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The challenge
Bilt's team could build and ship fast, but growing in search wasn't second nature to them
In August 2025, Uku Joost Annus, Kevin Akkermann and Karl Kiilaspää turned a hackathon project into Bilt, an AI agent that builds native iOS and Android apps from a plain description.
For two months they worked 9am to 9pm, six days a week, and in October they released the first version and joined the first programme at ruum, Estonia's first hacker space, alongside 10 other teams.
In December they launched Bilt on Product Hunt, and the next day they were named the programme's winner at its final demo, which earned them a week in San Francisco.
After that, they started running their own hackathons, where everyone leaves with a working app, and the first one sold out in four days.
To grow Bilt further, they wanted to win in search too, but they couldn't tell whether the hours going into their blog were paying off...
In the first three months of 2026, Bilt's 13 blog articles brought in only nine clicks from Google
Why? Because Bilt hadn't yet figured out a scalable SEO system that worked
“I do the search manually for references, keywords, etc. Then I take that whole mix together and feed it to the language model. I understand that Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude each rate content differently and put different weight on different parts of it. So I get very different results, and depending on that I tweak the prompt for which model it should be aimed at. And then I start iterating in GPT. Typically three, four, five iterations, and then I take it out, put it in Google Docs and actually start reading it through myself, rewriting, fact-checking, adding things. So the end product is usually 50-50. Half written entirely by me, and half is written by AI.”
Uku Joost AnnusCo-founder and CEO of Bilt So Uku went looking for an AI search monitoring tool, as those were hot at the time
“I'm looking for a platform that can precisely attribute the traffic source from the language models, and the reasons, where it comes from, which keywords. I'd really like to be able to measure the ROI clearly, return on investment, in that sense. That's been my worry. It doesn't show me any clear development or progress. You don't know whether those hours each month go to waste or whether they bring results.”
Uku Joost AnnusCo-founder and CEO of Bilt 
