Odense, FUNEN, Nov. 12, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- For eight years, Morningscore sold one thing: software that helps small businesses rank on Google. In August 2025, new sales began to slow. The company spent the next year trying to work out why. By the time it finally had an answer, it had stopped being only a software company.
Karsten Madsen, co-founder and CEO in a space suit, the company uniform
This month, Morningscore officially launched Momentum, a service in which its team and its automation run a customer’s SEO and AI-search growth. The service is built on a split of 70% automation and 30% human work, and it has already reached about $100,000 in annual recurring revenue (ARR). Morningscore’s total ARR is about $1.5 million.
“Even to me it feels like we made a sudden change. But this is wrong. In early 2024 we got the first signs change was coming. People told us Google is dead now,” says Karsten Madsen, co-founder and CEO of Morningscore.
At the time, Morningscore was still fixing slow development on its product team, and it entered the race for GEO (visibility in AI tools like ChatGPT) late. “By my estimates we were 6 months behind competitors.”
A year of wrong answers
“While Q1 + Q2 2025 had been fantastic on new sales, August 2025 was off. And then September. 2 bad months could happen, but something felt off.”
The founder tested one explanation after another: SaaS was dying, SEO was dying, the marketing had got worse, the business climate was tough. None of them explained the whole decline. “Anyone who says it’s easy and ‘just talk to your customers’ must be taking pills.”
The team decided that customers saw Morningscore as outdated and worked nights and weekends to catch up. In December 2025 it released Morningscore 4, with new AI features and a new design. “It got a lot of positive feedback from current customers. Unfortunately it did not fix new sales.”
“The market is not rational”
The answer came in July 2026, after the founder read several LinkedIn posts about large, conservative German companies that had filled their websites with cheap AI content. “Like they were trying to destroy their brand trust as fast as possible.”
“I thought risk-analysis and doing things correctly was crucial to companies. I thought real ROI beats everything else,” the founder says. “The market is not rational. Decisions are not rational. People are fear driven. And by efficiency, not necessarily outcomes.”
“Our current position and offer was completely off.”
The company now believes three things. Small businesses may simply be replacing SEO tools with ChatGPT and Claude. Many think AI can fix SEO on its own. And a tool that teaches them to do SEO properly feels too slow in 2026.
From tool to outcome
In August 2026, a year after the decline began, Morningscore decided to “provide an anti-dote to what we see as an irrational fear driven market.” Momentum takes the work over from clients, with the aim to “show them how SEO automation can indeed 3x their ROI, but only if done carefully and correct.”
“Our growth is back and beating records,” the founder says. The goal is to grow Momentum fivefold in 2027.
The move carries a risk. About 20% of Morningscore’s customers are marketing agencies, down from about 35% three years ago. “We try to openly state our intentions, never touch their accounts and customers, and recommend the best of them to our clients.” The company is also considering certifying agencies in its service model.
The real goal is an AI agent
The founder calls Momentum a means to an end. “My dream is to build the worlds best SEO agent for small businesses.”
That agent is already in beta inside the Morningscore tool, and the Momentum team uses it heavily. “The only way to achieve that is to become customers of our own product to rapidly innovate and make sure the agent can deliver real success in the field. Services help us build the cash and experience to deliver on that goal.”
About Morningscore
Morningscore is an SEO and GEO software company (SaaS) based in Odense, Denmark, founded in 2018. It has customers in 40 countries. Its mission is to help 1 million smaller companies grow big.
The agent and tool is still the core of the business
Press Inquiries
Karsten Madsen
karsten [at] morningscore.io
https://www.linkedin.com/in/karsteel/
https://morningscore.io/
