43% of Tally's new users come from AI

Tally is a form builder from Ghent, run by Marie Martens and Filip Minev. In September 2026 it crossed $6M ARR with ten people, and Marie wrote a line I've been thinking about since: "AI search had overtaken our viral loop as our biggest acquisition channel."

I read their numbers because we're on a similar curve, a year or two behind. But this post is about them, and about one thing in particular. Tally did what we sell, and did it without buying a citation from anyone.

How much of Tally's growth came from AI answers?

Most of the recent part. Tally took 16 months to go from $30K to $100K MRR. Then ChatGPT turned on web browsing by default and the curve changed shape. In the spring of 2025 ChatGPT alone sent 125,000 visits in a month and drove a quarter of new signups. Tally hit $3M ARR five months ahead of its own plan. In September MRR was $501K.

Nobody planned it. Marie's account of the timing, on Justin Hammond's newsletter, is worth quoting in full: "It took a while for us to realize it, but it was since the beginning of 2025, especially April and May, that it just started skyrocketing." They found out because new users kept typing "ChatGPT" into the free text box on the onboarding survey.

That's the part I want to take apart, because the thing that looked like luck was sitting on top of assets they'd been building for years.

A room, some honest pages, and a form field

The room is r/TallyForms. The team answers technical questions there, ships changelogs and asks for template feedback, and Marie moderates it herself. Early on they promoted Tally on Reddit and Product Hunt by hand. At some point the recommendations started coming from users instead, and the team's job became listening. Marie on the social media role: "What the social media manager does is just checks every ticket."

The pages are comparisons. Tally has four: one each against Typeform, Jotform and Google Forms, and a roundup of free form builders. In one Perplexity thread Foundation traced, the roundup was cited 14 times. Marie on why they work: "We try not to just have a generic landing page where just everything is automatically generated." The newest one, on form builders with MCP support, says Typeform's MCP is in beta, notes Jotform's free plan stops at five forms, and ranks Tally first. It reads like a help article that happens to be a sales page, which is the right way round.

The form field is a question at signup: which AI tool sent you, and what did you type. It told Tally that ChatGPT was the top source before any analytics tool did, and it's why Marie can write "43%" with a straight face.

Behind those three sit a list of articles Tally should appear in and doesn't, two prompt-tracking tools, and years of G2 and Product Hunt reviews. None of it is exotic, and they own all of it.

The citations fell 86% in a day and the assets didn't

On 14 August 2026 Reddit's share of ChatGPT Search citations went from 3.8% to 0.5% overnight, after a change to how the engine writes its queries. I wrote up why nobody can promise you Reddit citations that week. Tally's numbers make the same argument from the other side. The engines are a retrieval pipeline you have no contract with. Your community and your pages are yours.

Look at what actually gets cited when someone asks about form builders. Tally's own roundup. A Tally comparison page. A Reddit thread where a Tally user recommended it unprompted. Across three of our client programmes we tracked 1,367 AI citations and found the same shape: the share held through the August collapse, the volume didn't. Tally never had to think about this. They built the share first and the volume arrived on its own.

Can an agency copy this?

The room and the pages, yes. Not the free plan, and the free plan does a lot of the work. Tally's free plan has no form or response limits, and every form carries a "Made with Tally" badge. A Redditor recommends it because the recommendation costs the reader nothing. The 2.0 launch on Product Hunt in September 2023 took weekly signups from 2,300 to 4,400, and that only works when the thing being launched is free to try. It's why we ask every prospect what a first purchase costs before we quote anything. If the answer is a demo call, no subreddit will save you.

The rest we copy on purpose. Every client gets a subreddit they own, staffed by people posting under handles that say who they work for. Every client gets the comparison conversation, in the thread where a buyer is asking "Tally or Typeform" about their category. And every client gets the form field, so they learn which surface sent the customer this month rather than from a survey box a year later.

Tally found the channel by accident and then got serious about it. That order is fine. It just cost them a year of not knowing, and Marie says so.