{
    "id": 1083771,
    "title": "One year of teas.co.uk: what building for AI has actually brought",
    "slug": "one-year-of-teas-co-uk",
    "type": "post",
    "url": "https://teas.co.uk/one-year-of-teas-co-uk/",
    "modified": "2026-11-15T08:57:45+00:00",
    "excerpt": "The first order came in on 18 November 2025: two boxes of Teapigs Winter Gl\u00fchwein. One year on, this is the whole first year counted honestly: what people bought, where the parcels went, what Google did, and what AI has and has not brought.",
    "content_text": "The first order came in at 1.24 in the afternoon on 18 November 2025: two boxes of Teapigs Winter Gl\u00fchwein. One year on, the shop has taken paid orders from customers, Google sends about 95 times the visitors it did, and AI systems have been served more than 150,000 pages. This is the whole first year, counted honestly, including what AI has not brought.\n\nThe first thing teas.co.uk ever sold was two boxes of Teapigs Winter Gl\u00fchwein. The order arrived at 1.24 in the afternoon on Tuesday 18 November 2025. Three more followed before the day was out.\nFour orders on day one. It took six months to beat that.\nThe 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.\n\nThe year in one table\nWhatThe figureWhere it comes from\nPaid ordersOrder records, counted live. on the first version of the site, since version two\nCustomersOrder records, counted live\nOrders from someone who had bought beforeOrder records, counted live\nBoxes, tins and packs sent847Order records, read 15 November 2026\nDifferent products sold at least once161Order records, read 15 November 2026\nUK postcode areas we have posted to85Order records, read 15 November 2026\nGoogle clicks, October 2025about 4 a dayGoogle Search Console\nGoogle clicks, October 2026341 a dayGoogle Search Console\nPages served to named AI systemsOur server's record, \nVisits from AI answersOur visit record, \nOrders on a link carrying an AI assistant's own tagOrder records, counted live\nAdvertising boughtNoneThere is nothing to count\n\nThese 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.\n\nWhat people actually bought\nYou might expect a tea shop's best seller to be a breakfast tea. Ours is chocolate and mint.\nTeaOrders it was inBoxes sold\nTeapigs Chocolate and Mint2599\nHyson Premium Breakfast Tea1135\nTeapigs Chocolate Flake1020\nYorkshire Tea Cherry Bakewell Brew1019\nYorkshire Tea Bedtime Brew910\nHyson Peach Infused Black Tea816\nTeapigs Fennel and Liquorice734\nTetley Digestive Biscuits78\n\nOne 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.\nThe rest of the records say the same thing:\n\nBy 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.\nHard to find teas: 50 orders, about one in five, included something from the shelf of rare and discontinued teas.\nFruit and herbal against black tea: almost level. Fruit and herbal teas were in 114 orders and black teas in 115.\nBasket size: small. The average order has fewer than two different teas in it.\n\nWhere the parcels went\nAt 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.\nA 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.\nSunday 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.\n\nMonth by month: orders and Google\nMonthPaid ordersClicks from Google Search\nNovember 2025 (orders from the 18th)10153\nDecember 202513207\nJanuary 202616599\nFebruary 20269429\nMarch 20266773\nApril 202615751\nMay 202622887\nJune 2026131,188\nJuly 2026102,431\nAugust 2026214,561\nSeptember 2026416,133\nOctober 20263610,576\nNovember 2026 (to the 13th)24see the note below\nTotal23628,688 to the end of October\n\nPaid 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.\nThe 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.\nA 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.\n\nWhat Google did\nIn 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.\nHere is what I have learned about those visitors, measured over 1 October to 13 November 2026:\n\nAbout two thirds of real visitors come from Google. DuckDuckGo sends about 4%, Bing about 2%, and AI assistants under 1%.\nOf the people Google sends, two thirds are in the UK and nearly two thirds are on a phone.\n85% of people who arrive from a search land on a Tea Wiki guide, not a product.\n94% read one page and leave.\n\nThe guides they come for, counted over the twelve months to 13 November 2026:\nTea Wiki guideVisits in twelve months\nBest tea brands UK925\nBest green tea UK781\nBest British tea bags UK708\nBritish tea brands compared550\nBest English breakfast tea bags UK538\nWhich UK teabags are plastic free?441\nCan you take teabags on a plane?381\n\nThe Tea Wiki now has 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.\n\nThe gap I have to be honest about\nTraffic has grown far faster than sales.\nSplit 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.\nThe 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.\n\nWhat AI has brought, and what it has not\nI 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:\nCompanyPages served to its agentsVisits from its answers\nOpenAI45,7291,043\nMicrosoft43,384583\nPerplexity33,53134\nAnthropic15,1305\nMeta9,932none recorded\nGoogle (its general crawler)3,75747\nDuckDuckGo2,397934\n\nThe 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.\nSo what did all that reading bring?\n\nVisits: browser sessions arrived from AI answers. That is real, and it is under 1% of our visitors.\nOrders: 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.\nSearch did the work: of the orders since version two, search engines brought , and for the records cannot say.\n\nI 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.\nWhat 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 citation anchors across pages, so an assistant can quote the exact section it used.\n\nThe traffic nobody sees\nHere 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.\nThe 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.\nThat 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.\n\nWhat we got wrong\nA year of building in public means a year of mistakes in public. The ones that mattered:\n\nWe 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.\nWe 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.\nWe 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.\nWe 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.\n\nEvery correction to the study itself is dated and kept on Page 06 of Under the Hood. Nothing is quietly fixed.\n\nThe year in dates\nDateWhat happened\n18 November 2025First order: two boxes of Teapigs Winter Gl\u00fchwein. Four orders on the day\n25 December 2025The shop introduces itself\nJanuary 2026The first big Tea Wiki guides are out. Sixteen orders, the best month on the first version of the site\nMarch 2026Six orders. The quietest month of the year\n10 May 2026Version two goes live: one checked set of facts behind every product\n17 May 2026Five orders in a day, still the record\n2 June 2026Under the Hood starts recording every named AI system that asks for a page\n19 June 2026Gift cards and rewards arrive\n3 August 2026The one crawler that ignored our rules is refused at the server\n8 August 2026Version two at 90 days, and 25 new buying guides\n13 September 2026The Autumn Sale starts\n22 September 2026Google's badge: 5,000 clicks in 28 days\nSeptember 202641 paid orders, the best month so far\n6 October 2026AI assistants can search the shop and fill a basket\n13 November 2026Our first social media posts, after a year of none\n14 November 202615 new Tea Wiki guides and 96 extended\n18 November 2026One year since the first order\n\nThe address is older than all of it. teas.co.uk was registered 173 days before google.com.\n\nWhy I built it this way\nBefore 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.\nSo 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:\n\nAI crawlers: why teas.co.uk opened its door to them. Why the door is open, and what stays shut.\nPremium Intent. What people now tell an assistant, and what a shop needs in order to answer.\nTruth entity. The one set of facts behind every tea.\nBuilder vocabulary. Every working word in one place, and where the rules came from.\n\nAnd the counterweight, because a plan with the risks left out is not worth trusting: what could prove me wrong.\n\nYear two\nThree things, and I will report on each whichever way it goes.\n\nTurn 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.\nFind out if people got the right tea. orders came from someone who had bought before. It is the hardest number to fake, and the one to watch.\nKeep the newsroom about tea. New teas, stock, brands, wiki updates, sale notes and, once in a while, the numbers.\n\nThank you\nTo the of you who ordered in the first year, from Tunbridge Wells to Norway: thank you. To whoever bought those two boxes of Winter Gl\u00fchwein on a Tuesday afternoon last November, before there was any reason to trust us: you were the first. Thank you.\nYear two starts on 18 November.\nLee Samuel TuckerFounder, teas.co.ukTunbridge Wells, Kent\nMethod. 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.",
    "contentSignals": "ai-train=yes, search=yes, ai-input=yes",
    "links": {
        "apiCatalog": "https://teas.co.uk/.well-known/api-catalog",
        "llmsTxt": "https://teas.co.uk/llms.txt",
        "mcp": "https://teas.co.uk/mcp",
        "mcpSetupGuides": "https://teas.co.uk/ai/",
        "mcpCard": "https://teas.co.uk/.well-known/mcp/server-card.json",
        "primaryAgenticRouteAuthority": "https://teas.co.uk/.well-known/teas-primary-agentic-route-authority.json"
    }
}