How Bitly Ships Growth Experiments in Days, Not Months with Quill

Bitly is the platform behind billions of short links, QR codes, and landing pages used by brands worldwide.

They're also one of the first teams building with AirOps Quill: testing what it looks like when an AI agent runs your marketing Playbooks, not just assists with them.

These are early days for agentic marketing, and Bitly is helping define what it looks like in practice: building the content engine that drives growth in both traditional and AI search. The results so far are just the beginning.

130 integration pages, 27 competitor pages, and a full content lifecycle

Quill let Bitly unleash their creativity across many strategies, right out of the gate. They built Playbooks for content refresh briefs, net new content briefs, and full blog posts.

Then they pushed further: 130 programmatic integration pages, 27 competitor comparison pages, and a competitive playbook, all generated through Playbooks and connected to an existing Workflow that formats and pushes content directly to WordPress.

This was all within the first couple of weeks.

The build process was a fraction of what it would have been before. The team described their requirements to Quill, uploaded page templates as PDFs, and let Quill structure the playbook. Once the Playbook was dialed in, they could generate pages at volume without starting from scratch every time they shifted to a new page type.

Quill handles execution autonomously but knows when to check in: before content pushes to WordPress, the team reviews and approves. "No matter how sophisticated the Playbook gets, we always have a good overview of what each step does," Drews said. "If we want to make a tweak, it's often as easy as adding another sentence or example, or asking Quill to make the update."

Weeks to days on content production, with humans still driving quality

The efficiency gains showed up fast. Bitly's team compressed time to production from weeks to days and streamlined the number of touchpoints needed to move content from idea to publication: a content engineer builds the playbook, a human editor reviews and refines the output.

"We were able to go from 4-6 touchpoints down to two: a content engineer and a content editor," said Tyler Roehmholdt, Director of SEO Strategy & Website at Bitly. That's not about removing humans from the process. It's about removing unnecessary friction.

On the content side, refreshed blog posts have consistently seen higher average position, along with increases in impressions and clicks. The 57 programmatic integration pages that are already live: too early for conclusive traffic data, but the team was thrilled with the quality, and already expanding their Playbooks for the next page type.

The bigger shift is capacity. When a given month requires more content, the team doesn't need to slow down. They run the Playbook.

"AirOps enables us to test out new ideas and demand capture surfaces at much greater velocity than traditional experimentation," Roehmholdt said.

From complex workflows to natural language execution

Bitly's growth team had the strategy. What they needed was a faster way to execute it. Their existing Workflows were powerful but a limiting factor to experimentation: intimidating to set up, and difficult to debug when something needed troubleshooting.

"Workflows can look very intimidating, and it's easy to lose oversight once they get more complicated," said Roland Drews, SEO & Content Acquisition Manager at Bitly. "If something didn't work right, it could be difficult to figure out even which step was causing the problem."

That's one gap Quill is designed to close. Instead of configuring multi-step workflow chains, teams describe what they want in natural language. Quill is the agent captain that runs your Playbooks autonomously: handling content creation, refresh, and optimization while keeping your team in the loop at the moments that matter.

What's next

Bitly's team is thinking about this shift beyond any single project. "With agentic tools, the real benefit comes from thinking about processes holistically," Drews said. "Instead of asking an AI tool to help you write a single blog post, think about building a process you can use for this purpose repeatedly."

The setup takes longer upfront. But once a Playbook is running, it delivers with greater efficiency, consistency, and confidence than any one-off prompt could.

Ready for an AI agent that actually moves your metrics? Meet Quill.