Lawcris — growing visibility
in a shrinking market
How Maratopia lifted a Leeds-based distributor of MFC, laminates and panel products up the search results and into AI answers — while its trade market went backwards.
The brief
Lawcris needed to keep winning trade buyers — joiners, furniture and KBB makers, shopfitters — from search, even as their customers’ market tightened and classic “blue-link” clicks were absorbed by AI answers. The brief wasn’t simply “rank higher”: it was to defend and grow high-intent visibility across both traditional search and the emerging AI channel.
The backdrop — two headwinds at once
Most case studies report results in a vacuum. Lawcris’s gains only make sense against what was happening around them — a softening trade market and a search landscape being rewired by AI. We measured the results against both.
The trade market went backwards
The Builders Merchants Federation's BMBI — the recognised proxy for UK repair, maintenance & improvement activity — shows merchant sales in sustained decline: value down 1.5% and volumes down 4.3% in the year to June 2026, with growth coming only from price rises. Lawcris's own category, Timber & Joinery, held broadly flat — outperforming the wider market, but not a rising tide. The Construction Products Association forecasts output to contract 2.5% in 2026, with private-housing RM&I forecast to fall 8%.
Search moved toward AI
Gartner forecast that traditional search-engine volume would fall 25% by the end of 2026, with generative-AI tools becoming, in its analyst's words, "substitute answer engines." Pew Research found that when Google shows an AI summary, people click a normal result link only about 8% of the time versus 15% without one; Ahrefs measured a 34.5% lower click-through rate on the top result when an AI Overview appears.
"This proved to be a difficult quarter… significant growth is unlikely until the second half of the year."
— John Newcomb, CEO, Builders Merchants Federation, on trading conditions into 2026Our approach
Search foundations
- Lifted technical site health from 68% to 78% across a 5,000-page catalogue
- Built topical authority around core lines — MFC, laminates, MDF, worktops, edging
- Grew the tracked keyword footprint and pushed head terms onto page one
- Ongoing content & link acquisition — domain authority 21 → 30
AI visibility (AEO)
- Structured product & question-led content so AI engines can cite it
- Targeted the question-shaped queries ("what is MFC") that feed AI answers
- Established Lawcris as a source ChatGPT surfaces for panel-product queries
- Tracked the new "AI Assistant" channel in GA4 as a first-class metric
The results — the market fell, Lawcris rose
Against a market shrinking in real terms and a search landscape shedding clicks, Lawcris’s visibility and rankings moved the other way.
| Metric (September) | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Domain authority | 21 | 27 | 30 |
| Site health | 68% | 70% | 78% |
| Avg. search position (GSC) | — | 19.8 | 10.4 |
| Click-to-call (Aug) | — | 151 | 218 |
| AI-assistant visits (Aug) | 0 | 0 | 174 |
The AI angle — the shift, already in the data
The move to AI search isn’t a future risk for Lawcris; it’s a channel that now shows up in their analytics. “AI Assistant” went from zero to ~423 visits a quarter — 97% from ChatGPT — and it converts: those visits are already generating enquiries. Lawcris is being cited by the answer engines the whole industry is bracing for.
"Generative AI solutions are becoming substitute answer engines, replacing user queries that previously may have been executed in traditional search engines."
— Alan Antin, VP Analyst, Gartner (Feb 2024)Search is evolving rather than collapsing — Google still holds the lion’s share — but the direction is clear, and the brands that get cited inside AI answers now will own the next decade of discovery.
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