Enrichification: What It Means and How a Tea Shop Uses It

In capsule: Enrichification is the name Lee Samuel Tucker gives to what teas.co.uk did with its own information: making every product's facts fuller, clearer and easier to check, so that the AI systems which read the shop pass on better answers, more of the people asking click through, and some of them buy. We don't know whether anyone has used the word before, but it suits what we've built.

What is enrichification?

Most of what a shop knows about its products is written for a person looking at a page: a photo, a title, a few lines of description. An AI assistant answering a question about tea reads differently. It needs the facts behind the page, stated plainly, with their sources, and with an honest note of what is not known. Enrichification is the work of giving it that, one product at a time, so that the answer it passes on is a good one.

Where the word comes from

Lee came up with the word while rebuilding teas.co.uk in 2026, as a deliberate play on enshittification, the writer Cory Doctorow's term for online platforms that get worse for their users over time. The American Dialect Society named enshittification its word of the year for 2023, and Doctorow writes about it often on his blog, Pluralistic. People have asked for years what the opposite of enshittification should be called. Enrichification is Lee's answer for a shop: a service that gets more useful to the people it serves as it grows. We don't know whether anyone has used the word before us, and we do not claim to own it. We use it because it describes the work.

What teas.co.uk actually did

Enrichification at teas.co.uk is not a slogan. It is a list of things that were built and can be checked:

A checked record behind every product. Each product has structured data: its barcode (GTIN), price, stock, pack size, ingredients and allergens where the maker publishes them, source links, and the price per cup. Anyone can read one, for example this product record. Gaps are marked as gaps rather than filled with a guess, the idea set out in claim boundaries.
Standard formats, not private ones. Product pages carry schema.org Product markup, following Google's guidance for product structured data and the Google Merchant Center product data specification, so any system that reads the open web can use them.
Front doors for machines. The shop publishes ai-entry.json, agents.json and an llms.txt file, following the llms.txt proposal, so an AI system arriving for the first time knows where the facts are and how to ask for them.
The door left open. Where much of the web blocks AI crawlers, teas.co.uk lets well behaved ones read it, and checks who they are against the providers' own published lists, such as OpenAI's crawler documentation. Lee explains why in Most of the web is closing the door to AI. We opened ours.
Tools an assistant can use. Since October 2026 an assistant can, with the customer's approval, search, compare and fill a basket through the teas.co.uk server built on the Model Context Protocol, with payment always on teas.co.uk. How it works is in Shop teas.co.uk from your AI assistant.
Thanks for reading it right. The shop records which AI systems read its pages and sends readers back, and thanks them in public with the Thank You Mint.

From better data to a click back to a sale

The point of enrichification is commercial, and Lee says so plainly: the shop is here to sell tea. The chain it is built for has three links. First, an AI system reads the enriched record and gives a better answer. Second, the person asking clicks through to teas.co.uk, a visit we call a click back. Third, some of those visits end in an order.

The shop publishes each link as it happens, in Under the Hood, and these figures update themselves from our own records. Since 10 May 2026 our visit records have counted 2,763 browser visits arriving from AI answers. Of the 161 paid orders taken since then, 5 arrived on a link carrying an AI assistant's own tag, and the shop has taken 236 paid orders in all since its first on 18 November 2025. Search engines still bring far more orders than assistants do, and the full count is in Where our orders come from.

These numbers show what happened, not why. Better data fits the rise, but nobody can prove which fact on which page brought which customer, and Room 02 of Under the Hood is careful about exactly that.

A tea example

Imagine someone asks an assistant for a light green tea for their mum, who is cutting down on caffeine, ideally fruity, under fifteen pounds. A thin product page says "green tea, 50 bags". An enriched record says whether it is decaffeinated (and that decaffeinated still means a little caffeine), what flavours it carries, what it costs per cup, and whether it is in stock today. With the second, the assistant can suggest Tetley Decaf Pure Green Tea and say why, mention Tetley Green Tea with Mango and Passion Fruit (Lee's own favourite) as a fruity choice for the times caffeine does not matter, and point to Tetley Super Green Defence Mango and Pineapple or Pukka Organic Supreme Matcha Green for someone who wants something brighter. The rest of the range is on the green tea shelf. The request is illustrative; the product records are real.

What enrichification is not

It is not stuffing pages with keywords, writing copy for robots at the expense of people, or claiming more than the facts support. An enriched record that admits a gap is better than a full one that guesses. It is also not a promise that AI will send a business sales; at teas.co.uk it is a bet being tested in public, with the results published whichever way they go.

Quick reference

Detail	Information
Term	Enrichification
Meaning at teas.co.uk	Making a shop's own product information fuller, clearer and checkable, so AI answers, click backs and sales improve
Name used by	Lee Samuel Tucker, founder of teas.co.uk, for what the shop built. Earlier use by others is not known to us and not ruled out
Plays on	Enshittification, Cory Doctorow's term for platforms that decay
Related	Premium Intent, truth entity, complete payload, claim boundaries

What others have found

Google reports that AI Mode queries are on average three times the length of a traditional search, and that people increasingly describe their own situation (Google, May 2026; covered by Search Engine Journal). Longer questions need fuller product facts to answer well.
Adobe found that traffic to US retail sites from generative AI tools rose 693.4% in the 2025 holiday season, and that those visitors converted 31% more often than others (Adobe, January 2026).
Kevin Indig argues that in agentic commerce "product truth wins" (Search Engine Journal).
Google explains how structured data helps it understand a page in its introduction to structured data.

The bottom line on enrichification

Enrichification is a shop making its own information better so that the machines reading it can be more useful to people, and the people can find their way back to the shop. At teas.co.uk it is the work behind the open door, and the results are counted in public.