A UK matcha brand that search engines and AI answers mentioned constantly, while retailers and wikis collected the clicks. We built the informational content that made its own site the source, and sitewide click-through rate rose from 1.5% to 3.6%.
This brand is one of the best-known names in UK matcha. Its products are stocked by online and high street retailers, so search engines and large language models (LLMs) know it well. Ask Google or ChatGPT almost anything about matcha, informational or commercial, and the brand gets mentioned.
The trouble was where those mentions pointed. Most citations came from other people's websites: the retailers stocking the products, wikis, and publications that had written about the brand. The brand got the name check. Its stockists got the visit.
Search Console told the same story. The site still ranked and earned plenty of impressions, but sitewide click-through rate (CTR) sat at 1.5%. People saw the brand all the time, then clicked through to someone else.
We started by working out what people actually ask about matcha, through keyword and topic research. Then we looked at which pages LLMs and AI overviews were already citing for those questions, and what made that content easy to quote.
That gave us the plan for the brand's own site:
For each topic we wrote variations covering the different ways people phrase the same question. Every piece had to be useful on its own. Thin pages built to catch keywords would have worked against the whole point, which was to make the brand's site the most quotable source on its own subject.
The work drew on our generative engine optimisation and SEO content practice.
The content was the easy bit. Getting the team to believe in informational content took longer.
For a product brand, a page answering "can matcha make you feel sick?" doesn't look like it sells anything. Our case was that it does a lot of quiet work. It builds topical authority that supports the category pages. It shows the experience and expertise behind the brand, which Google and AI engines both look for (E-E-A-T). And it answers the buyer's question on the brand's own site, at the top of the funnel that retailers had been collecting until then.
In search as it works now, that content is the price of being the source rather than the subject.
"Can matcha make you feel sick?" is a good example of the shift. AI answers used to pull that answer from retailer pages and wikis. Now the brand's own page answers it, and that's the page getting cited.
Six months covered the research, the foundation work and the first results. Average CTR across the site went from 1.5% to 3.6%, more than double, and informational pages now reach double-digit CTR. More of the attention the brand was already getting now ends with a visit to its own site.
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