DEV Community: Straight Up Search

Is AI Really Taking Your Google Traffic? What 8 Businesses Showed Us

Straight Up Search — Wed, 11 Nov 2026 10:00:09 +0000

"Is AI taking our traffic?" is easy to ask and easy to test, if you have Search Console. Here's the method we used across 8 businesses, and what it showed. ## Step 1: take brand out Brand searches move with reputation and ads, not AI. Filter your brand name and its misspellings out first, so you're looking at non brand clicks only. ## Step 2: isolate question searches AI answers questions best. In the Performance report, add a Query filter, choose **Custom (regex)** and use: \^(what|how|why|can|do|does|is|are|should|when|which)\\b \\ - ^\ anchors to the start of the query, so "how" has to be the first word. - The group lists the question words. - \\b\ is a word boundary, so "is" matches "is it" but not "isle". Add words that matter in your market if needed. ## Step 3: compare like with like Compare the same weeks this year against last year, and use clicks, not impressions. ## What we found Across 8 businesses, summer 2025 against summer 2026: - Question searches were under 3% of visible non brand clicks for 5 of the 8. Median: 2%. - Question clicks fell on 4 and held or grew on 4. They underperformed the rest of the site on only 2. - "best" and "vs" searches fell on 4 of the 5 sites with enough of them to measure, though some samples are small. ## Caveats Search Console hides very rare queries, which skew towards long questions, so the real share is probably a bit above 2%. And no click data can show searches that never happened because someone asked an AI instead. For most of these businesses, product and category searches carry the traffic. Check those first.

The Name Test: What Brand Searches Say About Your SEO

Straight Up Search — Sun, 08 Nov 2026 10:00:26 +0000

If you report on organic search, one of the most useful cuts you can make is brand versus non brand clicks. Here's how to do it in Google Search Console, and why it matters. ## Why bother We ran this across 8 businesses this summer. The median share of Google clicks from brand searches was 8%, but the range went from under 6% to over 40% for well known names. Brand clicks per day also fell on all 8 year on year. If you blend brand and non brand, a change in one hides a change in the other. Brand clicks track reputation and ads. Non brand clicks track SEO. ## Option 1: the built in filter On sites with enough search volume, the Performance report now offers a branded queries filter. Note that it also counts branded product searches, so it will read higher than a name only filter. ## Option 2: regex 1. Performance report, add a **Query** filter. 2. Choose **Custom (regex)**. 3. Enter the name and its misspellings, separated by a pipe: \acme|akme|acmee|acme ltd \\ 4. Toggle the filter to *Doesn't match regex* to get the non brand side. (acme\ is a placeholder. Use your own name and its real misspellings, which you'll find in the Queries list.) ## Gotchas - **Misspellings matter.** On one site, they accounted for over 250 clicks this summer that would otherwise have been counted as non brand. - **Anonymised queries.** Search Console hides rare queries for privacy. We count them as non brand, since they're almost never someone typing the brand. That's it. Put the split in every report and you'll stop crediting SEO for what the brand did.

Shopify SEO in 2026: 7 fixes UK stores still miss

Straight Up Search — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 12:36:59 +0000

Shopify makes it easy to launch a shop, but it doesn't take care of SEO for you. We audit a lot of Shopify stores at Straight Up Search, a Northampton SEO agency Jamie Irwin founded in 2021, and the same problems turn up again and again. None of them are exotic. Most are simple to fix, and many shops lose traffic to them for years without anyone noticing.

Below are seven fixes that UK stores still miss in 2026, roughly in order of impact.

1. Duplicate product URLs from collection paths

By default, Shopify themes often link to products through collection paths such as /collections/mugs/products/blue-mug. The canonical tag points to /products/blue-mug, but your internal links are still spreading authority across duplicate URLs and wasting crawl budget.

Fix: in your theme's product card snippet, remove the within: collection filter so every internal link points straight to the canonical /products/ URL. It's a one-line change in most themes.

2. Faceted filters that create thousands of crawlable pages

Filters for size, colour and price create URL parameters. On a big catalogue, Googlebot can spend its crawl time on endless filter combinations and miss your new products.

Fix: add sensible Disallow rules for filter parameters in robots.txt.liquid. Only make a filtered view into a proper indexable landing page when it matches real search demand, for example "men's waterproof walking boots".

3. Thin, manufacturer-copied product descriptions

Hundreds of retailers paste the same supplier text, so Google has no reason to rank your version. AI search tools ignore it as well, because there's nothing in it to cite.

Fix: start with your top 20% of products by revenue. Add real details buyers ask about, such as sizing advice, materials, UK delivery times, care instructions and who it's for. Short and specific is better than long and generic.

4. Missing or broken product structured data

A lot of themes produce incomplete Product schema. Common gaps are no brand, no gtin, the wrong availability and no shippingDetails or hasMerchantReturnPolicy. Google uses these fields for merchant listings, and AI shopping answers rely more and more on clean structured data.

Fix: test a few product URLs in Google's Rich Results Test. Fill the gaps in your theme JSON-LD, or use one well-maintained schema app instead of stacking several that conflict.

5. Collection pages with no copy

Collection pages are often your best-ranking pages for commercial searches, yet many have nothing on them except a product grid. Without supporting text, Google has very little to go on.

Fix: add 100–200 words of helpful introduction above or below the grid. Explain what's in the range, how to choose and any UK-specific points. Link to related collections and buying guides.

6. Slow mobile pages from app bloat

Each app you install can add scripts, and uninstalled apps sometimes leave code behind. On mid-range phones over 4G, this is what pushes Interaction to Next Paint and Largest Contentful Paint into the red.

Fix: go through your installed apps and remove anything you don't use. Then search theme.liquid for leftover script tags. Compress hero images, serve them at sensible sizes with Shopify's image URL parameters, and lazy-load anything below the fold.

7. Ignoring how AI search sees your store

Customers now ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews for product advice before they ever reach a search results page. These tools cite brands they can understand clearly: consistent business information, helpful content and mentions across the web.

Fix: make sure your About, delivery and returns pages are clear and crawlable. Publish genuinely useful buying guides, and keep your brand name and details consistent everywhere they appear. This is the core of generative engine optimisation (GEO), and it builds on solid SEO rather than replacing it.

Where to start

If you only have an afternoon, fix the collection-path links (#1) and audit your apps (#6). Both are quick and the effect is easy to measure. Then work through the product content and schema over the next month.

Shopify gives you a good foundation, and these fixes are what turn it into a shop that actually gets found. If you'd like a second pair of eyes on your store, Straight Up Search offers technical SEO and GEO audits for UK online shops.

Written by the team at Straight Up Search, a Northampton-based SEO agency founded by Jamie Irwin in 2021.