When we asked ChatGPT "what is the best body kit brand in Europe" in October 2026, it answered with six well-known names. G.R.A.M.S Styling, which makes its parts by hand in its own workshops in England and Lithuania, was not one of them. Assistants build these lists from brand pages that state facts in plain words and from third-party comparison articles. The old WordPress site offered neither.
Moving a shop to a new platform is also the moment where rankings get lost. The move is in progress, with the new site ready behind Cloudflare Access. This is what we are doing to keep the rankings and to open the second channel.
Keep every click: the redirect map
From the Search Console data we know which old URLs still bring visitors. The new storefront will redirect every one of them permanently, and the map is already built and tested: product pages, including renamed and merged listings; the category paths; the tag pages, which still bring clicks years later; the content pages and the old search URL; and the whole old domain, path for path, on launch day.
Each market has its own canonical URL and a bidirectional hreflang set with an x-default, checked against Google's guidance on localized versions. Pages that stay in English on purpose are excluded from hreflang and sitemaps for the other languages, so Google never sees untranslated duplicates.
Fix what the old shop told Google
- Titles. Many product titles were too long or stuffed with marketing tails. The new rule is "Make Model Code Part - Style +Width", short enough for Google and Merchant Center, with the wording checked per market on Google Trends: the UK searches "front wings", the US searches "fender flares".
- Descriptions. SEO texts copied from one product to another in WooCommerce, naming the wrong car or style, are gone. Thin descriptions were rewritten from the real product facts and reviewed.
- Structured data. Organization with both workshops as places, Product with country of origin and material from the finish option, breadcrumbs and site search on every page.
- Feeds. One product feed per currency for Google Merchant Center, compatible with Meta and Pinterest catalogues.
Open the second channel: AI assistants
- robots.txt names the AI crawlers one by one (GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and the others) and allows them on public pages.
- llms.txt follows the llmstxt.org shape: who the brand is, where the parts are made, the cars covered, an honest one-paragraph comparison with the big European brands, then links to guides and policies.
- IndexNow submits every changed page, product and article to Bing and the engines behind ChatGPT search and Copilot.
- Comparison articles say in plain words where this brand wins (hand-made carbon fibre for Japanese and European performance cars, made to order, sold direct) and where the big names win (price, catalogue breadth, luxury cars). Assistants quote specifics and ignore claims without a source.
Content that compounds
The blog is where a niche brand earns its visibility. We built a two-year editorial calendar of model guides, how-tos, buying guides, builds and car culture, written from the real catalogue and the customer gallery, reviewed for legal claims about road use, translated into eight more languages and scheduled ahead so that new articles go live every week without anyone touching the admin.
Alongside the blog, a customer car gallery shows real builds grouped by make and model, with number plates blurred automatically, and a "share your car" page keeps it growing.
Convert the visit
Two things on the shop itself: an AI shop assistant that turns "BMW E46 coupe, rear diffuser" into the right product card with the options preselected, and Google sign-in so a returning customer checks out in two clicks.
Rankings take months to read. We measured the baseline now, on the old site: positions, clicks, and what each assistant answers. The new site leans on Cloudflare's edge for speed and on IndexNow so every change reaches Bing, ChatGPT search and Copilot within minutes. A few weeks after launch we will publish the comparison here.