From WordPress to AI-cited in twelve months.
A high-traffic retailer was carrying a slow WordPress site that Google had started to overlook and AI tools could not read. We rebuilt it as a hand-coded static site with full schema, then optimized every page to be quoted by answer engines. Twelve months on, the growth curve still has not leveled off.
The site was built to be maintained, not found.
It ran on a heavy WordPress theme with a stack of plugins. Pages loaded slowly, the markup was messy, and there was no structured data for search engines or AI models to parse. Rankings had plateaued.
Worse, when customers asked ChatGPT or Copilot about the products this retailer sold, the site was nowhere in the answer. Every month of that was traffic and revenue going to competitors who were simply easier for a machine to read.
We rebuilt the site from the ground up as hand-coded static HTML. No page builder, no plugin bloat, just clean semantic markup served fast from the edge. On top of that we layered the things search engines and answer engines actually reward:
- Full structured data on every page (Organization, Product, FAQ, Breadcrumb) so crawlers and AI models read the site as data, not guesswork.
- Answer-engine optimization: content restructured into the clear, quotable question-and-answer format that ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot pull from.
- A technical foundation built for speed: static delivery, edge caching, and clean internal linking.
- An AI-crawler-friendly setup with llms.txt, so the models that summarize the web are pointed straight at the right pages.
The curve has not stopped climbing.
Search impressions climbed from a flat baseline to 667,000 over twelve months, with 20,500 organic clicks and a 109% jump in users across the most recent 90-day window. More telling for where search is heading: the site was cited 945 times in Microsoft Copilot and started surfacing in answers across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
Search growth after the rebuild
Google Search Console · 12 monthsCited by
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