BigLeagueShirts Case Study: Organic Clicks Up 108% in 11 Months, and What AI Search Showed Next
BigLeagueShirts sells custom jerseys and uniforms to US sports teams. We doubled its organic clicks from Google, outgrew all three of its main competitors, and then tested whether that growth carried over into ChatGPT and Google AI answers. It did not, and that finding now shapes the next phase of work.
TL;DR: Content-led SEO more than doubled BigLeagueShirts' organic clicks and grew traffic more than five times faster than the peer average. But ranking first in Google did not earn a single ChatGPT citation, and 90.2% of its AI Overview visibility came from blog posts, not the pages that sell. Ranking and being cited are different problems, and the next phase targets the second one.
The Client and the Challenge
BigLeagueShirts competes for custom team apparel searches against three larger, better-linked brands: Boombah, Sportsgearswag and Fansidea. It started smaller on every authority measure.
| Brand | Domain Rating | Referring domains | Est. monthly traffic |
|---|---|---|---|
| Boombah | 47 | 3,434 | 71,037 |
| Sportsgearswag | 58 | 1,803 | 62,627 |
| Fansidea | 41 | 909 | 30,570 |
| BigLeagueShirts | 36 | 668 | 20,461 |
Source: Ahrefs, snapshot 10 August 2026.
Where things stood in April 2025
- Organic traffic had been falling since 2024, while newer competitors took market share.
- A full site redesign went live on 14 April 2025, one week into the engagement, and analytics tracking dropped out after launch.
- Homepage clicks from Google fell after the redesign, and collection pages had thin copy, weak titles and no clear keyword targets.
With fewer links and a smaller site, BigLeagueShirts could not win by outbuilding competitors on authority alone. The plan combined fixing the foundations, answering the questions buyers search for, and earning links from sources competitors could not easily copy.
What We Did for BigLeagueShirts
A programme that started in April 2025, run in phases. Every task was tracked on a shared project board with the client team.
Audit, roadmap and redesign recovery
Technical, content and UX audit, keyword research across roughly 430 tracked terms, a competitor analysis and a six-month roadmap. We reviewed the new design before and after go-live and got tracking restored.
Collections and technical fixes at scale
New titles, H1s and meta descriptions for every collection, with "custom jerseys" and starting prices in the titles. New collections built to match search demand, breadcrumbs, structured data across templates, canonical and URL parameter fixes, pagination changes and a link audit with disavow.
Question-led content by sport
A long-tail content plan by sport, focused on slowpitch and fastpitch softball, baseball, cornhole, archery and darts. Later, we answered 297 sport questions on the site, 147 for softball and 150 for flag football, covering about 86,000 searches a month, and turned sizing charts into readable HTML guides. By November 2025, the first 9 articles ranked for 139 search terms and had earned 400 clicks in two months.
Tools, indexing and AI visibility
We rebuilt the batting average calculator page with schema, submitted new content through the Google Indexing API, added review schema, and began measuring AI visibility with a GA4 AI channel group and buyer prompt tests.
Link Building That Also Produced Sales Leads
We ran three outreach campaigns in 2025. Two earned high-authority links. One turned into sales conversations.
14 links from universities and scholarship sites
A $1,000 Big League Shirts scholarship earned links from Purdue University, DePaul University, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the University of Illinois, CUNY and CareerOneStop, plus 10 further listings without links. It was the most effective campaign we ran, and lifted BigLeagueShirts' Domain Rating from 30 to 39 by November 2025, its highest at the time.
Links and leads from military discount guides
A discount programme page for military, first responders, nurses, teachers and students earned 3 links from veteran and military sites in its first round of outreach, and produced 7 sales leads that went straight to the sales team.
Outreach that became partnership talks
Sponsorship outreach to clubs had a low response rate, but led to a jersey partnership discussion with Gridiron Football, which has 35,000 to 45,000 registered players, a sample request from a college team, and a vendor showcase invitation from a youth sports association.
Sources: Rankdough link building report, 29 September 2025, and November 2025 SEO update. Domain Rating fluctuates; Ahrefs showed 36 in August 2026.
+108%
Organic Clicks Doubled in 11 Months
Google Search Console shows organic clicks up 108% over 11 months to June 2026. Ahrefs puts BigLeagueShirts' 12-month traffic growth at 115.1%, the fastest of the four brands. The peers grew by 7.1% to 49.1%, an average of 21.2%.
| Brand | 12-month traffic growth | Share of voice (4-brand pool) |
|---|---|---|
| BigLeagueShirts | +115.1% | 11.1% |
| Boombah | +49.1% | 38.5% |
| Sportsgearswag | +7.4% | 33.9% |
| Fansidea | +7.1% | 16.5% |
Source: Ahrefs, weekly traffic August 2024 to August 2026. Growth came off a smaller base and was mostly blog traffic, while peers grew larger absolute numbers, mostly on commercial pages.
| Platform | Responses | Pages |
|---|---|---|
| AI Overviews | 599+470 | 89+76 |
| AI Mode | 121+111 | 127+122 |
| ChatGPT | 27−17 | 21+3 |
| Gemini | 96+57 | 42+31 |
| Perplexity | 119+87 | 20+8 |
| Copilot | 45+32 | 22+16 |
| Grok | 0−16 | 0−25 |
+292%
AI Citations Up 292% in Six Months
BigLeagueShirts was cited 1,112 times across AI platforms in September 2026, up from 284 six months earlier, across 334 pages. Google AI Overviews and AI Mode drove most of the growth. ChatGPT citations fell from 44 to 27, which matches what our prompt tests found: Google visibility is growing faster than ChatGPT visibility.
Source: Ahrefs Site Explorer, AI responses, bigleagueshirts.com, all subdomains, 23 September 2026 compared with 23 March 2026. Responses are citations of the site in AI answers Ahrefs tracks; pages are distinct cited URLs.
What AI Search Showed: Ranking First Did Not Mean Being Cited
Once Google growth was established, we tested whether it carried over into AI answers. It did not.
- #1 in Google, absent from ChatGPT. BigLeagueShirts ranks first in Google for "custom softball jerseys" and "custom slowpitch softball jerseys", yet appeared in none of the answers in a six-prompt ChatGPT test in September 2026.
- Different sources entirely. The sites ChatGPT cited had zero overlap with Google's top 10 for the same searches.
- AI visibility came from the blog, not the shop. 90.2% of BigLeagueShirts' AI Overview keywords came from informational blog content. Without the blog, its commercial AI Overview share fell to 4.1%, against 7.6% for competitor Triton.
- Cited competitors state the facts buyers ask for. The pages ChatGPT cited opened with answer-first facts on turnaround, minimum order, rush options and where the product is made.
- ChatGPT favours comparison formats. For this category, ChatGPT returned shopping-style comparisons that cite brands with aggregator and retailer listings, not custom-quote sellers.
Evidence: Rankdough prompt tests (ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews) and Ahrefs AI Overview data, September 2026. AI answers vary between sessions, so we treat single tests as directional and re-run them before acting. See how we approach this in our AI Visibility Programme.
What We Are Doing Next
The next phase targets citations, not just rankings. This work is in progress, and we will update this page with measured results.
Answer-first landing pages
One page per buyer intent, such as custom softball jerseys, uniforms and fast turnaround, opening with the facts AI answers quote: minimum order, pricing, turnaround and production.
A baseball collection page
"Custom baseball jerseys" gets 8,200 searches a month at keyword difficulty 3, and BigLeagueShirts does not rank for it, because it has no dedicated baseball page.
Mentions beyond the website
AI tools often reach brands through third-party sources such as Reddit and editorial lists, so earning those mentions is now a priority workstream.
We measure progress with three separate numbers: how often BigLeagueShirts appears in AI retrieval results, how often it is cited, and how often the citation is accurate.
What This Means for Your Brand
Google growth does not transfer automatically
A #1 ranking and zero AI citations can happen on the same search. Measure both separately.
Your blog may carry your AI visibility
If AI answers only mention your informational content, your product pages are invisible at the moment buyers decide.
State the facts buyers ask about
Minimums, prices, turnaround and origin, in plain text near the top of the page, are what cited competitors had in common.
Want the same analysis for your brand? See the full BigLeagueShirts snapshot or get your free Search & AI snapshot.
BigLeagueShirts Case Study: Frequently Asked Questions
The key facts from this case study.
How much did BigLeagueShirts' organic traffic grow?
Organic clicks grew 108% in 11 months to June 2026, according to Google Search Console. Ahrefs measured 12-month traffic growth of 115.1%, against a 21.2% average for its three main competitors.
What SEO work did Rankdough do for BigLeagueShirts?
A technical, content and UX audit, collection page rewrites with keyword-led titles and prices, structured data and canonical fixes, 297 answered sport questions, a scholarship link campaign that earned 14 university and scholarship links, and AI visibility testing.
How did the scholarship campaign help BigLeagueShirts' SEO?
A $1,000 scholarship earned 14 links from universities and scholarship sites, including Purdue, DePaul and CareerOneStop, and lifted the site's Domain Rating from 30 to 39 by November 2025.
Did ranking first in Google get BigLeagueShirts cited by ChatGPT?
No. BigLeagueShirts ranked first in Google for "custom softball jerseys" but appeared in none of the answers in a six-prompt ChatGPT test in September 2026. The cited sites had no overlap with Google's top 10.
Where did BigLeagueShirts' AI Overview visibility come from?
90.2% of its AI Overview keywords came from informational blog content. Its commercial pages held a 4.1% share of AI Overview visibility, against 7.6% for competitor Triton.
What makes a page more likely to be cited in AI answers for custom apparel?
In our tests, the pages ChatGPT cited opened with plain-text facts on turnaround, minimum order, rush options and production location. We treat this as a working hypothesis and are testing it on BigLeagueShirts' new landing pages.
Who were BigLeagueShirts' main competitors?
Boombah, Sportsgearswag and Fansidea. All three had higher Domain Ratings and more referring domains than BigLeagueShirts in August 2026.
Want to Know Where Your Brand Stands?
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