About the author
SEO and GEO specialist and computer scientist (B.Sc.) from Aachen, Germany, working in SEO for more than a decade. In-house from mid-sized companies to international e-commerce, currently Team Lead SEO at a large online retailer and, in parallel, founder of EverGrow SEO Solution. I come from code, not from content marketing: understanding structures and building them myself belong together for me.
I publish what I measure when it can be generalized, with method, limitations and sources. Data from retailers only anonymized. My services and the rest of this website are in German; for questions about a study, LinkedIn or Reddit is the quickest way to reach me.
Studies
Study · October 2026 · HTTP Archive, 100 large shops, server log
4.6 % of German home pages name GPTBot in robots.txt; 2.5 % have Disallow without Allow (block indicator), compared with 8.3 % and 3.5 % worldwide. The picture reverses for large websites: up to rank 100,000, 28.8 % of German pages name GPTBot (23.0 % with Disallow without Allow), compared with 13.9 % worldwide excluding Germany. On the same pages in Germany, naming rises from 3.5 to 4.4 % between February and October.
Study · October 2026 · Server logs and web analytics
AI bots account for around 1.1 % of all requests. 92.8 % of ChatGPT visits to product pages were to products previously fetched by OAI-SearchBot; only 6.5 % had a live fetch in the preceding hour. ChatGPT sessions had 1.5× as many purchases per session as organic Google sessions.
Study · October 2026 · ChatGPT, signed out · US and Germany
US: 65.4 % web cards, 30.7 % OpenAI feed. The cheapest confirmed model card comes first in 23 of 31 mixed-source answers. Four apparent feed price premiums do not establish an actual price disadvantage after review. Germany: no defined OpenAI feed marker; 20.5 % Google Shopping cards.
Study · October 2026 · Search Console, Merchant Center, own measurements
In Germany, 90 % of product items in the new grid lead to comparison sites. Shop A: Search Console merchant listings −63 %, Merchant Center −9 %, organic clicks on product pages +6.5 % (previous year −15.6 %).
Study · October 2026 · Search Console and Merchant Center
From May 16 to October 8, 2026, Search Console counted 3 to 7 times the desktop impressions for merchant listings in several shops, CTR fell to 0.2 to 0.9 %. On October 9 it was over everywhere.
Study · October 2026 · Server logs and GA4
Tagged ChatGPT clicks −73 to −79 %, ChatGPT live fetches only about −20 %: mostly the tag was missing, not the visibility.
Study · October 2026 · 100 large online shops
ChatGPT search is blocked at only 1 of 90 shops. But only 38 % provide a GTIN, only 16 % mark up variants as ProductGroup.
Focus
URL architecture, structured data, product data and migrations for online shops with large catalogs.
How Googlebot and AI bots crawl a shop, verified against official IP lists, in runs of many millions of rows.
How ChatGPT, Google’s AI features and other assistants read, cite and link online shops, measured instead of assumed.
Search Console, GA4 and BigQuery combined with my own fetches and measurements.
Working student in SEO at navabi, an international plus-size fashion retailer in Aachen. Content, keyword research, link building, first scripting projects for technical audits. This is where I learned how enterprise SEO works across hundreds of thousands of URLs.
Applied computer science with a focus on algorithms, IT security (including DNS analysis and network stability tests), computer engineering and theoretical computer science. Studied alongside ongoing SEO projects, theory and practice combined from the start. The basis for the crawlers, parsers and analysis pipelines I built later.
Alongside in-house roles, work on SEO projects for international brands such as American Express, Netto Marken-Discount and Sodexo through Buzzmatic (Aachen) and partner agencies. Multi-market, multi-stakeholder, enterprise pace. Complemented by my own freelance projects in web development (Python, Java, WordPress, Joomla).
Almost four years at Mathes Design GmbH (design-bestseller, interior e-commerce). Categories, product data and the technical SEO structure for a large furniture range.
Leadership role at motoin GmbH, an online shop for motorcycle accessories. Strategy, team, KPI responsibility. Afterwards, motoin became my first ongoing consulting client through EverGrow.
First SEO project manager, today Team Lead SEO at a large international online retailer: URL architecture, structured data, data analyses up to management level, SEO requirements for development teams. In parallel EverGrow SEO Solution as a freelancer, with my own tool suite on my own server.
