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Team Empathy · Client Report · 22 July 2026

Organic Search & AI Search: Three Month Update

Nature Baby · Australia and New Zealand

Getting Nature Baby found on ChatGPT

Executive summary

The migration broke Australia's organic search: errors that were not caught during the migration compounded over the months that followed. That damage has now been repaired, the foundations are rebuilt, and the recovery is underway, verified against ad spend, sale events, seasonality and the reported outage.

All figures compare 1 April to 30 June 2026 with 1 January to 31 March 2026

+27.5%
AU organic search clicks
22,888 → 29,186
$73.6K → $207.6K
AU organic revenue, up 181.9% (NZD)
12% → 22%
Organic search's share of all AU online sales, roughly doubled
+219%
AI referral sessions
504 → 1,608
AU organic clicks by month, April 2025 to June 2026

AU organic search clicks by month, April 2025 to June 2026 · grey: post-migration slide · blue: the fix phase · source: Google Search Console

The commercial read: organic revenue rose from $73,649 to $207,598. Organic search's share of all AU online revenue roughly doubled, from about 12% to about 22%. Because every channel enjoyed the same winter season and promotional calendar, that share gain is the cleanest evidence the search work itself moved the needle. Shopify's own data corroborates it: AU orders up 41.7%, and orders from new customers up 79.4%.

AI referral sessions by month 2026

Visitors arriving from AI tools (ChatGPT and others), monthly

Organic share of AU online revenue, 12% to 22%

Organic search's share of AU online revenue, by quarter

Verified. Every number above has been cross-checked against ad spend actuals, the one-day sales, the reported outage and seasonality. The checks are summarised at the start of the results section.

1. Where this started

The November 2025 Magento to Shopify migration left Australia's organic search badly damaged: more than 8,000 broken AU pages, failing site speed scores, AU pages carrying New Zealand metadata, and no structured data on collection pages. By March 2026, AU organic revenue was down 30% on the year before, and AU organic search clicks hit their lowest month in our data (6,030).

The engagement began in April with a clear sequence: repair the technical foundations first, then build the content and AI search engine on top. This report covers the repair phase and what changed.

2. What we fixed

104 delivery tasks were completed across the quarter. The material ones, by theme:

AreaWhat was done
Broken pages and redirectsAU 4XX pages reduced from over 8,000 to around 4,000. The remaining ~2,000 dead product URLs are mapped in a 2,009 row redirect plan, built and awaiting final sign-off.
Site speedCore Web Vitals now passing on both domains. The mobile performance score was 27/100 at audit.
Market targetinghreflang and AU country targeting corrected; 241 page titles referencing "NZ" on AU pages fixed; duplicate titles and descriptions cleared.
Page structureMissing headings restored on 260+ pages (219 outstanding reduced to 8); image alt text resolved.
AreaWhat was done
Authority protectionToxic backlink disavows filed for the AU, NZ and US domains; quarterly review process recommended.
AI readabilityFull structured data audit across every template type; a three tier implementation spec delivered to the development team; Wikidata brand entity underway; Google Merchant Centre feed corrected.
The content engineNature Baby's own AirOps workspace stood up; keyword strategy (111 keywords) and AI prompt strategy (229 prompts) client approved; 285 blog articles audited and prioritised; first three refreshed calibration articles delivered for review.

3. Australia: the recovery

Before the numbers: how we checked them. We tested these results against everything else that could explain them.
  • Ad spend: cross-checked against Google Ads and Meta actuals. Google spend was flat across the recovery months, paid brand clicks fell while organic brand clicks rose, and no non-brand search campaigns exist in the account. The growth is not paid media echo.
  • Sale events: both quarters contained a one-day sale (13 to 15 January, 9 to 11 June). Every headline claim survives with the sale windows removed from both quarters.
  • The outage: the reported disruption (27 January to 27 February) sat in the baseline quarter and shows no impact on organic search clicks in either market's daily data.
  • Seasonality: April to June is the winter merino peak, so quarter on quarter claims are paired with year on year comparisons wherever native data exists.

The side by side

Australia (country filtered)Jan to Mar 2026Apr to Jun 2026Change
Organic search clicks (GSC)22,88829,186+27.5%
Organic impressions (GSC)592,509670,573+13.2%
Average CTR across the period3.86%4.35%up
Average Google ranking position13.511.52 positions better
Organic search sessions (GA4)28,85144,315+53.6%
Organic revenue (GA4, NZD)$73,649$207,598+181.9%
Organic transactions (GA4)399944+136%

Excluding the one-day sale windows from both quarters, organic revenue growth is +143.9% and click growth is +23.6%.

The growth is new demand, not brand awareness

4. New Zealand

Every technical fix applied to the store benefits both domains, and New Zealand's numbers reflect that. Because the June one-day sale dominates the quarterly shape, New Zealand is measured against the same period last year:

5. AI search: the first measured baseline

This is the first period AI search has been measured for Nature Baby, on two levels: people arriving from AI tools, and how AI assistants answer about the category.

People arriving from AI tools (GA4, hard data)

AI referral sessions by month, 2026

Sessions arriving from AI tools, by month · source: GA4

The technical repair made the site readable to AI engines. Visibility share inside AI answers is won with content depth and authority, which is precisely where the engagement goes next.

6. What happens next

Appendix: definitions and sources

Organic search clicks are totals for the market and period from Google Search Console (web search, country filtered). Organic sessions, revenue and transactions are from GA4, attributed last non-direct click, revenue in NZD. Shopify figures use billing country and native post-migration data only; pre-migration history is excluded as it cannot be verified like for like. CTR is the average across the period. Share of revenue compares GA4 organic revenue with Shopify total sales, currency adjusted. Sale windows excluded in ex-sale figures: 11 to 17 January and 7 to 13 June, removed from both quarters. AI referral sessions count arrivals from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com, claude.ai and copilot.microsoft.com. AI answer tracking is AirOps daily prompt monitoring across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Mode. Percentage figures describe the change between the stated periods.