Rankings up 4x in a month, revenue still $200/month: the programmatic SEO ledger of a Brazilian company lookup site

CNPJ Aberto (cnpjaberto.com.br) research report

Channel: web (pool C1, matches TrustMRR) | Research date 2026-11-07

One line

A Brazilian company (CNPJ) lookup site. It turns the federal tax office's (Receita Federal) monthly public full dataset (70M+ companies) into free lookup pages, then sells a Pro subscription (US$10/month abroad, R$449/year; includes ownership networks, bulk lookup, CSV export, REST API at 10k calls/day, and an MCP server). It registered 2026 years ago in April, and its October Tranco rank jumped from 917k to 116k.

Verdict

The traffic came up. The business didn't. Its traffic comes from a tidy programmatic SEO setup: a curated sitemap of about 480k URLs, AI search crawlers allowed, a government open-data portal reuse badge, open-source SDK/MCP, and backlinks earned by submitting to API lists. But in the same month a whole batch of Brazilian CNPJ lookup sites also rose in Tranco rank, so a large share of its climb is the whole category rising together, not just its own doing. In the month its Tranco rank rose 4×, revenue only went from $189 to $211, with MRR hovering around $200 and 37–38 subscriptions. Its differentiator is "a cheap all-in-one Pro subscription plus AI-facing MCP/API," but that isn't why traffic rose, and it hasn't become money yet.

1. Basic facts

Traffic lives on the web. It has no app. GitHub has a repo for a Chrome extension (cnpj-chrome-extension), but I found no listing in the Chrome Web Store. The npm package cnpjaberto had 99 downloads in the last 30 days (npm API), so actual SDK/MCP usage is very low.

2. Competitors

CNPJ lookup in Brazil is an old, crowded niche. The Receita Federal has always released full data monthly, so anyone can build a site on it.

Bottom line: it has plenty of competitors, not none. The leaders (cnpj.biz, Econodata) are 3–6 times its size.

3. Growth tactics (evidence)

1. Programmatic SEO, but not every one of 70M companies is pushed out (confirmed). sitemap.xml lists 231 sub-sitemaps, about 479k URLs in total (2026-11-07 counted by crawling each one):
   • cnpj/demanda/*: companies with search demand, sharded by founding year and month; the legacy shard alone has 23,791 entries;
   • cnpj/capital/*: companies picked out by registered capital;
   • fundos.xml: 33,904 investment funds;
   • There is also bolsa (listed companies), cnaes (industries), and locais (states / cities).

This indexes only the pages that have demand and value, avoiding being judged thin content. There are also landing pages by profession (/solucoes/advogados, contadores, analistas-credito, jornalistas…), a "look up CNPJ by company name" page, a /panorama statistics page, and an English version at /en.

1. Generative engine optimization (GEO) (confirmed). robots.txt explicitly allows OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Claude-SearchBot, Claude-User and PerplexityBot, and only blocks parameterized URLs and the advanced search page.
2. Getting government endorsement and backlinks (confirmed). It registered a "data reuse" entry on dados.gov.br (reuso/246), and every page footer carries "Iniciativa catalogada no Portal Brasileiro de Dados Abertos". It also opened dados.cnpjaberto.com.br, offering open data downloads to attract backlinks.
3. Developer channels and link building (confirmed). The GitHub account cnpjaberto was created in 2026-04-24, has 6 repos, and 3 of them are forks of public-apis-style API lists (public-apis, public-apis-1, APIs-PublicasBrasil), the classic "submit a PR to get listed" backlink move. SDKs were published to PyPI and npm with a bundled MCP server (released 2026-04-29), and a blog post covers "checking CNPJ in Claude" (2026-04-28). Usage is still small: npm 30 days with 99 downloads, repo with 0 stars.
4. Social content (confirmed, small impact). Instagram @cnpjabertobr keeps posting marketing content (search results show posts like "Pode falar com essa empresa"), the Facebook page username is @lista.de.cnpj, and the X account @cnpjabertobr has only 1 followers (TrustMRR). x-radar shows 0 mentions of cnpjaberto in the last 180 days.
5. Paid ads: nothing in our ad library, and the ads field on the data card is empty. Not finding it doesn't prove there was none, but there's no evidence.
6. HN / Product Hunt / media: nothing found.

How much of the Tranco climb is its own?

In the same period (October), several sites in the same niche surged together:

The long-established leaders cnpj.biz and Econodata barely moved, and Casa dos Dados only rose slightly. All of these started around 310k, a suspiciously uniform pattern that looks more like a change on the ranking data source or search engine side (such as a Google update, or AI crawlers or API calls being counted in the ranking) than growth specific to CNPJ Aberto. Meanwhile its CrUX Brazil bucket has stayed flat from 5 to September (October's CrUX isn't out yet). Per Tranco's notes, climbs lag real traffic by 1–2 weeks, so real users may have grown, but revenue barely followed.

4. Why users come and why they pay

• Why people come: long-tail searches like "consulta CNPJ" or a specific company name, landing on a company detail page. The need is rigid: lawyers, accountants, credit reviewers, journalists, and salespeople doing due diligence and finding leads.
• Why people pay: Pro bundles the shareholder network, PDF reports, bulk lookup, CSV export (30k rows a month) and API (10k calls a day), at US$10 a month or R$449 billed yearly. It's cheaper and simpler than Casa dos Dados, which charges per credit, and CNPJá, which charges by API plan. But only 37–38 people pay, so conversion is very low.

5. Differentiation

• Pricing and packaging: one Pro subscription includes all tools and the API, while competitors mostly charge per call, per credit, or sell the API separately.
• Built for AI: MCP server, Python/TS SDKs, and AI crawlers explicitly allowed.
• Trust packaging: a dados.gov.br registration badge, a more modern product UI than the old sites (the homepage shows a real Pro profile card from Magazine Luiza), and an English version.
• Is that what drove it? No. The traffic comes from programmatic SEO plus a rising niche overall. MCP and API usage is tiny (npm 99 installs per month), and free open-source MCPs already exist. The differentiation so far supports only about $200 a month in revenue.

6. How visible it is

• Revenue is public on TrustMRR but small (cumulative $943, ranked #4122). The X account has 1 followers, no media or major account has written about it, and x-radar shows 0 mentions. Basically, almost nobody knows about it yet.
• The niche itself is well known, though: a Reddit r/MicroSaaSBR post is titled "Os dados abertos de CNPJ da Receita são uma mina pra prospecção B2B…", and r/brdev often discusses CNPJ APIs.

7. Copycats

• cnpjzip.com: registered 2026-10-22 (Verisign RDAP). Its structure closely resembles CNPJ Aberto: /busca-avancada, state browsing at /empresas/<uf>, a "Fonte e competência" source label, and a note on shareholder relations "to avoid confusion with same-name companies". It may have been modeled on it, unverified.
• maiscnpj.com.br: registered 2026-04-04, launched almost at the same time. It looks like a parallel new entrant rather than one that copied it.

8. What others can learn

1. For "government open data + programmatic SEO", only put entities with demand into the sitemap (filtered by search demand, registered capital, funds, listed companies). That's less likely to get demoted by search engines than mass-publishing every page.
2. Register for reuse on the government open data portal to get an official badge and backlinks, and open an open-data download subdomain to attract links.
3. Give AI search crawlers their own explicit allow in robots.txt while blocking parameterized URLs.
4. A cheap all-in-one subscription (tools + API), against competitors that charge per call or per credit.
5. The cautionary lesson: traffic rank rose 4x, but revenue rose only 12%. Tools like this usually make money from ads or high-ticket B2B sales, and self-serve subscriptions at US$10 convert poorly. This playbook is also already crowded in Brazil; rebuilding it in another country or language only makes sense where similar open business registry data exists (such as the UK's Companies House or France's SIRENE, though people are already building on both).

9. Still unclear

• The reason the whole niche rose together in October (a Google update? AI crawlers or API calls counted in Tranco?) has no direct evidence.
• October's CrUX isn't published yet, so how much real user traffic grew is unknown.
• Who the founder is: the registrant on registro.br is Felipe Caon, but several people with the same name appear online (a Recife lawyer, an Instagram account "Empreendedor & Atleta", etc.), and it can't be matched to one.
• Whether it ran ads: nothing in our library, but that doesn't rule it out.
• Whether cnpjzip.com deliberately copied it: unverified.

Sources

• Website cnpjaberto.com.br/ (/en, /sobre, /planos, /robots.txt, /sitemap.xml)
• Blog cnpjaberto.com.br/blog/consultar-cnpj-no-claude-com-mcp (2026-04-28)
• TrustMRR trustmrr.com/startup/cnpj-aberto (updated 2026-11-07)
• dados.gov.br reuse registration dados.gov.br/dados/reuso/246
• registro.br RDAP (cnpjaberto, maiscnpj, etc.); Verisign RDAP (cnpjzip.com)
• GitHub github.com/cnpjaberto ;npm downloads API;PyPI cnpjaberto
• Internal DB: traffic (rank_day, crux_domain), indie (product), chromestore (item)
• Competitor pricing: cnpja.com/pricing, leadjet.com.br/casa-dos-dados/
• Reddit: r/MicroSaaSBR 1uo5ghz, r/mcp 1nxvocl / 1rmq0ep, r/brdev