Alexei Rozenplenter
Founder and CEO of RootRank, an SEO and AI search agency that works only with technical products. Before RootRank he spent years in-house on the marketing side of software companies, and since 2019 has not taken a project outside SaaS, developer tools, infrastructure and fintech. He runs the strategy on client engagements himself, including the expected payback month in every proposal, and writes every article on this site from the projects the team is running that week.
Background
Alexei came to agency work from the other side of the table. Before founding RootRank he spent years in-house, commissioning SEO for software products and reading the reports agencies sent back. Most of those reports led with sessions and rankings; none of them explained why the pipeline had not moved. That gap is the reason the agency reports against revenue rather than traffic.
The specialisation was not a positioning decision. By the time RootRank was founded in 2019, every project on his desk was already a SaaS, an infrastructure vendor or a developer platform, and the agency simply kept that boundary. It has declined clinics, retailers and property developers since, and still turns down roughly one enquiry in five.
What he works on
Demand mapping for B2B products with long sales cycles, the split between documentation and product pages that quietly costs SaaS companies a third of their signups, and, since 2024, visibility in ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews. The four case studies published on this site are engagements he led.
He writes the blog personally and keeps it to working notes: what the team did on a live project that week, what moved and what did not. No industry news and no rehashing of other people's research.
Articles by Alexei
What AI answers cite: 152 sources in ITSM and proxies
We sorted every page AI assistants cited when naming seven vendors. Nine in ten ITSM sources are “best X” rankings, and none sit on the vendors’ own sites.
Read itHow to rank in ChatGPT
Getting named in AI answers is a sourcing problem more than a writing problem. Five steps in the order that works, with timings from real projects.
Read itGEO vs AEO vs AI SEO: what each term means
Four names for one job. Where the terms come from, what genuinely differs from classic SEO, and what to ask an agency before signing.
Read itSaaS SEO strategy: a twelve-month plan
Docs take the traffic, comparison pages take the signups. The plan we run month by month, built around activated accounts rather than sessions.
Read itSEO pricing in 2026: what SEO agencies charge and why
Two agencies quote the same site: $1,500 and $6,000. What sits behind the gap and how to compare two proposals.
Read itB2B SEO strategy: a guide for long sales cycles
A nine-month sales cycle, a buying committee of five and a keyword with two hundred searches that outearns one with fifty thousand.
Read itWhy your documentation is eating your traffic
Half the organic traffic on a mature SaaS lands in the help centre and converts nobody. How to separate it from product pages without noindex.
Read itTalk to Alexei directly
For projects in SaaS, developer tools, infrastructure or fintech. He reads every enquiry himself.