Prithvi Pujari joins Decathlon as SEO manager

BENGALURU: Prithvi Pujari has swapped agency life for the client side, joining Decathlon as SEO manager in Bengaluru. It caps a fast moving run for a specialist who has spent the better part of a decade proving that organic traffic, done properly, can move revenue needles as hard as any paid campaign.

Pujari arrives fresh from Pepper Content, where he served as SEO growth lead steering organic strategy for eight US based clients. The headline number there is hard to ignore: a 167 per cent jump in monthly organic traffic within eight months for one American SaaS brand, contributing to a 6x annual traffic surge significant enough to be written up in a CMO endorsed case study. He also led Pepper’s first full scale generative engine optimisation rollout, lifting AI platform domain coverage by 68 per cent and brand visibility by 45.8 per cent across ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overview and Perplexity, precisely the kind of skillset marketers are now scrambling to hire for as search shifts from blue links to chatbots.

Before Pepper, Pujari spent six and a half years at Performics India, part of the Publicis Groupe, rising to senior business manager and running a 14 member team delivering search and generative engine optimisation for ITC’s food portfolio, a 13 million rupee account spanning India, Europe and Africa. His scorecard there reads like a growth marketer’s highlight reel: a 2.3x revenue jump for ITC Store, a tenfold rise in organic traffic for B-Natural within six months, and an 86 per cent organic click uplift for Pampers across seven European markets. He also engineered the app store optimisation strategy behind the Pampers India app, driving over 700,000 downloads and a top three trending slot on Google Play within a month, no small achievement in a crowded app ecosystem.

Pujari’s earlier stints, at General Data and Lodha Group, gave him grounding in both digital marketing and direct sales before he found his calling in search. For Decathlon, a brand that lives and dies by discoverability across a sprawling product catalogue, bringing in an operator with proven SEO and GEO chops looks like a shrewd bet as search behaviour keeps evolving.