We Analysed 6 Container Tracking SaaS Companies. The AI Visibility Gap Is 60x.

We spend a lot of time inside Ahrefs pulling apart how B2B SaaS companies grow (or fail to grow) their organic and AI-driven search presence. We do this for clients, but we also do it for our own education, because competitive landscapes tend to reveal patterns that are bigger than any one company.

A few weeks ago, we turned our attention to the container tracking and supply chain visibility software space. It is a market that sits at an interesting intersection: technically complex, deeply operational, and increasingly dominated by software-first companies replacing the manual port tracking workflows that freight and logistics teams have relied on for decades.

We analysed six companies in this category, ranging from large, VC-backed platforms with enterprise contracts to lean, API-first products targeting smaller importers and freight forwarders. We looked at their organic search performance, AI citation footprint, referring domain profiles, keyword strategies, and content architecture.

What we found was a market that is, collectively, making the same handful of strategic mistakes, and a small number of players who have quietly figured out how to win the modern search landscape while most of their competitors are still playing a 2019 SEO game.

Here are the findings.

Finding 1: The Container Tracking Space Has a Catastrophic AI Visibility Problem, and Almost Nobody Knows It

The single most striking data point from this analysis had nothing to do with Google rankings. It had to do with ChatGPT.

When we measured AI citation counts across the six platforms (tracking how many times each brand appears in responses from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Copilot) the numbers told a story that should alarm every CMO in this space.

Across the peer group, AI citation counts varied by a factor of more than 60x between the leader and the laggard on the ChatGPT dimension. One company in the set had 63 ChatGPT citations. Another had 1.

On Perplexity, the gap was even starker. One company had 121 Perplexity citations. Three others had fewer than 5.

Table 1. AI citation counts across the six-company peer group, measured across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overview. Source: Ahrefs Brand Radar, April 2026. 

When a logistics manager, an importer, or a procurement director types "What is the best container tracking software?" into ChatGPT or Perplexity (and an increasing number of them are doing exactly that) the brands that show up in the answer are being evaluated. The brands that don't show up don't exist.

The container tracking software market is already a crowded, noisy space where buyers have a lot of options and often struggle to differentiate between them. The companies that are consistently recommended by AI tools are building a compounding awareness advantage that traditional SEO metrics don't yet capture.

What Drives AI Citations in This Space?

We looked carefully at which types of content and which types of referring domains correlated with higher AI citation counts. Two things stood out clearly.

First: companies with higher AI citation counts had built structured, use-case-specific content pages that matched the exact questions AI tools are trained to answer. Carrier-specific tracking pages (content covering how to track shipments with individual ocean carriers) appeared to be the single highest-leverage content type. These pages are specific, actionable, and directly answer questions that buyers ask. LLMs cite them constantly.

Second: companies with higher AI citation counts had more referring links from third-party, editorially independent sources. The algorithm that decides what ChatGPT cites is not fundamentally different from the one Google uses to assess authority. It is, at its core, a trust and citation graph. The brands that appear in AI answers are the brands that the internet (and specifically the relevant corners of the internet) has cited and discussed at length.

Finding 2: Domain Authority Is More Concentrated Than You Would Expect — and the Gap Is Widening

The Domain Rating spread across the peer group we analysed ran from the high 20s to the low 70s. That is not unusual for a B2B SaaS category of this age, but the trajectory data is where things get interesting.

Table 2. Core organic search metrics across the six-company peer group. Source: Ahrefs Site Explorer, April 2026.

The companies at the top of the DR range have been building their authority profiles consistently for several years. Their referring domain counts are growing. Their high-DR, topically relevant backlinks are compounding. The companies at the lower end of the range are either flat or declining on these same metrics, and that gap does not close on its own.

What separates a DR 28 company from a DR 72 company in practical terms? In a contested SERP like, "supply chain visibility software" or "container tracking platform," the higher-DR site does not need to have better content to win. It just needs to be roughly as good. Domain authority is a head start that compounds over time. When a DR 72 site and a DR 28 site both publish a piece targeting the same keyword, the DR 72 site will typically outrank the DR 28 site even if the content quality is equivalent, because it enters the race with a higher baseline trust score.

In a market where the top few search positions capture the majority of buyer attention, this is an existential issue for lower-authority players.

Domain Rating is not fixed. It is a function of the number and quality of unique referring domains, weighted by their own authority and topical relevance. For companies currently sitting with a DR in the 28–50 range, the path to meaningfully improving that number in 12–18 months is clear, it just requires systematic, niche-relevant link acquisition rather than the generic PR and job-board links that dominate most of their current profiles.

Finding 3: Every Company in This Space Is Over-Indexed on Informational Traffic — and Almost Nobody Has Commercial Keyword Coverage

This was perhaps the most consistent finding across the analysis, and it speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding of how content strategy should work for B2B SaaS.

We categorised the keyword portfolios of each company in our analysis by intent: branded, non-branded, informational, commercial, transactional, navigational. The breakdown was striking across almost every player.

The typical profile looked something like this: 60–70% of organic traffic came from informational keywords. Commercial keywords (terms like "best container tracking software," "supply chain visibility platform," "container tracking solution," or "logistics software comparison") accounted for less than 5% of traffic across most companies. Transactional keywords, the terms buyers use when they are ready to request a demo or sign up, were effectively zero for most players.

Table 3. Keyword intent distribution across the peer group. Source: Ahrefs Site Explorer, April 2026.

This is a structural problem, not a content quality problem. These companies have invested in building educational content that drives traffic but not in the commercial infrastructure that converts that traffic into pipeline. Their content engines are doing the awareness job. The evaluation job, the moment when a buyer is actively choosing between vendors, is happening somewhere else, and these companies are largely absent from it.

The commercial keyword gaps we identified were substantial. Terms like "supply chain visibility software" (approximately 1,100 US monthly searches), "logistics software" (2,400 US monthly searches), and "freight visibility solution" were either unranked or ranked very low by most of the companies we analysed. The companies ranking for these terms were, notably, the same ones generating the most organic traffic overall, suggesting that commercial keyword coverage and total traffic are more correlated than commonly understood.

Why Does This Happen?

The pattern we see again and again in B2B SaaS: teams build content for the customers they already have (educational, operational, feature-specific) rather than for the buyers they are trying to acquire: commercial, evaluative, comparison-oriented. Educational content is easier to write, gets more social shares, and feels more aligned with the thought leadership ethos that marketing teams gravitate toward. Commercial content is harder (it requires taking a position, making claims, and being direct about what you do and why you are better) but it is the content that actually fills pipeline.

Finding 4: There Is a Carrier Tracking Page Strategy That the Winners Have Figured Out — and Most Players Have Missed Entirely

One of the more specific and actionable patterns we identified was what we are calling the "carrier tracking page strategy."

Several companies in this space (particularly the ones with the highest AI citation counts) have built a library of individual, carrier-specific container tracking pages. Pages targeting searches like "Maersk container tracking," "MSC container tracking," "Evergreen container tracking," "Yang Ming container tracking," and so on.

The volume on these searches is not trivial. "MSC container tracking" receives approximately 6,100 US searches per month. "Maersk container tracking" receives approximately 3,800. "Evergreen container tracking" receives approximately 3,300. These are not obscure long-tail queries, they are mainstream searches made by importers and freight forwarders who are actively managing live shipments.

Table 4. Carrier tracking keyword opportunities by US monthly search volume. Source: Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, April 2026. 

The companies that have built these pages are capturing traffic at exactly the moment when a buyer is doing the operational work that software like theirs is designed to automate. A shipper manually tracking a container on an MSC vessel is, by definition, a prospect for a container tracking platform. That is about as close to buyer intent as you can get in organic search.

The carrier tracking page strategy matters for a second, arguably more important reason: these pages are the primary source that AI tools cite when answering questions about container tracking. When ChatGPT or Perplexity is asked how to track a specific carrier's containers, it almost always cites the companies that have built dedicated carrier tracking pages with structured content. This is a direct, reproducible mechanism connecting content structure to AI citation count.

The companies in this space that have not built these pages are leaving both organic traffic and AI citation footprint on the table, and because their competitors are claiming both, the gap is compounding.

Finding 5: A Significant Share of Organic Traffic in This Space Is Geographically Misaligned with the ICP

This finding was unexpected, and it deserves more attention than it typically gets in B2B SaaS SEO discussions.

Several of the companies we analysed are receiving a meaningful portion of their organic traffic from countries that do not represent their primary commercial market. We saw traffic profiles where 25–35% of visits originated from India, Pakistan, or Southeast Asia — for platforms that primarily sell to US-based importers, freight forwarders, and enterprise supply chain teams.

The reason is relatively straightforward once you look at the keyword data. These companies are ranking for port-specific and terminal-specific tracking queries that are high-volume in those markets — searches related to specific container terminals in Indian ports, Pakistani customs tracking, and regional freight hubs. The content that generates this traffic is typically generic enough to rank in multiple geographies, but it attracts a user base that has minimal overlap with the B2B buying audience the platform is designed for.

The implications for marketing teams are twofold. First, headline organic traffic numbers are misleading in this context. A company reporting 10,000 monthly organic visits may be generating less qualified US commercial traffic than a competitor reporting 6,000 visits, if the second company's traffic is more concentrated in the US and better aligned with commercial intent. Second, the resources spent producing and ranking content for geographically misaligned queries are resources not being spent on the commercial content gaps that actually matter.

Table 5. Organic traffic distribution by top geography. Source: Ahrefs Site Explorer, April 2026.

Finding 6: The Referring Domain Profiles Are Structurally Weak in the Same Way Across Almost Every Player

We pulled the full referring domain profiles for each company in our analysis and categorised the domains by type: logistics and freight media, B2B tech and SaaS research platforms, startup and VC ecosystem sites, job boards and recruitment platforms, PR wire services, generic tech blogs, and spam.

The pattern was consistent: the referring domain profiles in this space are wide but shallow on topical relevance.

Most of the companies we analysed had reasonable total referring domain counts, anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 unique domains. But when we filtered for domains that a logistics professional would actually recognise and trust (publications like FreightWaves, Supply Chain Dive, Supply Chain Brain, DC Velocity, Inbound Logistics, Supply Chain Digital, gCaptain, or Port Technology) the numbers were thin across the board.

Some companies in the analysis had zero links from every one of those publications. Companies with tens of thousands of dollars a month in marketing spend, selling to an audience that reads those publications daily, with no editorial presence in any of them.

Table 6. Number of linking pages from key logistics and freight media publications. Source: Ahrefs Site Explorer, April 2026.

By contrast, referring domain profiles were often padded with high-DR but zero-relevance links from job listing platforms, generic tech news sites that cover hundreds of software categories, and PR wire services that produce links which Google increasingly discounts.

Why Does This Matter for More Than Just Domain Rating?

Topically relevant referring domains are a qualitatively different type of signal than generic high-DR links. When FreightWaves links to a container tracking platform, it is not just passing link equity, it is signalling to Google's ranking algorithm that this domain is a credible source in the logistics and supply chain topic cluster. This topical authority signal is what allows a page to rank competitively for commercial supply chain keywords that generate pipeline.

The freight and logistics media landscape is also (unlike general tech media) genuinely accessible to B2B companies in this space. FreightWaves, Supply Chain Dive, and their peers actively seek data-led contributions, expert commentary, and product news from companies operating in their coverage area. The absence is a strategic failure, not an access problem.

Finding 7: The Traffic Trajectory Is Diverging — and the Gap Is Accelerating

The last finding worth highlighting is about direction, not just current position.

When we plotted 12-month traffic trends across the peer group, we saw three distinct trajectories:

Growing: One company has added approximately 8,000–10,000 monthly organic visits over the past 12 months, driven by consistent investment in informational content, commercial keyword coverage, and a growing referring domain base. Its authority and traffic curves are both upward.

Volatile: Several companies show a traffic profile that peaked around Q4 2025 and has since declined. The December 2025 period saw elevated traffic across multiple players (likely driven by seasonal shipping patterns and tariff-related search activity) but companies without a durable authority base have given back those gains.

Declining: At least one company in the set is in a clear declining trend on organic traffic, despite having a mid-tier Domain Rating. This suggests a content quality or indexation issue that DR alone does not explain.

SEO is not a linear game. The company that is growing its organic traffic today is also growing its keyword coverage, its referring domain diversity, and its topical authority signals. Each of those improvements makes the next piece of content easier to rank, which attracts more links, which raises the Domain Rating further. An early lead tends to compound into an insurmountable one if the laggards do not move aggressively.

What the Winners Are Doing Differently

Drawing across all seven findings, the pattern of what separates the highest-performing players from the rest is relatively consistent:

• Content architecture aligned with the buyer journey. Winners have built content for every stage: educational and definitional content for the top of funnel, use-case and comparison content for the middle, and product-specific and commercial content for the bottom. Laggards have built almost exclusively for the top of funnel.

• Carrier and use-case-specific page libraries. The companies that perform best on both organic search and AI citations have invested in building structured, specific pages at scale (carrier tracking pages, port pages, and integration pages) rather than relying on a small number of high-level pillar pieces.

• Systematic presence in industry media. The top performers have editorial coverage in the publications their buyers read. This is not accidental, it is the result of deliberate, ongoing outreach to freight and logistics journalists and editors.

• A clear GEO strategy. The companies with the highest AI citation counts are producing content that is structured in the way LLMs are trained to cite: clear, factual, specific, well-structured, and supported by credible third-party references.

What This Means for B2B SaaS Companies in Logistics and Supply Chain

Container tracking software is a narrow enough category that the specific findings here are directly applicable. But the broader patterns (the GEO gap, the commercial keyword deficit, the topically misaligned referring domain profile, the carrier-page opportunity) apply to almost every vertical of logistics and supply chain SaaS.

Freight visibility, transportation management, customs brokerage software, warehouse management, procurement automation, freight forwarding platforms. We have looked at several of these spaces and found the same structural patterns. The market is early enough in its SEO maturity that a well-executed 12–18 month programme can meaningfully shift competitive position. The window for that kind of catch-up is not unlimited, but it is still open.

The companies that move in the next six months will look back in two years and understand why they are being recommended by ChatGPT while their competitors are explaining to their boards why organic pipeline has dried up.

About This Research

This analysis was conducted by RawMktg. in April 2026 using Ahrefs data, including Site Explorer, Link Intersect, Content Gap analysis, and Brand Radar AI citation tracking. The peer group consisted of six B2B SaaS companies operating in the container tracking and supply chain visibility software category.