Case Study · 5 months

9 owner leads from AI search, in five months.

In The Sun VR, a 13-property vacation rental management company in St. Augustine, FL, started running inkSTR in March 2026 and had 9 property-owner leads arrive from AI search within its first five months — while Google Search clicks grew 3.1x (20 to 62 a month) and impressions 6.2x (927 to 5,746). Every number is measured in Google Search Console and their own lead records, not estimated by a third-party tool.

Customer: In The Sun VR
Market: St. Augustine, FL
Industry: Vacation rental management
9
AI-search owner leads
3.1x
Organic clicks growth
417
Keywords ranking
150
Articles published

Hockey Stick SEO

The growth curve, in one chart.

Google Search clicks per month, from Google Search Console, May 2025 through July 2026. Hover any month for impressions and keywords ranking.

Google Search clicks per month
In The Sun VR · Google Search Console, May 2025 – Jul 2026
018355370May 25Aug 25Nov 25Feb 26May 26Jul 26InkSTR begins62

The starting point

For the ten months before inkSTR, Google search sent In The Sun VR very little: clicks ranged from 4 to 36 a month across the property's Search Console history, dating back to May 2025. In February 2026, the month before the program started, Google delivered 20 clicks and 927 impressions, with the site ranking for 69 keywords.

Why it took off

In The Sun VR started running inkSTR in March 2026. Over the following five months, inkSTR published pillar-and-cluster content built for both the travelers considering a stay and the owners considering a manager — 150 articles in total, each grounded in real details from all 13 properties in the portfolio and mapped to buying-intent keywords tied directly to bookable listings. Every article shipped with an answer-first structure, TL;DR summaries, and FAQ sections built from real searcher questions, with E-E-A-T signals and schema markup on every post — auto-published to Wix on a steady cadence so the site compounded month over month.

What happened next

The leads came first: 9 property-owner inquiries have arrived through AI search since the program began — owners who asked an AI assistant about vacation rental management and were pointed to In The Sun VR, because the content was structured to be cited. By July 2026, Google clicks had climbed to 62 a month and impressions to 5,746 — a 3.1x and 6.2x lift from the month before the program started — with the site ranking for 417 keywords, up from 69.

The playbook

What ran in the background, week after week.

  • Pillar-and-cluster topical authority for both guest and owner intent
  • Real details from all 13 properties grounded into every article
  • Buying-intent keywords mapped directly to bookable listings
  • Answer-first structure with TL;DR summaries, built for AI search citability
  • FAQ sections with FAQPage schema drawn from real searcher questions
  • E-E-A-T signals and schema markup on every post
  • Auto-published to Wix on a steady cadence so the site compounds week over week
  • Internal linking that distributes authority across the whole topic graph

About these numbers

These numbers come from one operator over a five-month engagement, measured in Google Search Console and their own lead records rather than third-party traffic estimates. The playbook — pillar content, real property data, AI-search-ready structure, consistent publishing — is the same one we ship to every inkSTR customer from day one.

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