This case study on SEO for renovation companies shows how a bathroom and kitchen renovation business with a showroom quadrupled its leads, grew on-site sales by 150%, and became one of the answers AI search gives homeowners.

Industry: Home Renovation, Bathroom & Kitchen, Showroom Retail
Services: SEO, GEO, Digital PR, Content Strategy, Link Building, Conversion Optimization

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Results at a glance

Leads: up 4X in the last six months

Sales on the site: up 150% versus the previous six months

Impressions in Google AI features: from 406 to 9.72K in three months, roughly a 24X increase

Average position: improved from 24 to 18.2

Impressions: up 30% versus the prior six months

Clicks: up 20% versus the prior six months

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The client: a renovation company competing on two fronts at once

Our client operates a bathroom and kitchen renovation business built around a physical showroom. They sell vanities, showers, bathtubs, and fixtures, and they also deliver the full service side of the business: interior design and complete bathroom and kitchen renovations.

That combination is a strength in the real world and a challenge online. They were competing against product retailers on one side and local contractors on the other, and they needed to win both kinds of searches. Someone pricing a vanity and someone looking for a renovation team are two very different buyers, arriving through two very different queries, and the site needed to serve them both. For confidentiality, we are presenting their results without naming the brand.

The challenge: strong offline reputation, weak search presence

The showroom did the convincing. The problem was getting enough of the right people to walk in or fill out a form in the first place.

When we started, the site averaged a search position of 24, which is deep into page three. Rankings clustered on broad, low-intent terms rather than the searches homeowners use when they are actually ready to buy a vanity or book a renovation consultation. High-intent pages for specific products and services either did not exist or were too thin to rank. Authority was limited, with little coverage or linking from the design, renovation, and home improvement world.

There was also a newer problem. Homeowners increasingly start renovation research by asking an AI assistant rather than typing a query, and the client was almost entirely absent from those answers.

The strategy: SEO and GEO run as one program

We built a combined SEO and GEO campaign. Traditional search optimization earns the rankings, and generative engine optimization makes sure the same content is structured, sourced, and trusted well enough for AI systems to cite it. The two reinforce each other, so we ran them together rather than treating AI visibility as a side project.

Research and competitive analysis

Before touching the site, we mapped the landscape the client was actually competing in.

• Competitive analysis across both product retailers and local renovation firms
• Keyword research split by buyer type, product searches versus service searches
• Prompt research to identify the questions homeowners ask AI assistants
• Ongoing tracking of both keyword rankings and AI prompt visibility

On-page optimization

We rebuilt the foundation so search engines and AI systems could understand every important page.

• Optimized titles, headings, and metadata across product and service pages
• Clear page structure and internal linking that channels authority where it matters
• Content formatted so key facts are easy to extract and cite
• Technical clean up covering structure, indexing, and page health

High-intent pages

We built the pages that capture buyers at the moment of decision, for specific products, specific services, and specific renovation needs, rather than leaving those searches to competitors.

Link building and digital PR

We grew authority with relevant placements rather than volume for its own sake.

• Digital PR campaigns that earned coverage and brand mentions
• Links from publishers in the renovation, interior design, and home improvement space
• Guest placements on topically related sites
• A natural, diversified profile built steadily over the program

Blog content

Consistent blog posting targeted the research and inspiration stage, answering the questions homeowners ask long before they book, and creating the kind of source material AI systems draw from.

Conversion optimization

Traffic only counts if it converts. We improved the paths from page to inquiry so that the additional visibility turned into booked consultations and showroom visits rather than passive browsing.

The results: six months of organic growth

Comparing the most recent six months against the previous six, visibility and traffic climbed together while the site moved up nearly six positions on average.

Average position: improved from 24.0 to 18.2, a gain of 5.8 spots

Impressions: 400K, up from 307K, an increase of 30%

Clicks: 4.66K, up from 3.9K, an increase of 20%

Average CTR: 1.2%, compared with 1.3%, holding steady as reach expanded

A quick note for the data minded. Average click through rate eased from 1.3% to 1.2% over the same window. That is expected here, and it is a healthy sign. As the site began ranking for a much wider set of queries, many entered at lower positions where clicks naturally start smaller, so the average spreads across far more reach. Total clicks still grew 20%, which is the metric that pays.

The GEO result: a 24X increase in AI visibility

The single most dramatic change was not in traditional search. It was in AI.

Impressions from Google AI features went from 406 in the previous three months to 9.72K in the most recent three months. That is close to a 24X increase, and it reflects the site moving from effectively invisible in AI answers to a regular source for renovation and product questions.

This matters more than a vanity metric. Renovation is a considered purchase with a long research phase, and homeowners are increasingly starting that research with an assistant instead of a search box. Being one of the sources those answers draw from puts the client in the conversation before competitors are even considered.

The outcome that matters: 4X leads and 150% more sales

Visibility is the means. Revenue is the point. Over the same six month period, the campaign delivered on both sides of this business, the service side and the product side.

Leads generated from the site: up 4X

Sales on the site: up 150%

Leads grew four times faster than traffic did. That gap is the conversion work paying off, better visibility bringing in the right people, and better pages turning them into inquiries.

It is worth sitting with those numbers together. Clicks rose 20%, but leads rose 4X and on-site sales rose 150%. Growth of that shape does not come from traffic volume alone. It comes from reaching buyers with real intent and then removing the friction between interest and action.

Why it worked

• SEO and GEO together. The same structure, authority, and content quality that earn rankings are what AI systems rely on, so one program produced gains in both channels.
• Two buyers, two paths. Separating product searches from renovation service searches meant each type of buyer landed on a page built for them.
• Intent over volume. High-intent pages and prompt-level research targeted people ready to act, which is why leads outpaced traffic by a wide margin.
• Conversion work compounds everything. Optimizing the path to inquiry multiplied the value of every visit the SEO and GEO work earned.

Want results like these?

If homeowners are searching for what you sell and you are not the answer they find, in Google or in AI, let us map the same kind of program to your market.

Book a call. Free strategy call, no obligation.

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Client name withheld for confidentiality. Search metrics are from the client’s Google Search Console for the periods indicated. Lead and sales growth reflect results attributed to the organic SEO, GEO, and conversion optimization program. Individual results vary based on market, competition, and starting point.

Ask ChatGPT for the best physiotherapist in your city and watch where the answer comes from. Almost never the clinics’ own websites. It pulls from a local magazine’s annual roundup, a Reddit thread from eight months ago, a Yelp category page, maybe a “top 10” post from a neighborhood blog nobody in the industry has heard of.

Those pages are the real battleground. You cannot edit them. You cannot buy your way onto most of them. And they decide who gets named when a buyer asks a machine for a recommendation.

Here is how the placement actually works.

The Citation Math Nobody Puts in a Pitch Deck

Muck Rack analyzed more than 25 million links cited by ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini across 17 industries. Earned third-party media accounted for 84% of all citations. Paid and advertorial content came to 0.3%.

Other studies land differently depending on how they define categories. Stacker put the figure at 64%, a 5WPR study at 85.5%. The honest range sits between 64% and 89%, and the direction is not in dispute even if the decimal is.

The mechanism behind it is simple enough. A business claiming it is the best in town is self-interested, and the models treat it that way. A local newspaper, a review platform or twelve strangers on Reddit saying the same thing is corroboration. AI systems need to encounter your name across independent sources before they build a stable enough association to recommend you.

Stacker and Scrunch ran a controlled test on this. The same article, hosted only on a brand’s domain, earned citations at around 8%. Distributed across third-party publisher networks, the identical content hit 34%.

That gap is the whole argument for treating generative engine optimization as an off-site discipline rather than an on-page checklist. It is also the cleanest illustration of how GEO differs from traditional SEO, where the bulk of the work happens on pages you control.

Step One: Find Out Which Lists Are Actually Getting Cited

Do not guess at this. Guessing produces a spreadsheet of 200 directories, 40% of which are dead.

Open ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Mode separately, logged out, and ask each one which specific websites, directories and review platforms it would check to research providers in your category and city. Then ask for the best providers and note every source it cites by name.

Twenty minutes gives you a target list of maybe 15 to 25 real URLs. That list is your entire program. The same audit approach works for checking whether ChatGPT recommends your business in the first place, and you may as well run both at once.

Expect the results to differ by platform. Reddit dominates Perplexity. Wikipedia dominates ChatGPT’s top sources. Gemini leans toward Medium and YouTube. If you have already decided which AI platform is worth prioritizing, weight your target list toward that one rather than spreading thin across all four.

Directories: Fewer Than Twenty Matter

The 500-listing packages sold for forty dollars are worthless. Most of those domains are dead, blocked at the CDN level, or link farms the models have already learned to ignore.

Build in three tiers.

Tier one, non-negotiable: Google Business Profile, Apple Business Connect, Bing Places. These feed the mapping and grounding layers directly.

Tier two, general trust: Yelp, Better Business Bureau, your local Chamber of Commerce, Foursquare. Four listings, not forty.

Tier three, vertical: this is where the real value sits and where most businesses do nothing. Clinics need Zocdoc and Healthgrades. B2B service firms need Clutch and G2. Contractors need Houzz and Angi. One agency reported a dental client getting actual bookings from three vertical listings, not ranking movement, bookings.

When you fill them in, complete every field. Empty attributes are missed extraction opportunities. Write the description with specifics: named services, service area boundaries, credentials, years operating. “Committed to excellence” gives a model nothing to quote. “Same-day emergency appointments across Halifax and Dartmouth, open since 2011” gives it three extractable facts.

Roundup Pitching: The Part Almost Nobody Does

Local publishers run “best of” lists on schedules. City magazines, regional newspapers, neighborhood blogs, industry trade sites. Most refresh annually or quarterly, and most editors are quietly desperate for suggestions because updating those posts is nobody’s favorite assignment.

Four things separate a pitch that works from one that gets deleted.

Pitch the list that already exists. Do not propose they write something new. Find their existing roundup, note that it is missing a category or has a closed business still listed, and offer yourself as the fix. You are doing maintenance work for them.

Lead with a fact, not a request. Editors need a reason your inclusion is justified. Years in business, a specific credential, a service nobody else in the market offers, a measurable result. One sentence.

Keep it to four sentences. No attachments. No media kit. No paragraph about your passion.

Time it. Annual lists get updated six to eight weeks before publication. Pitching inside that window beats pitching at random.

A working version reads something like: “Your 2026 roundup of accountants in Calgary is missing anyone who handles cross-border filings, which is the most common question we field from clients here. We have been doing US and Canadian returns since 2014 and are one of two firms in the city with the designation. Happy to send details if useful. Either way, the listing for [closed firm] at number six shut down last spring.”

That last line is the one that gets replies. You just saved them from publishing something wrong.

Do not pay for placement. Paid and advertorial content made up 0.3% of AI citations in the Muck Rack data. It is the single worst-converting spend in this entire category.

Reddit: The Most Cited Domain in AI Search, and the Easiest to Get Wrong

Multiple 2026 studies put Reddit as the single most-cited domain across the major engines. Perplexity is the heaviest user by a wide margin, with Reddit making up a huge share of its top sources. ChatGPT sits lower. Gemini cites it least, around 3% by one tracker.

The mechanic that matters most: research on more than a million citations behind recommendation-style prompts found that around 62% of cited Reddit threads already ranked on Google’s first page. Search rank predicted citation. Karma did not.

So the goal is not to farm upvotes. It is to be present in the threads that rank, and to be mentioned in a way that reads as a real person’s experience.

How to do that without getting banned:

Use a real account with genuine history. A three-day-old account posting a recommendation is obvious to moderators and to readers.

Answer questions in your category without linking anywhere. Depth of answer is what gets quoted.

Disclose your affiliation every time it comes up. Reddit tolerates experts who identify themselves and removes anyone caught pretending.

Never coordinate. Vote manipulation and sockpuppeting get accounts banned, and a ban removes your comment history retroactively, which erases whatever citation value you built.

The highest-value Reddit mentions are the ones you did not write. When a customer says something specific about your work in a thread, that carries weight nothing you post yourself can match. Asking satisfied clients whether they use the relevant subreddit is a reasonable thing to do. Asking them to post a recommendation on your behalf is not.

Review Platforms: Substance Over Volume

Review count is a vanity metric here. What gets extracted is descriptive content.

“Great service, highly recommend” is unquotable. “They rebuilt our inventory system in six weeks and caught a tax error the previous firm missed” contains three facts a model can lift into an answer.

Ask for specifics. Prompt customers with a question: what problem did we solve, and how long did it take. That one change produces reviews that feed citations.

Recency matters more than total volume, particularly on Perplexity, which weights freshness heavily. A steady handful each month beats forty in one burst, which also looks manufactured to every platform’s fraud detection.

What Third Party Citations Will Not Fix

Getting cited sends people to your site. What happens next is on you.

If your pages were spun out of a template with generic filler copy, visitors arrive from a pre-qualified AI recommendation and land on something that reads like every competitor. That is a conversion problem no citation strategy solves, and it is the sharpest argument in the debate over whether AI website builders are good for SEO.

The same logic applies to visibility that produces nothing. Plenty of businesses already know the version where they rank first and still get no clicks. Adding citations to a site that cannot convert just moves the leak.

The Order to Do This In

Ninety days, roughly:

Weeks one and two, run the source audit and build your target list of 15 to 25 URLs. Fix tier one and tier two directories.

Weeks three through six, complete vertical directory listings and start the review request process with specific prompting.

Weeks seven through twelve, pitch roundups on their refresh schedules and build genuine presence in the two or three subreddits that map to your category. Then re-run the audit. The lists that cite you now are the ones worth defending.

Most businesses treat AI search as one thing. You either show up in it or you don’t.

That framing costs money. ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Perplexity and Gemini each build their answers from different source pools, using different selection logic, and they send you visitors who behave nothing alike once they land. One of them sends the highest volume. A different one sends the highest converting traffic per visit. A third sends barely any traffic at all but is growing faster than the rest.

If you’re going to spend money getting recommended by machines, you should know which machine is worth the spend.

The Traffic Split Is Nowhere Near Even

Start with raw referrals. Across the 2026 studies, ChatGPT sits somewhere between 63% and 78% of all AI referral traffic depending on whose panel you read. Statcounter had it at 78% globally in March 2026. SE Ranking put it closer to 75%. A B2B-weighted panel from Goodie put it at 63%, which tells you the split shifts hard by sector.

Below that, Gemini has been the story of the year. It passed Perplexity in early 2026 and roughly quadrupled its referral share inside twelve months. Perplexity has gone flat or slightly down, holding around 7%. Copilot sits near 3.5%.

Two caveats before you act on any of that. First, the numbers move monthly, sometimes violently. Second, all AI platforms combined still account for a fraction of a percent of total web traffic. Organic search sends vastly more visitors. Anyone telling you to abandon SEO for AI is selling something.

Volume and Value Are Different Numbers

Here’s where the ranking scrambles. Referral counts measure visits. Visits are not customers.

The conversion data from early 2026 shows a spread wide enough to change your priorities entirely. ChatGPT-referred visitors converted somewhere in the 14% to 16% range across the panels studied. Perplexity landed near 10.5%. Gemini came in around 3%. For comparison, Google organic traffic converted at roughly 2% to 3%.

Read that again. Gemini is the fastest-growing referral source and the weakest converter of the group. ChatGPT sends the most traffic and converts it best. Perplexity sends little traffic that punches well above its weight.

Engagement follows the same pattern. AI-referred sessions run roughly 30% longer than Google organic sessions and generate more pageviews per visit. Someone who arrives from an AI answer has already been pre-qualified by the model. They didn’t scan ten results and click yours on a hunch. They were told you were a fit.

That’s the entire argument for generative engine optimization as a budget line rather than an experiment.

ChatGPT: Structure and Third Party Coverage Decide It

ChatGPT does not simply answer from memory anymore. When a query triggers search, it breaks your question into sub-questions, retrieves live pages for each, and then picks a handful to cite.

The retrieval and the citation are separate steps, and that distinction matters. Research from 2025 and 2026 found ChatGPT cites only around 15% of the pages it actually reads. Being retrieved gets you nothing. Being quoted gets you the customer.

What separates the 15% from the rest comes down to two things. Position on the page is one. A 2026 study found 44.2% of ChatGPT citations came from the first 30% of a page. Bury your answer under four paragraphs of throat-clearing and you forfeit most of your odds. The other is who else talks about you. Wikipedia, Reddit, LinkedIn and editorial publications dominate the source pool, while brand-owned pages are structurally underrepresented.

One technical note worth acting on today: check that your robots.txt and your CDN allow OAI-SearchBot. Cloudflare has blocked AI crawlers by default since mid-2025, and plenty of sites are invisible for that reason alone without knowing it.

Google AI Mode: One Question Becomes Twelve

AI Mode works through query fan-out. It takes the question typed by the user, splits it into multiple hidden sub-queries, runs them in parallel, and assembles an answer from whatever surfaces across that whole set.

The consequence is the most misunderstood fact in search right now. Ahrefs found AI Mode and AI Overviews cite the same URLs only 13.7% of the time, despite reaching the same conclusion in 86% of cases. Other analyses put the overlap between AI Mode citations and the organic top ten at around 14%.

Your number one ranking does not carry over. AI Mode selects passages, not pages. A tight 50-word block that directly answers one specific sub-question will beat a 3,000-word guide with no clean extraction points, every time.

The practical move is coverage. Instead of one page per keyword, build pages that answer the full question space around a topic: pricing, comparisons, requirements, timelines, objections. That structure is the core difference in the SEO versus GEO discussion, and it’s why sites built on generic templated content struggle here. If your pages came out of a builder that generated filler copy, there’s nothing specific enough to extract, which is one of the sharper points in the debate over whether AI website builders are good for SEO.

Perplexity: Fresh, Factual, Fast to Reward You

Perplexity runs a live web search on every single query. No answering from memory. It visits roughly ten pages per question and cites three or four of them, which is a far tighter funnel than ChatGPT’s but with mandatory attribution.

It weights freshness more heavily than any other platform. A well-structured piece published today can appear in Perplexity citations within hours, which makes it the only realistic short-term win available to a newer site. It also runs a multi-stage reranking pipeline that checks semantic relevance, then structural quality, then authority, with commercial queries leaning harder on review platforms like G2, Clutch and Trustpilot.

Small traffic numbers, high intent, quick feedback loop. Treat it as your testing ground rather than your main event.

Gemini: Your Google SEO, Repurposed

Gemini grounds its answers in Google Search. That means the retrieval layer is Google’s index, and everything you’ve already earned in rankings, links and crawlability feeds it directly.

There’s one setting that overrides all of it. Google-Extended controls whether your content is eligible for grounding in Gemini apps. Block it, often through a well-intentioned privacy setting, and you remove yourself from Gemini entirely.

Gemini’s citation mix leans heavily on user-generated platforms. Reddit, YouTube and Quora appear far more often here than in ChatGPT’s pool. If your category has active Reddit threads or comparison videos and you’re absent from both, you’re missing the ground Gemini stands on.

Your Analytics Is Underreporting All Four

Before you judge any platform on your own numbers, fix the measurement.

Between 35% and 70% of AI referral sessions arrive with no referrer header and get dumped into Direct. Worse, GA4’s native AI Assistant channel, rolled out in May 2026, covers ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and a few others but leaves out Perplexity and Claude entirely. Perplexity traffic lands in generic Referral.

Build a custom channel group with regex filters covering all of them. Then verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools and open the AI Performance report, which since February 2026 shows actual citation counts rather than guesses. It’s free and it takes about ten minutes.

The Priority Verdict

For most North American businesses, in this order:

1. ChatGPT. Highest volume, highest conversion, widest lead. Nothing else is close on either axis. If you do one thing, front-load direct answers in the first third of every important page and confirm OAI-SearchBot isn’t blocked.

2. Google AI Mode. Second priority because the audience is enormous and the work compounds. Fan-out coverage lifts your AI Mode presence, your AI Overview citations and your long-tail rankings at the same time. No other platform gives you three returns on one investment.

3. Perplexity. Third on volume, but first on speed. Use it to test whether a new page can earn citations before you scale the format across your site.

4. Gemini. Ranked fourth only because the conversion rate is weak today and because good Google SEO already covers most of it. Its growth curve means that ordering may not hold through 2027.

Where Your Industry Changes the Order

That sequence assumes a general business. Two categories should reorder it.

Manufacturers and industrial suppliers should move Perplexity up. Technical buyers researching specifications, tolerances and compliance behave like researchers, and Perplexity’s evidence-first ranking rewards spec sheets, datasheets and documented processes that most manufacturing sites already own but never structure for extraction. We’ve written more on GEO for manufacturing businesses.

Clinics and healthcare practices should move Google AI Mode to the top. Health queries carry heavier trust weighting, local intent dominates, and Google’s grounding leans hard on established medical sources and verified practice data. The route in is entity consistency and credentialed authorship, which we cover in GEO for clinics.

Start With One

The temptation is to chase all four. Don’t. The underlying content architecture transfers between platforms, so the fastest route is to do the work properly for ChatGPT, measure it honestly, then extend the same structure outward. That sequencing is the whole basis of how we approach AI search optimization for clients. Pick the platform your buyers actually use. Fix your measurement first so you can prove what happens next.