Before we sold this to a single client we pointed it at our own site, in the most competitive category we know: agencies fighting to be the one AI recommends. The first version did not work. We spent months rebuilding it against our own results until it did, and once the system was right the visibility moved in weeks, from 2 citations a day to 65.
WRKNG Digital is a Shopify growth agency. For years the work was Meta ads, email and Google: the channels that made ecommerce brands money. Then the front door to a purchase started moving, and shoppers began asking AI what to buy instead of searching for it.
We built an engine to fix that for Shopify stores: rewrite the product feed so AI can find you, publish the content so AI trusts you. But an agency selling a new category of work has a credibility problem long before it has a delivery problem.
"Which agency should I hire for Shopify?" is a brutal question to win. The answers are owned by Shopify's own documentation, by Reddit threads, by LinkedIn, and by a long tail of listicle sites that exist purely to rank. National agencies with hundred-person teams were in those answers. We were not.
So we built on our own domain, where a failed experiment cost us nothing but time. The early versions did almost nothing. We published, adjusted, and published again with no measurable movement. When we finally put measurement in place, wrkngdigital.com was earning about two citations a day and did not appear in the ranked domains for the category at all.
The honest version of this story is that the first attempt did not work. Those months were research and development on the WRKNG AEO System itself, run at our own expense on our own domain. What follows is what we arrived at, and what every client now starts from on day one.
We rebuilt the site's own structured data and service pages so an AI engine could parse exactly what we do, for whom, on what platform, and in what category. The equivalent of the feed work we do on a client's catalog.
We kept refining what we published and how it was framed until AI started quoting it: the comparisons and buying guides someone actually reads when choosing an agency, on our own domain. That content now accounts for the overwhelming majority of our citations.
Because the engine was already running when measurement began, this is not a before-and-after. It is the floor we could first measure against where we are now. Rates are per-day so the unequal windows compare fairly.
We published into silence for five weeks. The measurement below starts the day we could first track it, and the shape is the whole story.
Where measurement returned no entry for a brand on a given day, that day is plotted as zero coverage.
Nine of our ten most-cited pages are posts the system published. The homepage is the only page on this list that existed in its current form when we started.
The nine agencies we track in the category, by how often AI cites them as a source, over the same six-week window.
All nine competitor agencies combined: 362 citations. WRKNG: 2,684, more than seven times every rival agency put together, and four of them AI never cites at all.
Of every domain AI cites when recommending a Shopify agency, the others in the top five are platforms. We sit third, ahead of LinkedIn and Reddit.
Roughly four months went into experimenting and rebuilding before our own visibility moved. That was development time on the system, not delivery time on an engagement. Clients start from the finished system, which is why Petersen Games took the #3 spot in their category sixteen days after launch.
Our two highest-cited pages are both comparison posts. When someone asks AI to recommend an agency, the model reaches for pages that compare options, so the brand that publishes the comparison gets named inside it.
Four of the nine national agencies we track earned zero citations across six weeks. Team size, category incumbency and ad budget do not transfer to AI visibility. It is a separate race and almost nobody has started it.
No ad budget, no backlink campaign, no PR. The entire move came from publishing the right content on a domain we already owned, which is why the economics of this work are so different from paid.
We'll run the exact questions your buyers ask AI, show you who it recommends today, and where you rank against your competitors. Same engine that did this.
Get Your Free AI Commerce AuditCitation and competitor data measured live across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Google AI (US). The WRKNG AEO System was already running and being refined when measurement began, so the baseline is our first tracked window rather than a pre-system state. Rates are normalized per day because the two windows differ in length. Prepared by WRKNG Digital · wrkngdigital.com
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