The Influence Agency, ourselves
We did it to ourselves
The situation
An agency site built for a decade of SEO, with an llms.txt file, an entity page and an AEO service page already live, measured by the same instrument we sell.
What we did
- Entity work, structured data, answer-first rewrites of the service pages, and a large batch of new pages in October 2026.
What moved
Keywords cited inside AI Overviews went from 13 in October 2025 to 48 in February 2026 and 87 in October 2026. The share of AI Overview answers citing us moved from 4.1% to 4.2%, so the count grew with Google’s expansion rather than ahead of it. Ranking keywords rose 39%. Estimated organic traffic was 2,456 in September 2026 against 2,043 a year earlier, up 20%. Top-3 rankings slipped from 64 to 50. That slip is the baseline for our own program, published weekly on the scorecard.
What we would do differently
Treat our own site as a client from the start, with the same month one and the same plan.
Our own baseline, published weekly.
Source: Semrush, Canadian database, monthly, as of October 15, 2026, Google only. Estimated visits are estimates. Leads come from client call tracking and Search Console. [Screenshots of the real AI answers naming this client go here.]
Written by Michael Landry, Founder and Head of AEO.