Rocky Pedden is chief executive of RevenueZen, the Portland, Oregon, B2B agency known for SEO, content, and generative engine optimization work for software and services companies. A career salesman who never planned to run a company, he joined RevenueZen in 2019 at the invitation of founder Alex Boyd, rebuilt its operations, and became CEO in late 2022. He now writes and speaks about how AI assistants choose which sources to cite.
Early Career in Sales
"Fresh out of school, I started my career in sales," he wrote in a LinkedIn post about his path. He worked first at Enterprise, then in medical publishing, then in software sales. "No matter what I sold, clients stayed," he wrote, crediting "integrity over pressure" and "relationships over transactions."
He met Boyd while both worked at a software start-up in Portland. Boyd left to start RevenueZen in 2017, selling outsourced sales development reps. "He broke off to start RevenueZen in 2017, but we always stayed in touch," Pedden told AgencyAnalytics.
Joining RevenueZen
When Boyd first asked him to join in 2019, Pedden turned him down because his first child was due any day. "For weeks, I felt I'd made a mistake," he wrote. Six months later Boyd asked again and he accepted, starting on customer management and expansion.
He soon found gaps in how much content the team produced, what drove client results, and where its procedures were written down, and he moved into a vice president of operations role. The owners then dropped outbound sales work and moved into SEO, in part by acquiring a small Portland agency whose owner became a partner. "We just felt that the market we were serving needed better marketing," he told AgencyAnalytics in 2023.
He took over invoicing, accounting, forecasting, and compliance, and became chief executive when Boyd stepped back in late 2022. Onfolio Holdings, a public company that owns a group of digital agencies, bought RevenueZen's business at the end of 2023, and he has continued to lead it within that group.
Profit Sharing at RevenueZen
In the AgencyAnalytics interview he described a profit-sharing pay model meant to let the firm slow down without layoffs. "We wanted to be really good stewards, not only for the business itself but also for the people who work for us," he said. He set 20 percent net profit as the firm's benchmark and said he would rather run a smaller agency that was 90 percent efficient than a $10 million one at 60 percent.
He also pushed the agency into its clients' HubSpot and Salesforce data so it could tie months of SEO work to leads and revenue. "We wanted to turn our team into not just SEO strategists but more like revenue strategists," he said.
Citations from AI Assistants
On the Profit Minds Podcast in 2026 he said traffic fell for almost all of RevenueZen's clients after Google launched AI Overviews, while conversions held steady or rose. He described how ChatGPT runs a series of web searches on a question and draws on 100 to 150 pages for its answer, and he argued that FAQ sections tied to each article raise a page's odds of being cited. He calls the approach that joins SEO, generative engine optimization, and human engagement hybrid engine optimization.