My Mom's Shop After a Summer of AI Search Work: Google Visits Up 2.4x, Online Sales Down 24%

From July 5 to October 3, 2026, Google sent my mom's boutique 2.4 times as many visits as it did in the spring. Copilot cited her pages 399 times, and her online sales still fell 24%. Here's what I did, what moved and what didn't, so you can judge whether it's worth running on your own shop. Sales show up as an index, because it's her money. And yes, I sell this kind of work.

The shop and the windows

Krafty Bandit is a handmade and boutique shop in Belle Vernon, Pennsylvania, and most of its sales happen at the register. The website runs on Shopify and sells part of the same stock online. In March and April, search engines sent it about 75 visits a month. I started the work in the second half of June.

What I changed

I wrote guide pages for the questions her customers ask in the store: quilt care, how Judy Blue, Kancan and Risen denim fit, what to send for a memory quilt or bear, and how to pick a candle scent. Each one answers one question start to finish. I added FAQ schema to them, the code that tells search engines and AI tools which questions a page answers.

Then the catalog. I cleaned up product titles, image alt text, image filenames and the feed fields Google Shopping wants (color, gender, age group, condition), and redirected product URLs that changed. On September 13 I rewrote 817 meta descriptions and read back all 1,210 active products. Every new batch of stock gets the same checklist. Sweep #13 went out October 4 and covered 72 new products.

Google search

Clicks went up 3.7 times and impressions about 8 times, so click-through rate dropped from 4.8% to 2.2%.

Search Console has no 2025 data for this site, so Shopify's count of visits from search engines gives you the year-over-year view instead:

July through September went from 131 search visits in 2025 to 691 in 2026. Some of that is season, since fall picks up every year, but last year the jump from spring to summer was about 1.4 times. This year it was about 2.5 times.

Searches that didn't use the shop's name

If you search "Krafty Bandit," you already know the shop. So I filtered Search Console to queries without "krafty":

That's roughly page three to page two. Some of those searches: judy blue jeans near me, craft stores near me, clothing stores near me, embroidery near me, sewing classes, blue sky patchwork overalls, huckle bee farms honey. You can run the same filter on your site: in the Performance report, add a Query filter and pick "Queries not containing" with your brand name.

Here's where you can see some of the biggest gains in impressions, by page:

Contact and visit are the pages you open before you drive to a store. In-store sales were already climbing in March, though, so I'm not crediting the website for them. I wrote about why walk-ins hide from analytics in your best local wins are invisible in your analytics.

AI answers

Search Console's generative AI report counts impressions only, and the shop went from 128 there in the spring to 1,600 in the summer.

On Microsoft's side, Clarity's AI Visibility report counted 399 Copilot citations of her pages from July 5 to October 3. On the questions where Copilot cited her, she got 28.9% of the citations. The quilt care guide alone earned 260, about two of every three. The denim fit guide earned 62 and the memory quilt guide 25, and the top question was "quilt care instructions," with 140 citations.

Citation tracking only started partway through the spring, so I can't give you a spring number to put next to 399. My first case study on this shop covers June and July in its own windows, so don't add the two together.

Don't expect AI citations to fill your cart. ChatGPT sent just 15 visits this summer, up from 5. GA4 counted 46 sessions from AI assistants, up from 4, and Clarity counted 74 AI-referred sessions.

Google Shopping and on-site behavior

I only have a 28-day Merchant Center view, September 6 to October 3 against the 28 days before:

Same exposure, nearly double the click rate. If you sell on Google Shopping, that's your number to watch. I'll pull a longer window before I give the cleanup credit for it.

Site-wide in Clarity, with bots excluded:

More depth, more return visits, and more people bouncing fast. Spring also had more paid Facebook traffic (1,432 paid social sessions in GA4, against 647 this summer), so the mix changed. In GA4, organic search sessions went from 143 to 583, and Organic Shopping went from 22 to 255.

Online sales didn't follow

Search traffic went up and online sales went down 24%. Orders that started with a search click stayed flat. Online is a small slice of her business, so a few orders swing that number hard, but it's still the wrong direction. If you only watched traffic, you'd call this summer a win.

Against last summer, total sales are at 233 with 2025 set to 100, in-store at 234 and online at 188. That's mostly the register, and the register was climbing before I got there.

What I'm taking into the fall

If you take one thing from this, pages that answer one real question carried the AI results. The quilt care guide carried Copilot, and the denim fit guide showed up in Google search, Google's AI features and Copilot.

Traffic came and online sales didn't. Next up is conversion work on the site, plus the 362 items Merchant Center flags, including 41 with no product image.

Run this on your own shop

Write one page for each question your customers ask you in person. If you sell mostly at the register, watch your contact and visit pages in Search Console. Filter out your brand name to see whether new people are finding you. Check your Merchant Center click-through rate before and after you touch your titles. And keep your sales numbers next to your traffic numbers, so a good traffic month can't hide a flat sales month.

I publish each month's numbers in The Receipts, including months like this one.

Questions about this case study

Did the SEO work increase Krafty Bandit's sales?

Not online, yet. Online store sales fell 24% from spring to summer 2026 while Google visits went up 2.4 times. Total sales rose 4%, mostly at the register, and in-store sales were already climbing in March 2026 before the work started.

Where do the AI citation numbers come from?

Microsoft Clarity's AI Visibility report, July 5 to October 3, 2026. It covers Copilot and its partner surfaces and can't see ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google. The Google numbers come from Search Console's generative AI report, which counts impressions only.

Why are there no dollar figures?

It's my mom's shop and her revenue. Sales are shown as an index with the earlier period set to 100, so you can see the direction and size of each change.