Commerce
How Rowan & Pike made AI answers its fastest-growing channel
Rowan & Pike’s jackets won independent gear tests but rarely appeared when shoppers asked AI engines for recommendations. After fixing how crawlers reached its product pages and restructuring its specs, it grew AI-referred revenue 2.6× in two quarters.
2.6×
growth in AI-referred revenue over two quarters
Shoppers ask very specific questions, like which shell is quietest in wind or which one fits over a midlayer. Once our pages answered those plainly, the engines started quoting us.
Luis Ortega
Head of ecommerce
The challenge
Rowan & Pike makes technical outerwear for hikers and climbers and sells mostly through its own Shopify store. Its jackets regularly won independent gear tests. But when shoppers asked ChatGPT or Perplexity for “the best rain shell under $300,” the answers usually named larger brands and linked to big retailers.
The team suspected its product pages were part of the problem, but had no way to see how the engines were reading them.
What they did
Crawler Insights showed that AI crawlers reached fewer than a third of Rowan & Pike’s product pages, because thousands of variant URLs and a slow size-guide script cut crawls short. Citation Sources showed that the pages engines did cite shared a pattern: explicit specs, clear comparisons and direct answers to fit questions.
Consolidated 1,900 variant URLs into 310 canonical product pages
Added a plain-text spec table to every product: weight, waterproof rating, packed size and fit
Published 14 buying guides that answered the use-case questions shoppers asked most
Synced the catalog from Shopify so Prompt Tracking covered every live product line
The result
Within two quarters, Rowan & Pike’s Share of Answer on product recommendation prompts rose from 7% to 29%, and AI-referred revenue grew 2.6×. Visitors from AI answers converted at 4.1%, compared with 2.3% from organic search.
AI crawler coverage of product pages is now above 95%. The team checks Crawler Insights before every site release, and adds new products to Prompt Tracking the week they launch.