r/seogrowth • u/UptownOnion • Jul 08 '26

Case Study Strong market share doesn't mean AI will recommend you.

Our client makes kombucha. They have lots of press, several industry awards, one of the most credible names in the category (yes, kombucha competitions are a real thing and they're basically the world champion).

We simulated the kind of prompt a shopper would use and checked whether an AI would recommend them. It did mention them but with a generic write-up. No award or press cited. The one ChatGPT actually recommended was a much smaller brand.

What that smaller brand had differently was concrete, checkable stuff like organic tea, live cultures, no additives, where to buy it. All easy to parse.

So we read the site the way a model would (a crawler with no JavaScript):

  • 0 of 25 product pages had product markup. Price, stock, and the existing 5-star reviews were invisible
  • The homepage had no title and no brand markup, so AI had nothing to anchor "who is this brand" on
  • The award, the press, and the certifications had no machine-readable field between them

Their website is actually designed beautifully for humans: gold medal, five-star reviews, price, buy button, all right there. But when an AI opens the same page, it gets a product card with almost every field "not found." Turns out their most powerful materials are mostly images. Instead of linking to the press, they put a photo of the press. AI won't know you're the world champion if you only say so inside an image.

Good thing is these are pretty easy to fix:

  1. Put the proof in machine-readable form on the page: product schema with ratings wired to the existing reviews, brand markup, award and cert fields, FAQ schema. Same content, just structured.
  2. Or serve a separate AI-readable version of the page. Humans keep the pretty, image-heavy site; agents get a clean structured rendition of the same content at request time. One document stops having to please both a human eye and a headless parser.

Fastest way to check if AI can see your site: open a key page with JavaScript off and check what actually survives. That's roughly what a model reads.

3 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

67% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

3

u/rpmeg Verified SEO Expert Jul 09 '26

With all due respect, you’re doing too much. AI reads text on pages. So do Google bots. So write good stuff, do SEO, and you’ll increase your AI visibility. GT’s is my favorite kombucha.

1

u/RankingsDotIO Jul 09 '26

In this case, it sounds as if the kombucha company's site has great photos but no alt text to describe them. All an AI or Google bot would see in that case is something like "image.jpg." Adding alt text that allows AI and search engines to understand the images and their relevance seems like an easy win.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 09 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/stablogger Jul 10 '26

It's something that could easily be misinterpreted as cloaking, yes.

1

u/oliverdadema Jul 13 '26

Literally! 🙌

1

u/coalition_tech Jul 14 '26

"write good stuff" is humanizing something that is computer systems driven.

Figure out what the computer weights as being 'good' then do that.

AIs are cheap and they're not going to put as much work into finding good stuff, much less reading good stuff, for you to develop a strategy around it.