Most shops will tell you their traffic. Fewer will tell you where their orders came from, because the honest answer usually includes a large "we don't know". Ours does too. This is the full count, taken from the origin record on each order on 13 November 2026.
The count
| Where the order came from | Orders |
|---|---|
| A search engine | 71 |
| We could not tell | 47 |
| Orders we entered ourselves | 15 |
| A returning customer | 10 |
| A link from another site, including ChatGPT | 8 |
| Typed our address, social media and other routes | 9 |
| Probably an AI assistant | 1 |
| Paid orders, 10 May to 13 November 2026 | 161 |
The rows add up to 161. Twenty six of those orders were later refunded; they stay in the count, because the question here is what brought the customer, not what we kept.
Google sends most of them
Of the 71 orders that began with a search, 61 came from Google, 8 from DuckDuckGo, and one each from Bing and Ecosia. Google has also been sending more visitors. Search Console recorded 26,445 clicks to teas.co.uk between 11 August and 10 November. In the first four weeks of that period the average was 160 clicks a day. In the last four weeks it was 468.
The orders followed. September brought 41 paid orders and October 36, our two best months so far. No advertising was bought for any of it.
ChatGPT sent five
Five orders arrived on a link that ChatGPT showed to someone, carrying ChatGPT's own tag, which our server saw in the same visit. Two of the five were later refunded. One more order probably came from an AI assistant, through a site that serves both an assistant and ordinary search, so we grade it as probable and no higher. And one customer told us on the thank you page that an assistant had sent them, although our own records show a search engine for that order.
That makes seven orders with some AI evidence out of 161. It is a small number, and we would rather publish a small true number than a large hopeful one. It is also a floor: someone who reads an AI answer and then types our address, or searches for us, leaves no AI trace at all. The rule behind each figure is in Room 02 of Under the Hood.
The 47 we cannot explain
Our pages are served from a cache close to the reader, so the first page of a visit often never reaches our server, and without a tag on the link there is nothing to read later. Where that happens the order record says "unknown" and gives the reason. We do not guess, and we do not fill the gap with a favourable assumption.
What we are doing with this
Most people find us through a Tea Wiki guide, not a product page. So this week more than 380 guides gained a shortlist of teas that match what the guide is about, drawn from the 402 products and 40 brands in the range. A guide about hard water now shows the tea blended for it. A guide about taking tea on a plane now shows instant tea that needs no milk.
We also found that Google was still sending visitors to pages for products we no longer sell, which answered "page not found". Those addresses now lead to the closest thing we do sell. And the teas that are hard to find elsewhere have a shelf of their own.
We will run this count again and publish it, whichever way the numbers move.
Method: the origin record on each paid order (completed, processing or refunded) placed on teas.co.uk from 10 May 2026, the first day an origin could be recorded, to 13 November 2026. Totals only; no single order is described. Search figures are from Google Search Console, 11 August to 10 November 2026.
