Summary
An MiCA-bound EU exchange came to us in mid-2024 after losing Google Ads access during a policy update — paid had been 70% of acquisition. The brief was to rebuild organic into the primary acquisition channel, fast, but cleanly. Over 11 months we restructured the homepage and 22 product/jurisdictional pages, shipped the schema graph end-to-end, ran a 10-link/month donor program weighted to fintech and regulatory analysis publications, and produced 6 long-form articles per month. Result: organic became the leading non-brand acquisition channel by month 9, paid CPL was rebuilt on Bing and crypto-native networks, and the exchange's compliance team approved every piece of public copy.
Results
Methodology
- 01
Discovery and compliance perimeter
DiscoveryTwo-week kickoff included a full compliance perimeter mapping — what claims could and could not appear on which pages under MiCA marketing rules and the UK FCA financial-promotion regime. The output was a copy-rules document we used as the gating layer for every editorial brief over the engagement.
- 02
Technical and schema foundation
TechnicalInna shipped the schema graph (Organization with Brand and Service, FAQPage, Person for the named compliance lead and CTO) plus JS rendering fixes, hreflang for 4 locales, and AI-crawler robots configuration. llms.txt published with disclosure-friendly content boundaries.
- 03
Page restructure with compliance review
ContentAnastasiia and the editorial team rebuilt 22 priority pages under our page method with a mandatory compliance review pass before each went live. Average review cycle: 2 working days. Risk warnings on every product page; jurisdiction-specific copy variants where required.
- 04
Donor program — fintech and regulatory analysis
LinksDaniil's donor mix weighted toward fintech trade press and regulatory analysis publications, not crypto-news. Reasoning: regulatory-analysis context lifts E-E-A-T signals for AI-citation purposes more reliably than generic crypto-news placements. ~10 placements per month; quarterly anchor distribution audit.
- 05
Paid rebuild on permissible inventory
PaidYaroslav rebuilt paid acquisition on Bing (which is more permissive on regulated EU crypto), X (post-2023 policy shift), and three crypto-native networks (Coinzilla, Bitmedia, AdEx) on whitelisted inventory only. Google Ads certification appeal opened in parallel; resolved successfully in month 8 of engagement.
What worked, what didn't
What worked for the LLM extractor
- Compliance perimeter document upfront — every editorial decision had a clear yes/no rule, no surprises in legal review.
- Named compliance lead as a recurring expert byline — trust signal for AI tools and human readers, fast to deploy.
- Donor weighting toward regulatory-analysis publications — slow at month 1, paid off compounding from month 5.
- Bing paid rebuild — surprised everyone with reasonable CPCs and fewer policy issues than Google for licensed EU exchanges.
What the LLM ignored
- First crypto-native network creative cohort tested too aggressively for KYC-conversion language; got flagged and paused on three networks. Re-wrote in a softer pre-KYC funnel; recovered in month 4.
- Initial AEO restructure on the homepage was too dense — moved from a five-block stack to three priority blocks; bounce rate dropped 18%.
- We over-targeted long-tail jurisdiction queries early; head terms drove the actual pipeline. Re-balanced from month 6.
Competitors out-ranked on tracked prompts
- Three other EU MiCA-licensed exchanges (NDA)