SEO and AEO Content Strategy Builds Search Authority and AI Visibility for Oatey Co.
An integrated SEO and answer engine optimization strategy helped Oatey strengthen its educational content ecosystem, generate nearly 1.2 million blog-related page views, and build measurable visibility across AI search platforms.
Industry
Plumbing
Manufacturing
Capabilities
Content Marketing
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
Outcomes
Organic Search Visibility
AI Search Visibility
Website Traffic
Content Authority
Overview
Since 1916, Oatey Co. has provided reliable, high-quality products for the residential and commercial plumbing industries, with a commitment to delivering quality, building trust, and improving lives.
Oatey’s blog has long served as an educational resource for plumbing professionals, apprentices, facility teams, channel partners, DIYers, and homeowners looking for reliable guidance on plumbing installation, maintenance, and product applications. As search behavior evolved, Oatey saw an opportunity to make that content more useful and discoverable through both traditional search engines and AI-powered answer platforms.
Working with Oatey’s communications and technical product expert teams, GreenHouse Digital + PR helped evolve the blog strategy around answer engine optimization, or AEO.
The program combined technical subject-matter expertise with a pillar-and-cluster content model, intentional internal linking, and answer-friendly formatting designed to strengthen topical authority and make Oatey’s expertise easier for search and AI systems to understand and cite.
The Challenge:
Search was changing quickly. Contractors and consumers could increasingly use Google (AI Overviews and AI Mode), ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and other generative AI platforms to ask detailed plumbing questions and receive synthesized answers without first navigating a traditional search results page.
For Oatey, strong organic rankings remained important, but they were no longer the only measure of discoverability. The team needed to organize its technical expertise so AI systems could identify clear answers, understand relationships between related topics, and recognize Oatey as a credible source. At the same time, the strategy needed to protect existing high-performing content and reduce competition between pages targeting similar search intent.
The Approach:
Oatey’s Marketing Communications Manager worked with the GreenHouse team to build a more structured content ecosystem around priority plumbing topics.
- Broad pillar pages served as comprehensive resources, while connected cluster articles answered narrower questions, and project guides provided step-by-step instructions.
- Bidirectional internal links helped users move naturally between resources while giving traditional crawlers and AI systems clearer context about how the content was related.
Each assignment began with a detailed content brief provided to GreenHouse by Oatey, defining audience intent, keywords, metadata, internal-link opportunities, approved product references, visuals, schema opportunities, and the specific question the article needed to answer.
GreenHouse writers then interviewed Oatey technical subject-matter experts and reviewed approved documentation to create accurate, educational content grounded in real-world plumbing expertise.
Content was also formatted with AI-driven discovery in mind. The team incorporated important AEO/GEO content optimizations, including:
- Concise Definitions
- Descriptive Headings
- Faqs
- Schema Markup
- True HTML Tables
- Bullet Lists
- Short-Answer Blocks
- And Structured Internal Links.
High-performing pages received selective updates rather than unnecessary rewrites.
GreenHouse has been a valuable partner in helping us evolve Oatey’s blog content strategy as search continues to change. They’ve helped us translate our technical expertise into useful, authoritative content that meets the needs of our audiences while also strengthening how that content is structured and discovered across traditional and AI-powered search. Just as importantly, they understand the importance of maintaining the technical accuracy and authenticity that our customers expect from Oatey.”
Amanda Keiber ● Senior Director, Marketing Communications, Oatey Co.
The Results:
The strategy delivered measurable gains across traditional and AI-driven search.
From June 1, 2025, through June 30, 2026, Oatey’s blog-related pages generated 1,198,218 views, while the main blog hub generated 94,872 views, up 24.4% from the prior period. The 10 most-viewed blog articles generated 372,870 combined views.
Oatey also established significant visibility within AI search. Google Search Console recorded 1.29 million generative AI impressions for Oatey blog pages from May 18 through June 30, 2026.
AI search engines generated 10,998 referral sessions to Oatey.com from June 30, 2025, to Aug. 3, 2026, while Semrush reported a 74/100 AI visibility score and thousands of mentions and citations across tracked platforms.
The work also established a repeatable framework Oatey can use to evaluate content through both human engagement and AI visibility, strengthen underdeveloped topic clusters, and prioritize future updates based on measurable demand.
The most important thing for us was making sure we didn’t sacrifice the quality or authenticity of the content in pursuit of AI visibility. Everything still starts with real subject-matter expertise and information that is genuinely useful to the reader. From there, we can structure and optimize that expertise so search engines and LLMs can understand, surface, and cite it. Brands now have two audiences: the people consuming the content and the machines helping them discover it. Strong content has to work for both.”
Madelyn Young ● Director, Content & PR, GreenHouse Digital + PR
Why it Worked:
The program combined Oatey’s technical expertise with a content architecture designed around how people actually research plumbing questions. Instead of treating AEO as a separate content channel, Oatey and GreenHouse strengthened the existing blog through clearer answers, stronger topic relationships, expert-led content, and selective optimization.
That approach allowed Oatey to preserve the organic value it had already built while extending its authority into emerging AI search experiences. The result is an educational content program that continues to serve people seeking practical plumbing guidance while becoming increasingly visible on the platforms that shape how those answers are discovered.