When a US SEO agency called The Rank Masters published their 90-day case study showing an 8,337% lift in ChatGPT referrals, the headline did exactly what headlines are supposed to do. I clicked. Then I noticed the baseline was 8 visits and the post-period was 675. So yes, the percentage is technically true. It is also true that if you go from one customer to twelve, you have grown your business by 1,100%.
What I actually cared about was the rest of the table. Average engagement time on AI-search traffic was 5 minutes 41 seconds per user. Page views per user climbed to 48. Those numbers are not a percentage trick. Those are people who showed up already interested and stayed. That is the part worth copying.
TRM described their playbook as four pillars. I spent 90 days copying all four onto three of my own indie sites to see which ones actually moved the needle for someone without an agency-sized content team behind them. Three of the four were noise. The one that worked was the one I almost skipped.
The setup
The three indie sites:
