Checked live on Google US, 2 September 2026. You hold five number-one positions, and six of the seven ranked terms in the tracked set sit in the top three.
| Keyword | Live US position |
|---|---|
| eco friendly hair ties | 1 |
| plastic free hair ties | 1 |
| biodegradable hair ties | 1 |
| cotton headbands | 1 |
| organic cotton headband | 1 |
Against the project's own baseline from 14 May 2026, the US tracked set went from 5 of 30 ranking to 7 of 30, with four terms improving and three new. Your homepage's average placement across all searches went from 21.3 to 7.4.
And the traffic followed: organic clicks are up year on year every month since June (+12.5%, +14.6%, +3.2%) from a third fewer impressions. Fewer people shown, more people clicking. That is what better rankings look like.
Organic search brings in more revenue than Direct, Email and Referral combined. It is comfortably your biggest channel.
Comparing May to August this year against the same months last year, organic revenue is flat: US$7,298 to US$7,259, and transactions are down 20%. Better rankings on a narrow set of terms did not lift revenue on their own.
That is not a reason to doubt the work, it is a reason to name what the 90 days could not cover. The sprint bought rankings on the terms you already had a claim to. It never got to the volume terms, the authority layer, or the AI answers, and that is where the revenue lives.
You rank number 1 on Google for "plastic free hair ties". Google's AI answer for that same search does not mention you at all. It cites Package Free Shop, Zero Waste Store, Me Mother Earth, EarthHero and Amazon.
Same on the other two terms where you hold number 1. Ranking first and being invisible in the answer above the results is the defining problem of search right now, and it is happening to you on your best terms.
One contributing factor worth knowing: your robots.txt deliberately blocks OpenAI's training crawler. Every retrieval crawler is allowed, so this is not the whole story, but it is worth a deliberate decision rather than a default.
| Layer | Why it moves revenue rather than rankings |
|---|---|
| The volume terms you do not rank for | 23 category terms in the tracked set have no ranking at all, including "elastic hair ties" (4,400 searches a month), "black headband" (4,400) and "head bands for women" (3,000). These are where the buyers are, and they need content rather than optimisation. |
| The AI answer layer | Zero citations on your best terms. Being the brand the answer names is a specific discipline and nobody in your category has claimed it yet. |
| Authority | DR 43 with no link building ever done on our side. Your competitors in those AI answers are cited partly because they are cited elsewhere. |
| The technical gaps | No FAQ structure anywhere on the site, and your llms.txt is the default Shopify one rather than a curated file. Both are quick. |