A mid-market industrial automation distributor — ~12K SKUs — was ranking well and still losing organic share as AI Overviews ate informational-query click-through. Six months on the Standard editorial retainer took its AI Overview citation count on its top 50 commercial queries from 4 to 34. Organic leads from informational pages doubled.
4 → 34
AI Overview citations on the top 50 commercial queries
×8.5
Citation-count lift over the six-month window
2×
Organic leads from informational pages
8 + 1
Pieces and pillars shipped per month — Standard retainer
The situation
The client ranked where it needed to — and watched click-through decay anyway, as AI Overviews started answering the informational queries upstream of its commercial pages. On its top 50 commercial queries, the client’s pages were cited in AI Overview responses exactly four times. The query spaces its category position should have owned were being explained to its buyers by manufacturers.
The constraint
The catalog was already in order; the gap was authority content, and the budget was approved for one retainer tier — not a content-team buildout. The constraint shaped the plan: 8 pieces and 1 pillar a month, concentrated on three product categories, written by senior subject-matter writers. Spread across the whole catalog it would have moved nothing.
What we ran
Months 1–6
8 pieces + 1 pillar per month for six months, concentrated on three product categories instead of scattered across the site.
Months 1–4
Each category got a pillar built to be the citable explainer for its query space, with cluster pieces answering the long-tail engineering questions around it.
Bi-weekly
AI Overview citation count on the top 50 commercial queries probed bi-weekly, so the content plan followed what engines actually started citing rather than an editorial calendar set in advance.
This is what a Editorial Authority engagement at this scale looks like in practice.
Why it worked
AI Overviews assemble answers from sources that look like the category authority: depth, internal coherence, and machine-parseable structure. Concentrating six months of senior writing on three categories made the client the densest source available for those query spaces.
Citations compound. Once the pillars started being cited, the cluster pieces around them followed — the engine had already decided the domain was the authority for that territory.
What happened
Citation count on the tracked query set went from 4 to 34 over the six months — a ×8.5 lift. Organic leads from informational pages doubled over the same window.
The pillar pages now sit at the top of AI Overview responses for terms the manufacturers used to own.
The number that mattered
×0.0
AI Overview citation count, top 50 commercial queries
4 → 34 citations · 6-month engagement
Measurement notes
A metric without a source is an assertion. Every number on this page is listed below with how it was counted.
Anonymity. Client name withheld under NDA — most industrial distributors prefer the case study without the logo. The vertical, scale, timeline, and every number are as measured; only identifying details are removed. Reference calls available on request.
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Your catalog, same standard
Held to the same standard as the studies above: we measure where you stand today — organic and AI-search visibility across your top categories — and show you the baseline before we propose a thing.