How we helped a Leading Exchange enter a newly contested and regulated market, post-MiCA.
Client: A top-tier global centralised crypto exchange (confidential per NDA) Scope: SEO, AEO, technical foundations, link building Market: New EU-regulated entity and website.
+60 DR
Single-digit DR to over 70DR
+1,000%
Lift in Organic Clicks against previous period
93,000+
Citations from AI Platforms
The Challenge
The Client needed a new, EU-specific website to support a newly regulated entity entering the European market. This wasn’t an optimization job on an established domain. It was a cold start: no backlink profile, no domain authority, no organic visibility, and a compressed timeline to establish credibility in a market where regulatory trust signals matter as much as search rankings.
On top of the usual SEO challenge, the brief included a newer requirement: visibility inside AI-generated answers. Prospective EU users increasingly ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews which exchanges are licensed and trustworthy in their market, not just Google. A new domain needed to earn citation share in both search and AI answers at the same time.
What we did
Technical and on-page SEO foundations. Built the site’s SEO architecture from the ground up: indexation, crawlability, internal linking and content structure designed for a new domain with no historical equity to lean on.
Link building at scale. Grew the domain’s authority signal from a single referring domain to a substantial, still-compounding backlink profile through a structured outreach and placement program.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization). Applied our proprietary AI citation tracking methodology, structuring content specifically to be surfaced and cited by AI answer engines, then measuring citation volume and cited-page count on an ongoing basis to keep tuning the approach.
The results
Domain authority, from nothing. The domain carried a single referring domain as recently as mid-2024. By June 2026, referring domains had grown to roughly 3,800, and Domain Rating climbed from single digits to 70.
AI citation growth. Comparing a 30-day window early in tracking against the most recent 30-day window: average daily AI citations grew from about 486 to 641, a 32% increase, and the number of distinct pages being cited by AI engines grew 25% over the same period. On its strongest day, the domain was cited 1,038 times across 143 distinct pages in a single 24-hour period.
Search impressions breaking out. Monthly search impressions jumped roughly 30x month over month as the site began ranking for a wider spread of queries, moving from a handful of top-3 placements to a growing footprint in positions 4 to 10, the first sign of a new domain earning its way onto page one.
Organic search visibility. The domain now ranks for over 1,100+ organic keywords.
Why it matters
For a new entity entering a regulated market, organic and AI visibility aren’t vanity metrics. They’re part of how a newly licensed exchange proves it’s a legitimate, established option to a user who is actively comparing where to trust their funds. Building that authority from a standing start, across both traditional search and AI answer engines simultaneously, is the specific problem ColdChain is built to solve for Web3 and fintech brands entering new markets.