team works on it. UpTier is another project that Štěpán and I are fully committing to – in terms of time, money, and work.
We both believe that the market for SEO and AI visibility tools is and will continue to be enormous.
Companies will always need traffic, customers, and high-quality content. However, the way people search for them is gradually changing. Alongside Google, language models and various forms of AI search will play an increasingly important role.
Our goal is for UpTier to provide assistance in both worlds.
We are not stopping with Czechia and Slovakia
We will, of course, also offer UpTier to Czech and Slovak users. However, these will not be our only or primary markets.
From the outset, we have been building the application as a global product.
We will enable individual countries and languages gradually, according to a prepared plan. We do not want to launch everything at once and then discover that we cannot maintain the necessary quality of support, data, or results.
We would rather grow gradually, but do it properly.
I honestly believe that within a relatively short period of time, we can build UpTier into an even larger project than Editee is today. Of course, only real-world results will show how quickly we can achieve this. But in my opinion, the potential is definitely there.
And Štěpán and I have agreed that we are truly going all in.
We are opening the waitlist for our first users
As of today, we are opening the waiting list, or waitlist.
Although our website states that we will launch UpTier sometime this year, it should actually happen much sooner. The fully functional application is already complete, and we are now primarily finishing the visual adjustments, onboarding, and a few final details.
As soon as we officially launch UpTier, we will send information by email to everyone on the waitlist.
The first 100 users will also receive special founder pricing. We will not offer UpTier under the same terms again in the future.
I therefore recommend joining the waitlist as soon as possible so that you will be among the first to know about the launch.
We are just getting started
I am genuinely curious to see how the market receives UpTier and how quickly we will be able to develop the application.
I am also looking forward to the first real users beginning to use it. Their feedback will show us which parts are most beneficial and where we should take the product next.
On the blog, I will, of course, continue sharing updates about how the launch is progressing, what is going well, what is not working as expected, and how the entire project is evolving.
I do not want to show only the successes. I think it will be more interesting to show the entire process of building a new global application – from the initial waitlist and first paying customers through to expansion into international markets.
So we will see how far we can take UpTier.
But one thing is already certain: we have given it everything we have, and it is a project we truly believe in.
You can join the waitlist at UpTier.ai.