Something Special’s Brewing – AI Search Support for Coffee Experts

The Challenge

“Things were going well. We didn’t need to ‘fix’ anything, but we didn’t want to get complacent. We knew we needed to ensure our SEO strategy focused on AI search engines, and thankfully, Catalyst knew exactly where to start!” – Anthony Hare, Marketing Manager, FreshGround

For years, SEO has been fairly stable. You do your research, you find your keywords, you write your content, and you earn your rankings. Higher rankings get you clicks, and clicks lead to conversions.

This is, of course, an oversimplification, but the point stands: the system is (mostly) still intact. However, AI assistants and AI overviews now often sit between searchers and the websites that used to receive their clicks. This means that the majority of websites are now receiving lower organic traffic, as much of the traffic that used to land on your website now goes to AI tools instead.

Someone researching office coffee for their workplace might get a full comparison inside an AI answer and never visit a supplier’s site at all. This is why it’s so important to be found in LLM responses.

For a business like FreshGround’s, the repercussions of ignoring AI search could be catastrophic. If AI is where buyers are doing their research and putting together their shortlists, then being absent from those answers means being absent from the buyer journey.

This means the challenge was twofold:

• Protect the SEO that’s already working
• Make sure FreshGround show up in AI searches

It was more of an evolution of what we were already doing.

Our Solution

Building on strong SEO foundations.

We’d already laid the groundwork; it was time to adjust the strategy to suit an AI search world. 

The SEO work continued as before – technical site health, well-structured service and location pages, and content aimed at the terms buyers are using. Changing any of this would be a mistake. 

What has changed is that the keyword research we deliver is optimised to consider how people phrase questions to an AI, not just what they type into a search engine. 

Generative engine optimisation (GEO) and answer engine optimisation (AEO) are also integral to our new strategy. Our GEO and AEO strategies centre around shaping content so AI systems can understand it, quote it and cite it. We answer the questions buyers ask and structure those answers so a machine can parse them, making sure they carry the specific, verifiable detail that answer engines tend to trust.  

We plan the topics and give guidance on what must be covered, and FreshGround’s writers produce the content based on our brief. 

Once live, we track and measure everything, identifying what’s working and what’s not. We also revisit older content and ensure it’s delivering value in traditional search and AI search alike.

The Result

Two years in, things are looking stronger than ever. We’re seeing improvements in both AI search and organic search, rising in tandem as they support one another.

Organic search is still doing the heavy lifting

• Organic enquiries have grown close to threefold year on year, comparing the first half of 2026 with the same period in 2025.
• Marketing-qualified leads were up 56% in June year on year, meaning leads are of a higher quality. 
• Total enquiries across all channels rose by roughly a third over the same six-month period. In June alone, that worked out at nine more enquiries every working day than a year earlier.