How FIFO Careers grew to 8,000+ visits a month in five months, and got cited by ChatGPT

Why FIFO is a strong niche

FIFO Careers is a board for fly-in fly-out (FIFO) jobs: roles at remote mines and projects where workers fly to site for a block of shifts, then fly home. It's a strong niche for a job board, for five reasons:

• The pay attracts job seekers. Mining pays more than any other industry in Australia. In May 2026, full-time adults in mining earned an average of $3,224 a week in ordinary time, about 55% more than the all-industry average of $2,084, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Some entry-level site roles on FIFO Careers advertise around $80,000: in Cooper's salary guide, service attendants from $78,000 and a village cleaner at $82,300.
• The roster frees up time. Work comes in blocks of long shifts on site, then days at home. On a week on, week off roster, workers spend half the year at home. The time away is hard on families and mental health, though, and Cooper's guide to FIFO pros and cons covers both sides.
• It draws people from overseas. In the last four weeks, about 43% of FIFO Careers visits came from outside Australia, led by the US, UK and New Zealand. Their questions about work rights and sponsorship are what Cooper's visa and sponsorship guide is for.
• Employers keep hiring. Mining employs around 300,000 people, and 9 of its 11 key occupations face skills shortages, according to AUSMASA's 2026 workforce report. The Minerals Council of Australia cites projections of up to 35,400 more jobs by 2028.
• Job seekers have questions as well as applications. Many people looking for FIFO work have never done it, so the niche is as much about answers as listings.

Competing with SEEK on a new domain

Australian job search has a clear leader. SEEK has been around for nearly 30 years and, by its 2026 annual report, 91% of Australians know the brand unprompted. It also owns Jora, and competes with Indeed and LinkedIn.

FIFO Careers launched at the end of May 2026 on a brand-new domain into that market. It couldn't beat SEEK on volume: SEEK shows thousands of FIFO results, FIFO Careers lists 905. It could be more useful to someone looking for FIFO work.

FIFO work has its own language and its own questions. What's the difference between FIFO, DIDO (drive-in drive-out) and BIBO (bus-in bus-out)? Is a 2:1 roster (two weeks on site, one week home) or an 8:6 roster (eight days on, six off) better for a young family? Are travel days paid? A general board treats “FIFO” as a keyword. FIFO Careers covers only FIFO work, with the answers next to the jobs.

A full board from the first week

A new job board has a chicken-and-egg problem. Candidates don't come back to an empty board, employers don't take a board seriously without candidates, and neither Google nor ChatGPT recommends a site with nothing on it.

When Cooper created the board, Cavuno's Backfill used its FIFO focus to find matching roles on employers' own careers pages. It imported about 580 jobs in the first week and 3,598 since launch, expiring each one when it closes. Cooper hasn't entered a job by hand.

Why new job boards struggle to rank

Jobs fill the board, but jobs alone don't earn rankings. New sites often get some early visibility in Google that doesn't last. In our support work we see some new boards lose much of it after the first few months.

Two things raise the bar for a job board. Most of its listings also appear somewhere else, so the listings don't set it apart. And job search fits Google's definition of “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) topics: ones that could significantly affect people's health, financial stability or safety. For those topics, Google says its systems give even more weight to content with strong E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust. E-E-A-T isn't a single ranking factor or a checklist.

Many FIFO guides fall squarely in that category. People ask about pay, tax deductions, visas, medicals and safety on remote sites, and a wrong answer can cost them money or a job.

FIFO Careers didn't lose its early traffic. Its visits rose every month. Here is the work Cooper did during that growth.

How FIFO Careers earns trust

Cooper runs FIFO Careers and writes its guides. Here is what he did, and why each step matters:

• A named author. All 30 guides are credited to Cooper. His author profile says he is the founder and editor and explains how he researches. Cavuno adds author structured data to every guide, so search engines can connect the guides to him.
• Checkable sources. Together, the guides link readers to 89 pages on 26 Australian government websites, including Fair Work, the Australian Taxation Office and Safe Work Australia.
• Original data. His salary guide analyses 974 live FIFO Careers jobs, 162 of which disclosed pay. A dated market snapshot shows which roles, locations and employers are hiring. Data drawn from his own listings gives other sites something original to cite and link to.
• Clear about aggregated jobs. The About page says why the site exists, where its jobs come from, how each listing is checked and when closed roles are removed. That answers the first question a careful reader, or Google, has about an aggregator.
• Dated, current content. Every guide shows when it was published, and the pay examples are tied to a date. Backfill removes closed jobs, so the board isn't full of dead listings.
• A real presence. FIFO Careers has a LinkedIn company page and a Facebook page, linked from the site.

Cooper drafts with AI and checks every figure against its source before he publishes. In July he connected Codex to his board through the Cavuno API, and went from 6 guides in five weeks to 15 in the next 25 days. He now also uses the Cavuno connector for Claude, which runs on Cavuno's Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. The assistant drafts posts straight into the blog, and Cooper checks the facts, edits and publishes them.

None of this is new. It is search engine optimization (SEO) done properly, and Cavuno's founder support, included on every plan, gives Cooper advice on what to work on next. Our guide to E-E-A-T for job boards covers each signal in detail.

ChatGPT visitors apply more often

ChatGPT sends FIFO Careers fewer visitors than search engines do, but they are much more likely to apply. In the last four weeks, 20% of ChatGPT visits led to at least one apply click, against 9% of visits from search engines. The gap holds on visits that landed straight on a job page: 21% from ChatGPT against 6% from search.

ChatGPT sent 11% of visits but 19% of apply clicks: 242 of 1,253. Most of those visitors were local: 59% of ChatGPT visits came from Australia. An apply click records someone following a job's apply link to the employer; the application itself happens on the employer's site.

ChatGPT's visitors mostly skip the homepage. In the last four weeks, 669 of its 917 visits landed straight on an individual job page, across 224 different jobs. Many were entry-level roles, like a trainee underground truck driver at Westgold Resources or a driller's offsider at Swick Mining Services. Almost every one of these visits carried ChatGPT's own utm_source=chatgpt.com tag, which it adds to links in its answers. The data shows which jobs people reached from ChatGPT, not the questions they asked.

It started early. ChatGPT began sending visitors in June, within weeks of launch, and in July it brought in 383 of 1,695 visits, almost a quarter, while search traffic was still building.

“I thought all the traffic would come from Google. ChatGPT turned up much sooner than I expected, and the people it sends apply more often.”

Other AI assistants send visitors too, but ChatGPT sends almost all of them: 917 of the 939 AI-assistant visits in the last four weeks.

AEO built into every board

Cooper never treated answer engine optimization (AEO) as a separate project, and he didn't need to. As Graphite's Ethan Smith puts it, great SEO is free AEO: most of what helps a page rank on Google also helps it get found through ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini.

Two things matter more for AI assistants than for Google. They answer longer, more specific questions, so the long tail matters more: in four weeks ChatGPT sent visitors to 224 different FIFO Careers job pages. And they cite only a few sources per answer, so being one of them matters more than ranking. The analytics show where ChatGPT's visitors arrived, not why it chose each page.

Every Cavuno board covers the on-site side of both:

• Long-tail pages built for you: a page for every job, plus pages for each location, role category and salary, without writing them by hand.
• JobPosting structured data on every job, in the format Google uses for job search results.
• Indexing notifications whenever a job is posted, updated or closed: to Google through its Indexing API, and to Bing and other search engines through IndexNow. The search engines still decide when to crawl, but they hear about new and closed roles straight away instead of waiting to find them.
• Fresh listings, because Backfill expires jobs when they close.
• Author structured data on every guide, so search engines can tell who wrote it.
• AI traffic as its own analytics channel, which is how Cooper can see that ChatGPT visits lead to apply clicks more than twice as often.

The rest of AEO happens off-site, in the mentions and links that tell assistants whom others trust. That is Cooper's next step. Our guide to AEO for job boards covers both sides.

Google search grew fastest

FIFO Careers connected Google Search Console to Cavuno in July. Since then, weekly Google clicks have risen about tenfold, from 101 in the week of 13 July to 1,031 in the week of 26 October. In October, Search Console recorded 3,374 clicks from 166,000 impressions, up from 1,012 clicks and 75,000 impressions in August.

Counting every search engine, search sent 4,244 visits in the last four weeks, about half of the total. Search works differently from ChatGPT: more than half of those visits started on the homepage, and about one in seven on one of Cooper's guides. Since launch, FIFO Careers has had 19,600 visits and 2,809 apply clicks.

A site he can change himself

In September Cooper rebuilt FIFO Careers' site with Cavuno's AI Builder. The AEO foundations carried over automatically, and he makes changes by describing them.

“The AI Builder is really good. I'm honestly surprised how easy it is to make changes. I just describe what I want and it's done.”

What comes next

For now the focus is on building traffic: more guides, more roles and more FIFO questions answered. The board already has 313 registered candidates and 70 active job alerts, and it sends employers more than 1,250 apply clicks a month.

The next step is off-site: links and mentions from other sites, which both Google and AI assistants read as others vouching for the board. The obvious places to start are job board directories, training providers and the employers whose application pages FIFO Careers links to. His salary data is the kind of material that industry blogs and local news link to. Our link building guide covers the rest.

The split of work is the lesson. Cavuno filled the board from day one and handled the technical side of search. That left Cooper free to do the part only he can: answer FIFO questions well. These results describe one board's first five months; they don't isolate the effect of any single feature.