One year of teas.co.uk: what building for AI has actually brought

The first thing teas.co.uk ever sold was two boxes of Teapigs Winter Glühwein. The order arrived at 1.24 in the afternoon on Tuesday 18 November 2025. Three more followed before the day was out.

Four orders on day one. It took six months to beat that.

The shop turns one on 18 November 2026. I have spent most of the year building it so that people, search engines and AI assistants can all read the same facts about the same box of tea. So this is not a birthday card. It is the year's figures, read from the shop's own records on 15 November 2026, with the parts that worked, the parts that did not, and the mistakes.

The year in one table

These are different events and they stay separate. A machine reading a page is not a person visiting, and a person visiting is not a customer buying.

What people actually bought

You might expect a tea shop's best seller to be a breakfast tea. Ours is chocolate and mint.

One order in ten had Teapigs Chocolate and Mint in it, and people who buy it take about four boxes at a time. Look down that list. There is one everyday breakfast tea on it. The rest are flavours and blends people go looking for. That is the lesson of the year in one table: people do not come to a small tea shop for the tea they pick up with the milk. They come for the one they went looking for.

The rest of the records say the same thing:

• By brand: Teapigs was in 58 orders, Tetley in 28, Hyson in 25, Yorkshire Tea in 24, Twinings in 23 and True English Tea in 15.
• Hard to find teas: 50 orders, about one in five, included something from the shelf of rare and discontinued teas.
• Fruit and herbal against black tea: almost level. Fruit and herbal teas were in 114 orders and black teas in 115.
• Basket size: small. The average order has fewer than two different teas in it.

Where the parcels went

At least 223 parcels went to UK addresses, in 85 different postcode areas. The most to any one area is nine, and that is our own TN postcode around Tunbridge Wells, so we are not a local shop that happens to have a website. Reading, south east London, Bristol and Nottingham come next.

A handful went further: two to Norway, and one each to Italy, Turkey, France, the United States, Guernsey and the Isle of Man. Every order goes out with a free tea sample.

Sunday is the busiest day of the week, with 41 of the orders. The busiest single day was 17 May 2026, a week after version two went live, with five. The first day's four orders stayed the record until then.

Month by month: orders and Google

Paid orders are completed, processing or later refunded, the same rule as our count of where every order came from. Twenty seven of the 236 were later refunded and they stay in the count. Clicks are Google Search Console's own figure for unpaid results.

The line is not straight. March brought six orders. July brought ten. Then September brought 41, the best month the shop has had, helped by the Autumn Sale, and October brought 36.

A note on November. Google counted 5,672 clicks in the first eight days of November. On five days around the start of the month its count jumped to between 900 and 1,200 a day, and our own record of real browsers on the site did not move. I do not know why, so I am not going to build a claim on that week. Without it, Google is sending about 390 visitors a day.

What Google did

In October 2025 Google sent about four people a day. In October 2026 it sent 341 a day. That is about 95 times more in twelve months, and none of it was bought. On 22 September Google sent the small badge it sends when a site passes a milestone: 5,000 clicks in 28 days.

Here is what I have learned about those visitors, measured over 1 October to 13 November 2026:

• About two thirds of real visitors come from Google. DuckDuckGo sends about 4%, Bing about 2%, and AI assistants under 1%.
• Of the people Google sends, two thirds are in the UK and nearly two thirds are on a phone.
• 85% of people who arrive from a search land on a Tea Wiki guide, not a product.
• 94% read one page and leave.

The guides they come for, counted over the twelve months to 13 November 2026:

The Tea Wiki now has 1,937 entries and brought at least 28,000 visits from search engines, AI assistants and other sites in those twelve months. On 14 November it gained 15 new guides and 96 extended pages.

The gap I have to be honest about

Traffic has grown far faster than sales.

Split the year in two. In the first six months, November to April, the shop took 69 orders and Google sent 2,912 clicks. In the next six, May to October, it took 143 orders and Google sent 25,776 clicks. Orders doubled. Clicks grew ninefold. In October that was about one order for every 300 clicks from Google.

The reason is in the list above. People arrive on a guide, get their answer and go. When we traced 126 orders back to the first page the buyer saw, 67 started on a product page, 10 on a brand page and only 6 on a guide. The guides bring the readers. The product pages bring the orders. Joining the two is the job for year two, and it has started: more than 380 guides now carry a shortlist of teas that match what the guide is about.

What AI has brought, and what it has not

I opened the shop to every AI system that behaves well, because an assistant cannot take a box of tea away by reading about it. Since 2 June 2026 our server has recorded 27 named AI agents asking for pages. This is what each company's agents were served, and the visits that came back from its answers, read from Under the Hood on 15 November 2026:

The two columns come from separate records and are not joined journeys, so read them as a description, not a league table. One more crawler, run by the world's biggest online shop, ignored the limits we publish. It is refused, and its requests count towards nothing.

So what did all that reading bring?

• Visits: 2,765 browser sessions arrived from AI answers. That is real, and it is under 1% of our visitors.
• Orders: 5 orders arrived on a link carrying ChatGPT's own tag, and two of those were later refunded. One more probably came through an assistant, and one customer told us an assistant sent them. Seven orders with any AI evidence at all, in a year.
• Search did the work: of the 161 orders since version two, search engines brought 71, and for 47 the records cannot say.

I would rather publish seven than pretend it is seventy. Someone who reads an AI answer and then types our address leaves no trace, so seven is not the whole truth either. It is what we can prove.

What has changed is how the shop can be asked. Since 6 October 2026 an assistant can search the catalogue, compare teas and fill a basket, and the customer checks it and pays on teas.co.uk. Between 4 October and 14 November, use from outside the shop came to 132 calls to those tools. The site also publishes 49,599 citation anchors across 3,252 pages, so an assistant can quote the exact section it used.

The traffic nobody sees

Here is a figure that surprised me. Between 1 October and 13 November 2026 our server logged 5.8 million requests. Real people looking at pages were about half of one percent of them.

The rest is machines: our own jobs that check images and facts, search engine crawlers, AI crawlers, a network of scrapers working through filter pages, and 226,060 attempts to spam the contact form. In October, behind all of that, there were about 520 real people a day. In the first half of November, about 600.

That is why Under the Hood exists. Our own session counter holds 1.7 million rows, every one labelled human. We had to learn to count the real ones.

What we got wrong

A year of building in public means a year of mistakes in public. The ones that mattered:

• We miscounted our own orders. Our first count of where orders came from said 161 and left out the 75 the shop took on its first version. It is corrected to 236, and the correction is printed on the page.
• We believed a counter that could not be believed. In August a scraper wave produced more than a million sessions that our own records labelled as human. They were not. We stopped reading that number as people.
• We sent visitors to tea we no longer sell. Google was still pointing at products that had gone. Those addresses now lead to the closest tea we do sell.
• We filled the newsroom with articles about AI. Thirteen in one morning, in a place people visit for tea. That was fairly criticised. They now live in the Tea Wiki, each one folded into the entry on its subject, and every old address forwards to its new home.

Every correction to the study itself is dated and kept on Page 06 of Under the Hood. Nothing is quietly fixed.

The year in dates

The address is older than all of it. teas.co.uk was registered 173 days before google.com.

Why I built it this way

Before tea I spent sixteen years in the motor trade, and the rule I took from it is to sell the information first. A customer who knows what a cup really costs, what is in the box and what a tea is not good for will make a better choice, and a shop that tells them will be trusted next time.

So every product sits on one checked record, and a person, a search engine and an assistant all read the same one. The longer account is in the Tea Wiki:

• AI crawlers: why teas.co.uk opened its door to them. Why the door is open, and what stays shut.
• Premium Intent. What people now tell an assistant, and what a shop needs in order to answer.
• Truth entity. The one set of facts behind every tea.
• Builder vocabulary. Every working word in one place, and where the rules came from.

And the counterweight, because a plan with the risks left out is not worth trusting: what could prove me wrong.

Year two

Three things, and I will report on each whichever way it goes.

• Turn readers into customers. Thousands of people a month read a guide and leave. The teas that answer their question need to be on the page in front of them.
• Find out if people got the right tea. 24 orders came from someone who had bought before. It is the hardest number to fake, and the one to watch.
• Keep the newsroom about tea. New teas, stock, brands, wiki updates, sale notes and, once in a while, the numbers.

Thank you

To the 212 of you who ordered in the first year, from Tunbridge Wells to Norway: thank you. To whoever bought those two boxes of Winter Glühwein on a Tuesday afternoon last November, before there was any reason to trust us: you were the first. Thank you.

Year two starts on 18 November.

Lee Samuel Tucker
Founder, teas.co.uk
Tunbridge Wells, Kent

Method. Order figures are totals read from the shop's own order records on 15 November 2026, or counted live where the page says so; no single order or customer is described. Paid means completed, processing or later refunded. Google figures are from Google Search Console, whole site, unpaid results. Visitor figures for 1 October to 13 November 2026 are from the web server's own logs. AI figures are from Under the Hood, where each carries its source, period and rule.