The outdoor gear brand that found a channel nobody was watching

The problem

The referral report had a row that shouldn’t have been there. Traffic from AI chat assistants had climbed far enough that, for a stretch, it was the third-largest source on the site — and its revenue-per-session was the highest of any channel we ran, paid or organic.

The reasonable reading was: measurement artifact, ignore it. The uncomfortable reading was: customers are researching gear inside chat assistants, arriving already convinced, and we have no idea whether those assistants can read our catalog correctly.

What I did

• Built the internal case first. Segmented AI-chat sessions in GA4, held them up against every other channel on revenue-per-session, and made the argument that this was a channel to staff rather than a spike to explain away.
• Rewrote PDPs for machine comprehension. Clarified what each product is actually for — the use case a human would describe out loud — then expanded specifications and FAQ coverage until an assistant could answer a shopper’s question without guessing.
• Fixed the structured data. Product, offer, and FAQ schema across the catalog so entity relationships were explicit instead of inferred. Unglamorous, and the highest-leverage work of the year.
• Kept running the rest of the business. This ran alongside core KPI ownership: a $65K monthly digital budget, ROAS improvement to 3.1, and conversion, AOV, and retention work across the funnel.

What happened

AI chat is now a consistent top-5 traffic source that outperforms social on revenue, at roughly double the revenue-per-session of the next-highest channel. Annual online revenue grew 17% over the same period, with conversion rate, AOV, and retention all improving.

The part I care about more: the reporting now treats AI discovery as a first-class channel, so the next person to hold this seat inherits a measured asset instead of an anomaly.

What I’d tell you in the interview

Nobody handed me this project. It came from reading the reports closely enough to be bothered by a number that didn’t fit, then doing the political work of getting a weird idea funded. That’s the part of the job I’m best at — and it’s the part that doesn’t fit on a resume line.