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Rippling is worth $16 billion. Its revenue has grown 78% in a single year, and still climbing. It started with cold calls from a founder’s basement. Today, it pulls in over 1.5 million website visitors every month.
That kind of growth doesn’t happen by accident. Tim Cameron-Kitchen, Founder of Exposure Ninja, broke down the exact Rippling marketing strategy behind those numbers. There are three core pillars to it, and every one of them is replicable regardless of what you sell.
Pillar 1: Audience-First Storytelling
Go back to Rippling’s website in 2021, and it looks like almost every other SaaS platform. Generic headings. A single page stuffed with features. Keyword targeting so broad it could apply to anyone.
Fast forward to today, and it’s a completely different picture.
Rippling now builds dedicated pages and content for each of its key audience segments: HR leaders, finance teams, IT departments, and global workforce managers. Each segment gets its own language, its own pain points, its own messaging.
As Tim Cameron-Kitchen explains: “Because Rippling has segmented the pages, they can resonate with this audience much more closely using the terminology that they themselves use. HCM software might not make any sense to you as an outsider, but to an HR leader who’s a Rippling target customer, this is now what they’re looking for.”
This matters commercially. Broader pages might rank for higher-volume keywords, but specific pages convert better because they speak directly to the person reading them.
The lesson here isn’t just about page design. It’s about recognising that your website has multiple audiences, and trying to serve all of them with one generic message means you’re likely converting none of them particularly well.
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Pillar 2: A Content Strategy Built Around Customer Segments
Between 2022 and 2025, Rippling’s blog grew from around 5,000 monthly visits to nearly 200,000 visits per month. That’s not luck. It’s the result of a deliberate, audience-led content strategy.
Every topic cluster on Rippling’s blog maps back to one of its core customer segments: HR and employee management, payroll and salary, finance and accounting, and business operations. The content within each cluster targets the exact questions those audiences are searching for, such as performance review examples, employee benefits guidance, how to handle grievances, and termination processes.
It’s not glamorous content. But it’s exactly what HR leaders search for, which means Rippling is building relevance and trust with its target buyers long before those buyers are ready to request a demo.
Rippling also went a step further with localised content, producing articles on employment and labour law for every US state. Individually, a page about Georgia labour law might only bring in a few hundred visits a month. Multiply that across every state and you have a substantial, high-intent traffic engine reaching people who are very likely to need Rippling’s product.
The local angle may not apply to every business. But the principle does. As Tim Cameron-Kitchen puts it, the goal is “segmenting and targeting very specific topics that your audience could be interested in, which will make you seem incredibly relevant for what they need.”
More recently, Rippling launched Rippling+, a content hub functioning like a Netflix for HR, IT, finance, and startup topics: videos, reports, tools, and newsletters, all segmented by audience. It’s a resource-heavy commitment, and Tim Cameron-Kitchen is candid about the risk: “It’s not unusual to see businesses that try this for a year or two and then drop it because they just can’t commit to the amount of work required.”
The early results are strong regardless. Keyword visibility for the Rippling Plus section went from 12 total rankings at launch to over 1,400 in a matter of months.
Pillar 3: Digital PR That Builds Authority and AI Search Visibility
The third pillar is the one that is becoming increasingly critical heading into 2026: digital PR.
Rippling uses its own research to generate earned media. It publishes original reports, like The State of the Back Office Leader, packed with data on what HR and finance decision-makers are thinking about. That data then gets pitched to the specialist publications Rippling’s target audience actually reads.
The coverage that results does three things at once: it builds brand credibility with decision-makers, it earns high-quality backlinks that support SEO, and it gets Rippling mentioned on the kinds of websites that AI tools like ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews pull from when forming their answers.
That last point is where the real opportunity lies right now.
Rippling currently holds an AI Search visibility score of 72 out of 100 on Semrush. It performs well in Google AI Overviews, which tend to favour a brand’s own content. But ChatGPT typically cites third-party sources, which means Rippling’s digital PR activity needs to keep delivering coverage on the publications those tools are trained to trust.
Tim Cameron-Kitchen notes: “AI search is such a new area and so few businesses are really prioritising it, which actually can mean that the field of play is blown wide open.”
We’ve seen this play out directly with our own clients. Digital PR work for Zugu Case, a premium iPad accessories brand, secured coverage on Wired, MacRumors, and ZDNet. Now, when someone asks Google what the best iPad Air case is, Zugu Case appears in the AI Overview.
For Value Capital Funding, combining Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) with AI Search Optimisation delivered a 640% increase in conversions, with prospects increasingly reporting they found the business through ChatGPT and Grok. One prospect even asked AI for the best company in its sector and saw Value Capital Funding recommended by name.
What Rippling’s Playbook Means for Your Business
Three pillars. One clear thread connecting all of them.
Know your audience segments. Build everything around them. Your website, your content, your PR, your positioning. When you do that consistently, visibility follows. And when visibility is in the right places, qualified leads and revenue follow too.
One of the biggest risks right now is watching larger competitors get disrupted by businesses that embrace AI search faster. As Tim Cameron-Kitchen puts it, “this is a real changing of the guard moment and it’s up to you to decide whether you’re going to be on the right side of that trend.”
If you want to understand exactly where your business stands in search and AI Search, and what it would take to close the gap on your competitors, book a consultation with the Exposure Ninja team today.
