Caitlin Maloney is chief growth officer of Graphite, the San Francisco, California, SEO and answer engine optimization agency led by Ethan Smith. A Stanford Graduate School of Business alumna who ran growth at the shopping app Dote before joining Graphite in 2020, she is known for sharing Graphite's research showing that overall search use has held steady as people take up AI assistants.
Business School at Stanford
From 2012 to 2014 Maloney served on the national advisory board of the Sumeria Group, a young professionals network that pairs social events with volunteer work for underserved young people, according to her LinkedIn profile. She attended Stanford Graduate School of Business from 2014 to 2016, where she co-founded and co-led the school's Digital Health and Wellness Initiative. She lists Spanish and Mandarin among her languages.
Running Growth at Dote
After Stanford she moved into startup growth work at Dote, a mobile shopping app, serving as director of growth from October 2017 and vice president of growth from March 2019 to January 2020. She later wrote that founders find it hard to stay committed to SEO when it takes months to pay off and every year brings a new claim that it is dead, something she said she had "personally experienced" as a growth operator.
Building Graphite's Growth Practice
She joined Graphite as vice president of growth in July 2020 and became chief growth officer in October 2021. In a January 2026 LinkedIn post she described those years as "building a research-driven growth agency for high-growth companies."
That post shared Debunking the Myth That Search Is Dying, a Graphite study run with the web analytics company Similarweb across more than 40,000 sites. She summarized its findings: SEO traffic was down only 2.5 percent, overall search use had stayed flat for six years, and Google's AI Overviews, the AI-written summaries shown above some search results, cut clicks to regular results by about 35 percent when they appeared, though they showed up for only about 30 percent of searches, mostly informational ones.
In March 2026 she argued that most people underestimate AI usage by four to five times, because estimates count web traffic and miss mobile apps, where she said about 83 percent of AI use happens. She concluded that AI assistants built on large language models, or LLMs, were adding to search: "The AI 'shift' is not LLMs replacing traditional search but LLMs creating more searches that results in an increase in overall search," she wrote.