Car Rental Service: +54% Referring Domains and Organic Growth in 3 Months

The client operates a car-sharing and daily car rental service across Ukraine, Georgia, and Germany. The multilingual website features city-specific rental pages alongside a large content section focused on automotive topics and travel. The primary objective was to strengthen commercial pages in local search results, expand overall search visibility, and increase brand presence in AI-generated answers. Executing a systematic link-building strategy became the main tool for achieving these goals.

Objectives

• analyze the current backlink profile and competitive environment separately across the three markets
• develop a placement plan for city-specific commercial pages and informational content
• increase the quantity of high-quality referring domains without sharp fluctuations in dynamics
• strengthen rankings for rental and car-sharing queries in priority cities
• support the growth of pages that can serve as sources for AI-generated answers

Our actions

Our experts divided the project strategy by country and page type. Ukraine, Georgia, and Germany differ significantly in market competition, language, and available donor sites, so applying a uniform placement plan across all regions would have failed. We separately evaluated the current referring domains, anchor text ratios, and link equity distribution before benchmarking the profile against local search competitors.

Based on our analysis, we established a structured monthly action plan. Our team distributed incoming links across two primary site levels: commercial city rental pages and content hub articles. This approach allowed us to capture high-intent bottom-funnel traffic while expanding the informational hub, which reinforces commercial pages through internal links and powers visibility in AI search outputs.

Outreach articles on automotive, travel, and urban mobility platforms formed the core placement format to transfer link equity and boost topical relevance. We deployed targeted crowd marketing across regional forums and community sites in each market using local languages. Finally, our experts submitted business profiles to local web directories to diversify the backlink footprint and strengthen local search signals.

We also monitored the anchor list. It was primarily composed of URLs and branded mentions. Commercial anchors were added selectively for specific pages and in the language of the respective market. This approach allowed us to strengthen queries without overloading the profile with commercial wording.

Over the course of three months, our team tracked not only the growth in referring domains and organic traffic but also the distribution of queries within the TOP 20. This enabled us to see the expansion of overall visibility and also the movement of queries from the second ten positions into the TOP 10 and TOP 3.

At the same time, our experts tracked the project’s presence in AI-generated answers. We analyzed both the overall volume of mentions and the dynamics across individual platforms such as Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot.

Results

Over three months, the number of referring domains increased from 805 to 1,243. The project gained 438 new domains, thus representing growth of approximately 54.4%.

As for organic traffic, it increased from 21,579 to 25,583 visits over the same period. This represents an additional 4,004 visits from search and growth of approximately 18.6%.

At the same time, the distribution of queries within the search results improved. The number of queries in the TOP 20 grew from 4,488 to 4,725. More noticeable dynamics occurred in the upper part of the search results, as the number of queries in the TOP 3 increased from 1,085 to 1,470 (by 385 queries). Overall, the number of queries in the TOP 10 increased from 4,001 to 4,396 (+9.9%), while the number in the 11-20 range decreased from 487 to 329. The dynamics show that part of the semantics shifted to higher positions.

The project’s overall AI visibility also improved. At the time of measurement, the service recorded around 2.3 thousand appearances of the website in AI-generated answers, with an increase of 994 answers compared with the previous period. The number of pages represented in AI search results reached 257 (+66).

The most noticeable growth occurred within the Google ecosystem. In AI Overviews, the website appeared in approximately 1,200 answers, representing an increase of 771 entries, while participating pages expanded to 165 (+107). In AI Mode, search tracking recorded 894 (+228) answers across 187 (+73) unique pages. Positive trends also emerged in Gemini with 128 (+100) answers, Perplexity with 67 (+40), and Copilot with 22 (+3). At the same time, visibility in ChatGPT dropped to 33 answers (-148), showing that overall AI growth remained uneven and relied primarily on Google products and select generative engines.

Conclusion

So this case clearly shows that we managed to significantly expand the backlink profile, increase organic traffic, and strengthen the project’s search presence simultaneously in Ukraine, Georgia, and Germany. The result was achieved by distributing placements according to GEOs, page types, and their current dynamics. For a multilingual business, this strategy successfully supported commercial landing pages, expanded the content hub, and grew brand visibility within AI-generated search answers.