OBDK · AI Visibility and Search Growth Plan

Where OBDK stands today

Owl Brand Discovery Kits is a K-12 science education company that has procured, packaged, and shipped sterilized barn owl pellets since 1996, roughly 400,000 pellets a year from its own network across thirteen western states. The store sells to two audiences through one Shopify checkout: institutions (schools and districts, university biology departments, museum education programs, public libraries, and nature centers, many ordering by purchase order with Net-21 terms) and consumers (homeschool families and curious households). The catalog spans real and synthetic dissection kits, tools, educational cards, posters, and the Conservation in a Box line, and the brand sits inside a wider ecosystem: KidWings, Sherlock Bones, Passport to Wildlife Academy, and the Wolf Education and Research Center.

Work already completed

Seven SEO and content deliverables are already live in production on obdk.com, so this plan continues an engagement rather than starting one. The completed work covers the classic on-page and content layer:

Three educational guides, published, tagged, and cross-linked: "What Is an Owl Pellet?", "Owl Pellet Bone Identification Chart", and "How to Dissect an Owl Pellet", each with its own search title and description and links into both pellet collections.
A new, indexable Horned Owl Pellets collection with written copy explaining how horned and barn pellets differ and who each suits.
The "How Are Owl Pellets Formed?" page restructured into a clean six-step walkthrough with descriptive alt text on every diagram.
The supplier page re-titled to "Sell Barn Owl Pellets to OBDK", moved to /pages/sell-owl-pellets with a permanent redirect, and its conflicting pricing and voice fixed.
The Barn Owl Pellets collection given a proper title tag, a rewritten description, corrected heading order, and links to the three new guides.

What is already strong

A genuine, decades-long brand story and a direct-supplier position that competitors cannot claim.
An active content engine: the Classroom Connections blog publishes weekly, with tagged, teacher-ready lessons and a named byline.
Real social presence (Facebook, X, Instagram, YouTube), a strong Amazon review base, and institutional trust logos on the homepage.
A clean meta layer: descriptive titles and descriptions, with the Smart SEO app already handling part of the structured data.

Where the gap is

With titles, descriptions, headings, redirects, and the core guides now handled, the classic SEO layer is in good shape. The gap that remains is the generative and structured layer that Shopify does not deliver by default and that the completed work did not set out to touch. Today an AI assistant asked to recommend a classroom owl-pellet supplier has little machine-readable reason to name OBDK specifically: there is no curated map for language models, the AI crawler posture is undecided, the brand is not linked as a resolvable entity, the strong new guides and collections carry no machine-readable schema, and the blog byline points nowhere. The content is written for people to read rather than for retrieval systems to lift and cite. Closing that layer is what the next 90 days do.

Platform note. OBDK runs on Shopify. Where the platform makes something impossible (custom server headers, root files a storefront cannot serve natively), the plan uses a Shopify-appropriate method and never treats the constraint as a failing of the site.

How the engagement runs

The engagement has two gears. The first three months are intensive: each month ships a defined block of work that builds on the one before. From month four onward the work shifts to a lighter maintenance cadence that holds the gains and compounds them.

Element	How it works
Cadence	Months 1 to 3 intensive (one workstream block per month). Month 4 onward, monthly maintenance plus a quarterly deep check.
Owners	Work is tagged Dev (theme and app changes), SEO (schema, crawler control, measurement), or Content (copy, blog, comparison articles). Most items are shared.
Evidence discipline	Schema and root files live in places our fetcher cannot always see. Every claim is verified on the live site or confirmed by a validator paste, never assumed.
Reporting	A short monthly report: citation trend, schema coverage, freshness activity, pages shipped, and next-month priorities.

Month 1 · Foundations and visible quick wins

Objective. Ship the generative-era basics Shopify does not provide, fix anything visibly wrong, and set the citation baseline that the whole engagement is measured against.

Workstream	Actions and output	Owner
Generative access files	Publish an llms.txt via a Shopify-compatible method: a curated Markdown map of who OBDK is, the core product lines (barn and horned pellets, dissection tools, Conservation in a Box, Dissect It kits), the three new owl-pellet guides, the PO and Quote path, the blog, and the linked ecosystem. Edit robots.txt.liquid to handle AI crawlers explicitly. Allow retrieval agents so the store can be cited (OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Claude-SearchBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User), and make a deliberate decision on training agents.	Dev + SEO
Schema baseline check	The store runs the Smart SEO app, which usually injects Organization and Product markup. Confirm exactly what is live by running the homepage and a product page through Google's Rich Results Test and validator.schema.org. Record the detected types, so we add what is missing rather than duplicating what already exists.	SEO
Copy and rendered-text fixes	Review full-page screenshots of the homepage, a flagship product page, the PO and Quotes page, and one blog post for spelling, spacing, and text baked into icons and badges that the fetcher cannot read. Fix any confirmed errors in-theme. These are the cheapest, most visible wins in the plan.	Content + Dev
AI citation baseline	Run the fixed prompt set (see Measurement) across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews, and record whether OBDK or its products are cited today. This is the trend line for the engagement.	SEO

Milestone: llms.txt and AI-crawler controls live, true schema baseline known, citation baseline recorded.

Month 2 · Entity, authority, and structured data

Objective. Make OBDK a resolvable entity, and give every commercial and authored page the structured data that answer engines reward.

Workstream	Actions and output	Owner
Organization and sameAs	Complete Organization schema with name, legal name (Owl Brand Supply Company, Inc.), url, logo, description, and sameAs links to the Facebook, X, Instagram, and YouTube profiles and the Amazon storefront. Claim or create a Wikidata entity so the brand stops being an island and engines can confirm it across the web.	SEO + Dev
Product, Offer, rating	Ensure product pages expose Product with Offer (price, availability), and AggregateRating only where on-site, verifiable review data exists. This is the single strongest AEO lever for an e-commerce catalog.	Dev + SEO
Author identity	The blog byline currently links to "#". Build a real author page with a credentialed bio and Person schema (name, jobTitle, knowsAbout, sameAs), wire every post byline to it, and add Author to the Article schema on posts.	Content + Dev
FAQPage schema	Add FAQPage markup to the PO and Quotes page and to product pages, covering the questions institutions actually ask: pellet sterilization and safety, purchase orders and Net-21 terms, tax-exempt ordering, international shipping quotes, and NGSS alignment. FAQ schema is the highest-value AEO item and is almost always missing on Shopify.	Content + Dev
BreadcrumbList	Add BreadcrumbList across collections and product pages for cleaner navigational structure.	Dev

Milestone: brand resolvable as an entity; product, author, and FAQ schema live and validated.

Month 3 · Semantic mapping, answer engines, and RAG readiness

Objective. Mark up and consolidate the content already shipped so retrieval systems can lift and cite it, then complete the short list of comparison pieces AI answers reach for.

Workstream	Actions and output	Owner
NGSS and definitional mapping	The barn and horned collection copy is already rewritten. Layer definitional structure on top (what each kit contains, which NGSS standards and grade bands it maps to) so models can match OBDK to named topics: food webs, predator-prey, dissection labs.	Content + SEO
RAG markup on the live guides	Add a two to four sentence abstract and a short Key Takeaways block to the top of the three new guides and the blog posts, keep clean semantic HTML, and link out to primary sources. Add HowTo schema to the "How to Dissect an Owl Pellet" guide (the seven steps are already written) and the bone-chart method. The guides exist and are cross-linked; this makes them extractable and citable.	Content
Comparison content	The horned vs barn distinction already lives in the new collection copy. Consolidate it into a single comparison guide, "Barn vs horned owl pellets for the classroom", with comparison and FAQ schema. Add the two other pieces engines cite and OBDK has the authority to own: "Real vs synthetic dissection kits" and "Buying owl pellets direct vs through resellers".	Content
Freshness signals	Expose dateModified per article, show a visible last-updated date, and run the first Dynamic Refresh pass on the oldest evergreen posts.	Dev + Content
Re-run the prompt set	Re-run the Month 1 prompt set verbatim and record the first citation delta, so the client sees movement, not just activity.	SEO

Milestone: catalog and blog are RAG-ready, first comparison articles live, first measured movement in AI citations.

Maintenance program (Month 4 onward)

Objective. Hold the gains and compound them. A lighter cadence, the same evidence discipline.

Every month

LLM citation tracking. Re-run the prompt set, log citation status and surface (quote, link, or passing mention), and take corrective action on prompts where OBDK is absent.
Freshness cadence. Refresh two to four evergreen posts, update dateModified, and add short "what changed" notes where a topic has moved.
Editorial calendar. Keep the weekly Classroom Connection cadence, and extend into one external channel (LinkedIn or an educator community) for reach and authority signals.
New product and seasonal support. Schema and copy for new SKUs, plus a back-to-school push timed to the demand peak for classroom kits.
Monthly report. Citation trend, schema coverage, freshness activity, pages shipped, and next-month priorities.

Every quarter

Full schema and technical health check to catch any Shopify theme or app change that broke markup.
Prompt-set expansion as the catalog and the buyer questions evolve.
Competitive citation check: who is being cited instead of OBDK, and why.

Measurement framework

The engagement is judged on one question: when someone asks an AI assistant to help them buy or teach with owl pellets, does OBDK get named? The starter prompt set below is run every month, verbatim, so the trend is comparable cycle over cycle.

Test prompt	What it measures
Best owl pellet kits for the classroom	Commercial head term. Does OBDK appear as a recommended supplier at all.
Where can I buy sterilized barn owl pellets for a school?	Institutional buyer intent, and whether the direct-supplier position lands.
NGSS-aligned owl pellet dissection lesson	Curriculum intent. Is a kit or a Classroom Connection cited.
Barn vs horned owl pellet for dissection	Comparison intent. Whether OBDK owns the answer after Month 3.
How to run an owl pellet dissection lab	HowTo intent. Blog and HowTo-schema citation.
Owl pellet dissection kit for homeschool	Consumer intent. Product-page citation for the DTC audience.

What we need from you

A handful of items keep the work honest and unblock the fastest wins. None takes long.

Purge caches (Shopify and any CDN) before each re-check, so we measure the live site and not a cached copy.
Paste validator output for the homepage and one product page (Rich Results Test or validator.schema.org). Schema lives in script tags our fetcher cannot always read, so your paste settles what is truly live.
Full-page screenshots of the homepage, a flagship product page, the PO and Quotes page, and one blog post, for the copy and rendered-text pass.
Theme access to edit robots.txt.liquid and templates, and a decision on the llms.txt method (a Shopify app or a proxy route).
A training-crawler decision. Whether to allow or disallow the model-training agents (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended). Retrieval agents stay allowed either way, so the store can be cited.