CircleChess
EdTech · AI-powered chess learning platform
How CircleChess won AI Search Visibility for “online classroom chess programs”
From stagnant 600 daily SEO clicks and zero AI engine presence to #1 in Google AI Overview, #2 in Google organic, and +180 AI sessions per month — in a single engagement.
- Google AI Overview#1
- Google organic#2
- Grok (India)#1
- Perplexity#4
AI sessions / mo
+180
SEO clicks / day
750+
At a glance
#2
Google organic
online classroom chess programs
#1
AI Overview
Google AI Overviews
#4
Perplexity
online classroom chess programs
#1
Grok
online classroom chess programs in india
The Challenge
Stagnant SEO traffic — and zero strategy for AI engines.
CircleChess had built a strong product and a steady SEO foundation — but the foundation had stopped compounding. Organic traffic had flatlined at 600 daily clicks for 6–8 months. New content moved the needle for a week and then settled back to baseline.
And the bigger problem was already taking shape: buyers were shifting their early research into ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews — but CircleChess wasn't showing up in any of them. There was no content strategy for AI engines, no measurement, and no clear path to becoming the cited source for the queries that mattered most.
“Six months of work, and SEO clicks haven't moved. And now our buyers are asking ChatGPT before they ever Google us — and we have no idea what it's saying.”
The Goal
Get CircleChess ranked and cited for “online classroom chess programs” on Google and every major AI engine.
One high-intent commercial term, treated as the proving ground. Win it on Google organic, in AI Overview, in Perplexity and in Grok — and prove a repeatable playbook that could be scaled across the rest of the keyword set.
How Indexly helped
A four-step playbook — audit, track, ship, measure.
Step 1
AI Readiness Audit
We started by making CircleChess legible to AI engines. The site was structured for users but invisible to retrieval — no llms.txt, weak schema, and answer blocks that didn't extract cleanly.
- Restructured key pages for AI extraction (entity density, answer-format blocks)
- Added llms.txt and llms-full.txt with explicit allow rules for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended
- Shipped FAQPage, Course and Organization schema markups across category pages
Step 2
AI Visibility Tracking
Set up daily tracking on 25+ industry prompts spanning the full buyer journey — product discovery, competitor comparison and solution-aware queries — to see exactly where CircleChess showed up and where competitors won.
- 25+ tracked prompts across discovery, comparison and solution-aware intent
- Daily citation share and rank monitoring across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok and AI Overviews
- Citation gap analysis surfaced which competitor URLs AI was leaning on instead
Step 3
Content Authority
Built durable visibility through Indexly's Content Agents — GEO-optimized new articles for the gaps the tracking surfaced, plus AEO rewrites of existing pages that ranked on Google but weren't getting cited.
- GEO-optimized articles drafted, structured and shipped for high-intent prompts
- Existing SEO-ranking pages rewritten for AEO patterns — Q&A blocks, definitions, entity coverage
- Re-published with schema and internal links pointing to the new authority pages
Step 4
Monitor Traffic
Closed the loop with unified analytics — tracking how each shipped page moved Google rankings and AI engine citations, week over week.
- Google Search Console clicks tracked alongside AI engine referral sessions
- Per-page attribution: which fix moved which ranking
- Daily diff alerts caught the AI Overview lift the day it landed
Results delivered
From flatlined to category leader — on Google and AI engines.
Top of Google and AI Overview
CircleChess now ranks #2 in Google organic and #1 in Google AI Overview for “online classroom chess programs” — the highest-intent term in the category.
Cited across major AI engines
#4 cited source in Perplexity for “online classroom chess programs” and #1 in Grok for the localized “in india” variant — durable, recurring citations.
AI traffic from zero to 180 sessions/mo
Articles published by Indexly Content Agents now drive ~180 AI engine referral sessions per month — a channel that didn't exist before the engagement.
SEO traffic finally moves again
After 6–8 months stuck at 600 daily SEO clicks, the new articles and AEO rewrites lifted SEO clicks by 20% to 750+ per day.
“Six months ago we were stuck at 600 SEO clicks. Today we're #1 in AI Overview, #2 in Google, and we've added a whole new AI traffic channel that didn't exist before Indexly.”
Be the brand AI recommends — and Google ranks
Run a free AI Readiness audit, map your visibility gaps across six engines, and ship the content that closes them — with Indexly.
Want results like CircleChess's? See more case studies.