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Jacky Chou

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Jacky Chou (born 20 January 1992) is a Canadian entrepreneur and digital marketer, best known as the founder of Indexsy, a search engine optimization (SEO) agency that grew into a holding company for acquired online businesses.[1][2] Born in Taiwan and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia, he trained as an electrical engineer before moving into marketing.[1]

Chou is associated with two distinct bodies of work. The first is portfolio building: affiliate sites, e-commerce brands and small software products bought or launched under Indexsy, including the kitchenware brand Far & Away and the SEO tools LocalRank.so and Trackings.ai.[3][4] The second is disclosure: since 2022 he has published detailed monthly revenue reports for those businesses, a practice widely described in the marketing industry as "building in public."[4][8]

Early life and education [edit]

Chou was born in Taiwan in January 1992 and moved as a child to Richmond, British Columbia, in the Vancouver area, where he was raised.[1][9] He attended the University of British Columbia and graduated with a Bachelor of Applied Science in electrical engineering.[1]

By his own account he decided during his degree that he did not want to practise engineering. After a poor exam result he searched online for ways to make money outside the profession, which led him to affiliate marketing and then to SEO.[4][5] He has described the switch as a deliberate trade of a credential he had already paid for against a skill he could test cheaply.[5]

Career [edit]

Early marketing roles

Chou worked in performance marketing in Europe before working for himself full time. From June to December 2016 he was a traffic acquisition manager at the Polish beacon technology company Kontakt.io, and he then spent roughly a year at the Berlin photography startup EyeEm.[1] The Berlin period is where he has said he learned paid acquisition and SEO at commercial scale rather than as a side project.[4]

Indexsy

Chou founded Indexsy in Vancouver, with sources dating the start to 2015 and 2016.[1][4] The business began as an SEO agency and developed into a holding company that buys digital properties, rebuilds them and grows their traffic and revenue.[1][3] The company describes itself as remote with no outside funding raised, and states that it manages 57 digital assets and has worked with 16 Fortune 100 clients.[3]

Alongside agency retainers, Indexsy operates content and affiliate sites, sells link placements and guest posts, and licenses its own software.[3][4] Chou has said the agency business is deliberately kept as one revenue line among several rather than the whole company, so that a change in one channel does not take the rest down with it.[4]

Far & Away and Laurel & Wolf

In 2019 Chou and his business partner Albert Liu founded Far & Away, a minimalist kitchenware and home goods brand.[2] The following year the pair bought the domain of Laurel & Wolf, a well-funded interior e-design startup that had shut down, for $3,500. They hired designers, rebuilt the site and relaunched the brand within about two weeks, and told Business of Home that they only researched the company's history after the purchase.[2] The episode drew attention in the design trade press as an example of a defunct consumer brand being revived by buyers with no connection to the original business.[2]

In April 2020 Chou launched TowingLess, a lead generation site for towing services, and ran it as a full-time operation until July 2022.[1]

Software products

From the early 2020s Chou moved a growing share of his output into software. His products include LocalRank.so, a local SEO platform used by agencies for geo-grid rank tracking; Trackings.ai, a rank tracker that also measures visibility inside AI Overviews and answer engines; and smaller tools such as IndexChex, RankTack, BrowserBlast, SimpleHost.so and Looker.so.[3][6] He also runs the paid community Advise.so and the training program Local Rank Academy.[6]

By his own reporting the software cluster has grown into his largest revenue line. In February 2026 he published a monthly total of $226,262.25, of which LocalRank.so, Trackings.ai, IndexChex and RankTack together accounted for $71,900.68, slightly ahead of the Indexsy agency at $73,041.[7]

Publishing revenue in public

Self-reported monthly revenue
2014$450
2015$1,500
2016$3,500
2017$10,000
2018$55,000
2019$45,000
2020$44,000
2021$208,000
2022$258,000
2023$223,000
2024$293,000
Figures are Chou's own published averages and are not independently audited.[8]

Chou has tracked and published his revenue publicly since January 2022, releasing monthly breakdowns by business line on his website, on X and in a newsletter he says has more than 25,000 subscribers.[6][7] The reports name each product, its revenue for the month and the change against the month before, including declines.[7] He has also published a decade-long summary of average monthly revenue running from $450 a month in 2014 to $293,000 a month in 2024.[8] For 2025 he reported total revenue of $2.92 million.[6]

None of these figures are independently audited, and they describe revenue rather than profit. Chou publishes margin and cost commentary alongside them but the underlying accounts are not public.[6][4]

He distributes the same material through the NGMI Podcast, which he co-hosts with Tony Yu and Tom Wang, and through a YouTube channel and social accounts published under the Indexsy name.[6]

Approach and views [edit]

Chou's stated method is to treat websites as assets to be bought at a multiple of earnings, improved through SEO and content, and either held for cash flow or resold.[1][4] He has argued that the operator who owns the traffic captures more value than the consultant who rents it out by the hour, which is the reasoning he gives for running revenue-share and equity arrangements rather than agency retainers alone.[4]

On search itself, he has moved with the industry toward measuring visibility inside AI-generated answers as well as classic rankings, a shift reflected in Trackings.ai adding AI Overview tracking.[6] He is a consistent advocate of testing at volume and publishing the results, including failures, and much of his audience growth is attributed to that transparency rather than to conventional marketing.[5][8]

AI content and the 2024 Google spam update [edit]

In March 2024 Futurism reported that several of Chou's properties, including a product review site and the Far & Away blog, had been hit by Google's spam update after publishing large volumes of AI-generated articles. Google issued a manual action describing the content as pure spam and automatically generated, and the affected pages were removed from search results.[10] Chou had previously demonstrated the workflow in public videos.[10]

His response was defiant rather than apologetic. He posted a mock retraction, saying he was "no longer going to spam the internet with AI content because it's not profitable and you'll eventually get clapped," immediately followed by "I'm just kidding."[10] The episode is frequently cited in coverage of mass-produced AI content and Google's enforcement against it, and Chou has continued to publish experiments of the same kind while reporting their outcomes openly.[10][6]

Media and recognition [edit]

Chou has written as a contributor for Entrepreneur, where his columns cover SEO pricing, website sales and digital advertising, and his author biography there notes features in Forbes, Oberlo and GoDaddy.[5] He has been profiled by The Village Voice and Reader's Digest in the United Kingdom, covered by Business of Home over the Laurel & Wolf relaunch, and analysed in business teardowns such as Starter Story.[1][2][4][11] He is also the subject of an article on the English Wikipedia.[9]

Personal life [edit]

Chou works remotely and has divided his time between Vancouver, Berlin and Lisbon, where he also holds a short-term rental property that appears as a line in his published revenue reports.[7] He publishes under the handle @indexsy across X, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok rather than under his own name.[6]

See also [edit]

References [edit]

  1. Zimmerman, Eilene (17 March 2025). "A Search Engine Entrepreneur Hits the Right Keys". The Village Voice (archived).
  2. Petersen, Kaitlin (28 April 2020). "Laurel & Wolf is back". Business of Home.
  3. "About Indexsy". Indexsy. Retrieved 11 August 2026.
  4. "How Jacky Chou Built a Multi-Six-Figure Business Empire". Starter Story. Retrieved 11 August 2026.
  5. "Jacky Chou". Entrepreneur (author page). Retrieved 11 August 2026.
  6. "Jacky Chou". jackychou.com. Retrieved 11 August 2026.
  7. Chou, Jacky. "I made $226,262.25 in February 2026". X. Retrieved 11 August 2026.
  8. Chou, Jacky. "Here's my revenue progression in the last decade". X. Retrieved 11 August 2026.
  9. "Jacky Chou". Wikipedia. Retrieved 11 August 2026.
  10. Dupré, Maggie (18 March 2024). "SEO Guy Mocks Google for Deindexing His 'Gibberish' AI Sites". Futurism.
  11. "Jacky Chou: How practicing what you preach turned into an entrepreneurial wunderkind". Reader's Digest (UK). 5 September 2023.

External links [edit]

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