In 2003, American Airlines bought Jira from a small Sydney startup's website without a sales call (Atlassian). That order shaped how Atlassian has sold software ever since, including its SEO today.
Below is Atlassian's path from a $10,000 credit card to a $6.57 billion company, then the five SEO plays we found in its sitemaps.
A credit card, a bug tracker and a bet against salespeople
Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar founded Atlassian, maker of Jira, Confluence and Trello, in Sydney in 2002 with a $10,000 credit card. They sold support services first, then built the Jira issue tracker and sold that instead.
The founders kept selling through the website, and their 2003 lesson was that software should be bought instead of sold. The 2015 F-1 says Atlassian sold online "without traditional sales infrastructure," and it shared these numbers:
- Revenue reached $319.5 million in the year to June 2015, up from $148.5 million two years earlier.
- More than 98% of transactions happened on Atlassian's own website.
- More than 51,000 customers paid for its products, and over 5 million people used them every month.
- Research and development took 44% of revenue, while marketing and sales took 21%.
The filing credits word of mouth, "low-touch demand generation" and "targeted web-based content," the part that became Atlassian's SEO engine.
That bet still pays off, with $6.57 billion in revenue in fiscal 2026 and more than 350,000 customers (Form 10-K).
Atlassian has salespeople today, and its 10-K says self-service lands new customers while a growing sales team expands large enterprise accounts.
The two filings show where each dollar of revenue went, eleven years apart:
What to take from this:
- Let buyers purchase your smallest plan without a call, so they never wait for a rep.
- Put more of your budget into the product and into content that buyers find on their own.
The Atlassian SEO playbook, counted from its sitemap
Robots.txt points to a sitemap index with 8 child sitemaps and a blog index with 18 more, and we skipped the blocked tag sitemap.
The files we fetched on November 3, 2026 list 39,527 URLs, including 28,729 translated copies in 11 languages and 10,798 English pages. We grouped the English URLs by first folder, such as /agile/, with templates as their own group.
Blog posts, guides, templates and plays add up to 9,086 URLs, or 84% of the English site. That is about 16 teaching pages for each of the 572 product pages.
These are the teaching sections we found, and each one maps to a product:
- The guides hold 990 pages on agile, Git, DevOps, IT service management and related topics.
- The templates sitemap lists 294 pages for Confluence and Jira.
- The Team Playbook holds 69 workshop plays.
- The product sitemap includes 27 head-to-head comparison pages, such as Jira vs Asana.
- The blog holds 4,243 current posts and 3,471 posts in an older archive.
Lessons for your team:
- Count your own sitemap by folder and compare the number of teaching pages with product pages.
- Translate your best teaching pages once they bring in buyers in English.
Play 1: the Agile Coach teaches the method Jira runs on
Jira runs on agile methods like Scrum and Kanban, and the Agile Coach at atlassian.com/agile teaches them in 222 English URLs.
The Scrum guide has the title tag "What is Scrum? Guide to the Agile Framework," and a byline from Claire Drumond, Atlassian Head of Product Marketing.
The page has these parts, from top to bottom:
- A sidebar lists every agile topic, from sprint planning and standups to Scrum of Scrums.
- A blue box at the top offers the free Jira scrum template.
- A Key Takeaways list answers the main question in four short bullets.
- Links in the text point to six free Jira and Confluence templates and to the retrospective play.
- Article and BreadcrumbList schema describe the page to search engines.
The guides on Git, DevOps, IT service management and microservices follow this pattern, and it is the play we would copy first.
What to take from this:
- Write the guide to the method your product supports before you write about the product.
- Put one template or free trial at the top of each guide, matched to its topic.
Play 2: the Team Playbook turns workshops into search pages
Atlassian launched the Team Playbook in 2016, and its sitemap now lists 69 free workshops, called plays, for common team problems such as a messy project kick-off.
More than 10,000 teams use the plays, and the page quotes HubSpot and VML leaders on how the plays helped.
The retrospective play is built for search, with the title tag "Sprint Retrospective: How to Hold an Effective Meeting" over a simple heading, "Sprint Retrospectives."
The play gives a team everything it needs to run the meeting:
- A summary card lists 15 minutes of prep, 60 minutes to run and 4 to 8 people.
- Step-by-step instructions carry HowTo schema, so search engines can read each step.
- A section of variations and an FAQ answer the follow-up questions teams ask.
- A language switcher links to the same play in 11 more languages.
The product shows up only once, as a Try Jira Scrum Boards button. This play is the cheapest to adopt, since your team only needs to write down meetings it already runs.
How to apply it:
- Turn your best internal workshop into a public page with its time, people and steps.
- Add HowTo schema to step-by-step pages so search engines and AI tools can read each step.
Play 3: templates put the product one click away
The templates sitemap lists 294 pages, with 214 for Confluence and 80 for Jira. Each targets a search like "5 whys template" and opens in a free account with one click.
The Confluence templates library catches broad searches like "Confluence templates," while each template page targets its own phrase.
The 5 whys analysis template explains the method, previews the page, lists the steps with HowTo schema and links back to the 5 whys play.
We followed the links on two pages, and the diagram shows where each one led:
Every path we followed through the guides, plays and templates ended at the same free sign-up page.
How to apply it:
- List the documents your buyers create every week, then build a template page for each one.
- Link each template to the guide that teaches its method, and link the guide back.
Play 4: comparison pages meet buyers who are ready to switch
Buyers who are already choosing a tool land on 27 comparison pages, which we sorted by product:
- Jira has 10 pages, against tools such as Asana, ClickUp, Linear, monday.com and GitHub.
- Confluence has 8 pages, against tools such as Notion, SharePoint, Google Docs and Miro.
- Jira Service Management has 7 pages, against tools such as ServiceNow, Zendesk and Freshservice.
- Bitbucket and Jira Product Discovery have one page each.
The Jira vs Asana page opens with a "Last updated January 2025" label and a Get started for free button, then a "Migrate from Asana in minutes" section.
Its meta description ends with "See why 75% of Fortune 500 companies choose Jira," and a "Trusted by over 100K companies" section repeats the proof.
A small Contact sales link beside the main button serves larger buyers, as the 10-K describes.
These are bottom of the funnel pages, and our guide to BOFU content shows how to plan and write them.
What to take from this:
- Write one comparison page for each tool your buyers mention in demos and reviews.
- Show a last updated date, as Atlassian does, so buyers can see the comparison is current.
Play 5: the blog and the Community answer everything in between
The blog is Atlassian's oldest SEO asset, with a July 2002 post announcing that Jira news was live, and its sitemaps now list 7,714 URLs.
A 2022 founders post carries the byline Work Life Editorial Team, and the blog home page is now titled Inside Atlassian.
Posts sit in topic sections such as Leadership and Development, plus one section for each product.
The Atlassian Community answers questions in users' own words, and on November 3, 2026, it showed 3,816,399 members, 3,341 events and 196 groups.
Its learning sitemap lists 617 URLs, including 524 courses, but we couldn't count forum threads because their sitemap returned a 404 error.
The founders' 2008 lesson was to invest in your user community, which started with user groups in 2006.
How to apply it:
- Publish on a steady schedule for years, since an archive this deep takes time to build.
- Give users a public place to ask product questions, so their answers show up in search.
How to build a B2B SEO strategy the Atlassian way
Atlassian's lesson for B2B is to teach the method your product supports, then make the product the next step on every page.
We would apply it in this order on a B2B site with a small team:
- Name the method your product supports, such as Scrum for Jira or root cause analysis for incidents.
- Build a guide hub for that method, with one page for each question your buyers ask.
- Add a template or free tool to every guide, linked to a free trial or demo.
- Publish comparison pages for the tools your buyers use today.
- Track sign-ups and pipeline from each section, then grow the section that brings buyers.
Our pillar page examples show how other B2B brands build guide hubs. For the full plan, read our B2B SEO guide or our B2B SaaS SEO guide.
The hardest part is patience, since Atlassian has been publishing since 2002. For more examples, our post on content strategy examples covers 12 B2B brands.
FAQ
How does Atlassian do SEO?
Atlassian does SEO by publishing free content that teaches the methods its products support, such as agile guides, Team Playbook plays and templates. In our November 2026 count, these teaching pages made up 84% of its English sitemap, and the pages we checked each link to a free sign-up.
Does Atlassian have a sales team?
Yes, Atlassian has a sales team today, and it focuses on growing accounts with large enterprise customers. New customers still come in through a self-service model, where they try and buy products online without talking to sales.
How many pages does Atlassian's website have?
Atlassian's sitemaps listed 39,527 URLs on November 3, 2026. Of those, 10,798 were English pages and 28,729 were translated copies in 11 languages.
What is the Atlassian Team Playbook?
The Atlassian Team Playbook is a free library of workshops, called plays, that help teams fix common problems such as unclear roles or weak retrospectives. Atlassian launched it in 2016, and its sitemap now lists 69 plays.
What can B2B companies learn from Atlassian's SEO strategy?
B2B companies can learn to teach the method their product supports, then offer the product as the next step. Start with one guide hub, add templates that open in a free trial, and add comparison pages for buyers who are ready to switch.
Start by counting your sitemap by folder to see how many pages teach buyers something. If your guides don't lead to your product, a free AI visibility audit shows where buyers find you.
