Cheswick & Vale
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“AI is a tool on my belt that keeps the site relevant to the people who need it”
— Erik Halloran, Roundstone CTO
There is nothing quite like the dread a company feels when a search-ranking update quietly erases a decade of traffic. Roundstone, a trusted guide to neighbourhood data, learned that the hard way. Providing plain-language comparisons of the places people live, work, and visit — cost of living, commute times, school catchments — Roundstone watched a steady decline threaten its place in the market.
Challenges and setbacks
Roundstone was excellent at turning dense municipal data into something a person could actually read. But the ranking change blunted its reach, its engagement, and by extension its reputation. The situation needed intervention, not patience. And the goal was never simply to recover lost ground — it was to come back in better shape than before.
Tackling the traffic drop with the Alder API
When the going gets difficult, the difficult get inventive. Roundstone leaned on the Alder API to give its library a much-needed refresh. The API let the team automate the parts of content production that never needed a human — wiring generation directly into their own publishing platform. That produced more than 82,000 uniquely described location intros across 14,000 pages, executed at speed, without compromising the authority of the underlying data.
The payoff: a 780% increase in traffic
The calculated risk paid off handsomely. Roundstone recorded a 780% surge in organic sessions, passing every previous record and re-establishing itself in a fiercely competitive category. That result did not only serve the marketing team; it freed writers to channel their effort into original reporting and long-form guides, which drove the sort of return visits that ranking updates rarely touch.
Leading the race
The story does not end with recovery. Roundstone is now a genuine contender for search queries it had written off, and its share of first-page results keeps climbing. Better still, the site draws a larger share of visitors who stay — a leading indicator that the content is landing with the audience it was written for.
This is a testament to a stubborn kind of strategic thinking — a team unwilling to accept the decline as permanent, amplified by tooling that made the recovery tractable. With that technology and a clear plan, Roundstone continues to widen its lead in an ever-shifting market.
The Roundstone journey is proof that however steep the decline, with the right tools and the willingness to adapt, a comeback is not just possible. It is close to inevitable.
