How GEO Drove a 1,276% spike in AI Traffic for Cheer Apparel Seller

Situation

A Cheer apparel customization store was facing growing pressure from AI-induced CTR declines and paid media overcrowding.

• Product-relevant queries were increasingly cannibalised by PPC, driving rising CPCs alongside a decline in clicks per search.
• Informational content was losing acquisition value as zero-click SERPs and AI overviews absorbed demand.
• The brand’s visibility within emerging answer engines and LLM interfaces was limited, reducing discoverability at the moment of intent.

The result was a shrinking organic opportunity space. followed by higher acquisition costs and growing dependency on paid channels.

Task

The objective was to inoculate the Cheer store’s organic traffic against zero-click outcomes and adapt the site for AI-mediated discovery. Specifically, the GEO initiative aimed to:

(a) Diversify search visibility across GUI and API-based LLM surfaces

(b) Improve model recall and prompt relevance

(c) Increase citation frequency within AI responses

(d) Reduce the negative CTR impact of ads and AI overviews

Success was to be measured by AI visibility growth, answer-engine traffic, and response detection rates.

Action

With these AI visibility objectives in mind, we then took the following steps

(i) We created clear AI-friendly accessibility directives in the robots.txt file. This helped prevent any incidental restriction of the site’s content to both AI agents and answer engine crawlers

(ii) We created an LLMs.txt file and uploaded it to the site’s root folder. The role of this file was to expose the information architecture of the site to LLM crawlers such that at inference time, they can access information about the site’s pages without having to expend crawl and rendering resources

(iii) We expanded our target keywords into the search queries and prompts they are most likely to be embedded in. This was then used to create

• New subheadings and paragraphs in existing blog posts
• FAQ copy on collection and product pages

(iv) We also extended the schema footprint of the website by embedding.

• Carousel and collection page schema on category pages
• Web page schema on product pages
• Keyword properties in organisation, product, and article schema snippets

(v) We added the Shopify knowledge base app and provided answers to agent-derived questions about the business and its products

(vi) We added lastmod attributes to the XML sitemap to amplify recency signals associated with the site’s content, thus improving mentions and citation frequency in AI responses

Result

The GEO initiative delivered decisive, measurable gains across AI discovery and engagement metrics:

(1) +11.9% increase in aggregate AI visibility (Rankscale)

(2) +26.1% uplift in AI response detection rates

(3) In GA4, users arriving from Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude grew by 1,276.74%, increasing from 43 users in Q4 2024 to 592 in Q4 2025.

Collectively, these gains validated the strategy’s effectiveness in offsetting zero-click erosion, reducing reliance on paid acquisition, and positioning Omni Cheer for sustained growth in AI-first search