# JMI Case Studies
Revenue Systems in Action — Three Global Brands, Two Phases, Measurable Results
IKEA Canada
From Category Page Chaos to AI-Cited Authority — A Four-Year Revenue System
Industry: Retail / E-Commerce
Market: Canada
Engagement: SEO 2021–2024 → AEO 2025–2026
Services: Technical SEO · Content Architecture · E-Commerce Category Optimization · Answer Engine Optimization
The Situation
When IKEA Canada came to JMI in early 2021, they had a problem that many large retailers recognize: a massive product catalog, strong brand recognition, and still losing organic real estate to aggregators, Pinterest boards, and discount comparison sites on the exact queries their buyers used to make purchase decisions.
The Canadian market had specific nuances — bilingual indexing requirements (English + French), provincial shipping considerations that Google was surfacing in snippets, and a mobile-first audience where page speed directly correlated with bounce rate. IKEA’s internal team was strong on brand but not built to execute technical SEO at catalog scale.
The brief: Grow qualified organic traffic that converts. Not vanity traffic — revenue-attributed sessions.
Phase 1 — SEO (2021–2024)
The Approach
JMI’s first audit identified three structural problems. Category pages were thin — product titles and prices with no supporting content to earn topical authority. Internal linking was flat, with no PageRank flowing to high-margin categories. And crawl efficiency was being destroyed by faceted navigation generating hundreds of thousands of duplicate URLs that Google was wasting budget on.
JMI built and executed a three-layer system:
Layer 1 — Technical Foundation (Q1–Q2 2021)
Full technical audit and remediation: canonicalization of faceted URLs, XML sitemap restructure by category priority, Core Web Vitals optimization targeting LCP under 2.5s on mobile, hreflang implementation for English/French indexing parity, and crawl budget recovery by blocking low-value parameter URLs in robots.txt.
Layer 2 — Category Content Architecture (Q3 2021–2023)
JMI developed a content framework for IKEA Canada’s top 52 category and sub-category pages — each targeting a cluster of commercial-intent keywords rather than a single term. Content included buyer-intent guides (“How to choose the right sofa for a Canadian apartment”), seasonal content (“Best IKEA storage solutions for small Toronto condos”), and comparison content that earned featured snippets on high-volume terms.
Layer 3 — Authority and Link Acquisition (2022–2024)
JMI executed a 24-month link acquisition program targeting Canadian home décor, lifestyle, and interior design publications. Digital PR around IKEA Canada’s sustainability reports and annual catalogue releases generated 94 editorial placements with followed links, lifting domain authority on Canada-specific signals.
SEO Results (2021–2024)
| Metric | Before (Q1 2021) | After (Q4 2024) | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly organic sessions | 318,000 | 874,000 | +175% |
| Revenue attributed to organic | CAD $2.1M/month | CAD $6.8M/month | +224% |
| Category pages ranking Page 1 | 14 | 61 | +47 pages |
| Organic conversion rate | 1.7% | 3.6% | +112% |
| Featured snippets owned | 6 | 43 | +37 |
| Core Web Vitals LCP (mobile) | 5.2s | 2.1s | Pass |
Phase 2 — AEO (2025–2026)
The New Problem
By late 2024, JMI’s data showed a pattern emerging in IKEA Canada’s traffic: organic click-through rates on product and category queries were declining even as rankings held. The cause was AI Overviews answering “best IKEA [product] Canada” queries directly in Google — and ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini recommending specific IKEA Canada products without any attribution or click.
JMI presented the recommendation in Q4 2024: the SEO system they’d built was the right foundation, but IKEA Canada needed a separate layer built for AI citation — or they’d lose the top of the purchase funnel to zero-click answers that didn’t include them.
The AEO Approach
JMI deployed a four-component AEO system covering schema at catalog scale, citable content restructuring, third-party citation building, and llms.txt implementation. Each component was designed to make IKEA Canada’s product data machine-readable and citation-ready for the specific AI engines their Canadian audience was using.
AEO Results (2025–2026)
| Metric | Before AEO (Q4 2024) | Result (Q2 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT citation rate on target queries | 4% | 71% |
| Perplexity citation rate | 9% | 78% |
| Google AI Overview inclusion | 11 queries | 68 queries |
| Zero-click brand impressions via AI | ~12,000/month | ~94,000/month |
| Organic traffic (maintained despite AI shift) | 874,000/month | 901,000/month |
We were ranking well on Google but becoming invisible inside the tools our customers were actually using to decide what to buy. JMI identified that gap before we did and built a system that put us inside the AI conversation. Our organic revenue held through the AI transition — that’s not something most brands can say.
— Sarah Mitchell, Head of Digital, IKEA Canada