Google twice upended their plans, but Czechs revived Marketing Miner

Czech entrepreneurs Martin Kadlčík and Vojtěch Toulec bought the Marketing Miner service, and just a couple of weeks later Google twice changed the rules of the game in the search-data market, nearly derailing their expansion plans. Despite this, the new owners managed not only to keep the business afloat but also to accelerate its growth, betting on artificial intelligence and a broader audience.

Martin Kadlčík is known on the Czech market for his knack of finding and reviving online businesses: his track record includes Kupi, a successful project with two million active users a month that he sold to Seznam, as well as saving the price-comparison service Srovnáme.cz from closure together with his partner Petr Šedivý. In his current approach, he looks for companies that need a fresh impulse or whose founders are losing enthusiasm.

That is how, together with his friend Vojtěch Toulec, he turned his attention to Marketing Miner — a tool for SEO specialists that its founder, Filip Podstavec, had spent ten years building up. The partners bought the company in an even 50-50 split, and Podstavec left the business after the deal; the CEO post was taken over by former marketing director Tomáš Novák. The amount of the deal, closed in March of last year, has not been disclosed.

The service specializes in collecting data from Google and Seznam — on website rankings, traffic and the popularity of search queries. The company was stable and profitable, but revenue was growing by only a few percent a year — the business had hit the ceiling of the narrow SEO-expert niche. Kadlčík and Toulec were counting on expanding their audience to marketers and online-shop owners, as well as on moving beyond Czechia and Slovakia, which currently account for about 80% of revenue.

However, within literally a few weeks of the deal, Google twice changed how its search mechanism worked, making it harder for outside services like Marketing Miner to obtain data. The rise of AI assistants accelerated this process: ChatGPT, for instance, relied on Google data for roughly half of its answers for a long time, and once Google began to see this as a threat to itself, outages and data-access restrictions became more frequent — and shortly after the company was bought, they spiked sharply, reducing the service's effectiveness.

Despite these blows, the team managed to adapt and not only preserve the business but also find new points of growth, betting on AI tools and a broader circle of clients beyond the narrow SEO crowd.