Case study · JoVE Visualize
How JoVE Visualize got 6.7× more AI citations in 4½ months
Visualize is JoVE's library of science articles and videos. In my first 4½ months as Sr. SEO Strategist, we fixed how search engines and AI assistants crawl it, rebuilt how its pages get indexed, and tied the traffic to sales pipeline.
The results
- $100KPipeline generatedorganic-sourced, tracked in CRM
- 6.7×AI answer citations (Bing)209K → 1.4M
- 3.4×Organic users (GA4)37.9K → 127.8K
Hover or tap a row for the raw numbers.
- Bing clicks9.1×
- AI answer citations6.7×
- Bing impressions6.1×
- Pages cited by AI5.1×
- Google video clicks4.3×
- Organic users3.4×
- Google web clicks1.9×
- Google web impressions1.5×
Where users come from now
GA4- Organic Search127,784 users88.4%
- AI Assistants16,408 users11.4%
- Referral717 users0.5%
May 11 – Sep 23, 2026. A user can arrive through more than one channel.
See the raw numbers
| Metric | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bing clicks | 11.2K | 101.8K | 9.1× |
| AI answer citations | 209.2K | 1.4M | 6.7× |
| Bing impressions | 851.3K | 5.2M | 6.1× |
| Pages cited by AI | 626 | 3.2K | 5.1× |
| Google video clicks | 3.5K | 15K | 4.3× |
| Organic users | 37.9K | 127.8K | 3.4× |
| Google web clicks | 48.9K | 94.5K | 1.9× |
| Google web impressions | 19.9M | 29.9M | 1.5× |
Visualize launched in September 2025. I joined in May 2026, so these results compare my first 4½ months with the 4½ months before I joined. Both periods are after launch; there's no like-for-like year earlier.
What we changed
Fixed what bots actually see
Server-side rendering was serving fallback API content to Googlebot and blocking AI crawlers like GPTBot and ClaudeBot from JavaScript-dependent content. Bot log analysis showed where crawl budget was being wasted.
Cleaned up crawl errors
Fixed 404s, 500 errors and broken redirects, so crawlers spend their time on pages that should rank.
Rebuilt sitemaps for indexing
Split URLs into smaller, focused sitemaps and redefined how they're submitted, then built a pipeline (Python, Playwright, Search Console, BigQuery) to track indexing per sitemap. Indexed pages grew 300%.
Corrected the structured data
Moved article pages to ScholarlyArticle schema (MedicalScholarlyArticle, with MeSH topics and author data), so search engines and AI assistants understand what each page is and who wrote it.
Fixed international SEO
Resolved hreflang conflicts across 5M+ pages, caused by two systems generating mismatched URLs for the same page.
New content and page structure
Published new content with a clearer page structure, and tested three article layouts against each other on pages that were seen often but rarely clicked.
Used jove.com's authority
Added valuable content on the main jove.com site, drawing on its long-established authority to support Visualize.
We ran these as a series of experiments. I found and prioritised the issues and wrote the technical requirements and tickets; JoVE's developers built them, and I tracked the impact in Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and GA4.
From search to pipeline
How organic search turns into pipeline
$100K pipeline- Google & BingPeople search and find JoVE content
- visualize.jove.comArticles and videos answer the query
- jove.comVisitors continue to the main site
- CRM opportunityLeads become sales pipeline
How it's measured
- Bing Webmaster Tools · AI Performance (AI answer citations, pages cited)
- Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console · visualize.jove.com
- GA4 · users by first-user channel
- CRM · organic-sourced pipeline