For Tim, Caster Central

The AI Search Sprint

90-day plan to put CC into the answers buyers see first, prepared by Bear North Digital, May 28 2026

Why This Matters For CC

Procurement buyers placing $2,000-plus orders are starting their supplier search inside ChatGPT and Perplexity. The question is some version of "who sells heavy duty stainless casters with real spec data and a quick quote." The assistant returns three to five names pulled from whoever ranks on Google's page one. Whoever shows up gets shortlisted. Whoever doesn't never gets the call. For the kind of buyer who reads three product pages before reaching out, that shortlist is the whole game.

Where We Stand Today

Caster Central holds 4 top-10 organic positions out of 20 commercial head terms. Caster Connection holds 16. Our average position is 22.8 vs their 4.1.
Across the 7 caster queries where Google's AI Overview fired, CC was cited zero times. Caster Connection was cited in four of them.
Four keywords where the gap is widest and the buyer intent is strongest:

Keyword	Caster Central	Caster Connection
stainless steel caster	#52	#1
heavy duty caster	page 4	top 5
industrial caster wheels	page 4	top 5
total lock caster	not ranking	top 10

The 90-Day Sprint

ShippedPhase 0, Foundation

Three things already live as of last week. The Organization, Product, and BreadcrumbList JSON-LD schema on the theme is validating clean (the old Liquid errors that were breaking AI entity linking are fixed). The Cloudflare WAF rule is confirmed letting GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended through at HTTP 200, so AI crawlers are reading the site. And the review carousel is wired into product pages so AggregateRating signals start flowing.

NextPhase 1, Taxonomy build-out

Roughly 140 new category landing pages targeting the attribute searches buyers actually use: wheel material, stem diameter, weight capacity tier, environment, lock type. Caster Connection runs 60-plus filter taxonomies with an estimated 2,000-plus indexed category pages. That structural depth is doing more to win page one than backlinks or technical health. This is the biggest single move in the plan.

NextPhase 2, Editorial hub

Twelve cornerstone pieces over twelve weeks, drawn from real customer questions in CC's chat data. Stem sizing guide, wheel material decision tree, lock and brake explainer, application library, brand cross-reference. The educational long-tail is where AI Overviews fire today and where CC has nothing competing.

NextPhase 3, Authority repair

Disavow the spam blogspots sitting in the current backlink profile, then run targeted distributor-listing outreach with Albion, Colson Group, and Blickle using existing rep relationships. Target: 15 to 25 real referring domains over the quarter.

What We Need From You, Next 30 Days

Two or three application stories for the heavy duty cluster. Customer name optional. Use case, the spec problem, how it got solved. Those become the spine of the cornerstone content.
One 20-minute recorded interview to anchor the E-E-A-T author content. Your voice on the page is worth more to AI engines than any third-party byline.
Half-hour async review per week as draft category copy ships. No meeting needed, just a thumbs up or a redline.

Pacing

This is the 90-day arc. Phase 1 alone is roughly 50 hours of execution and will likely bump the current retainer scope. Flagging now so we can talk through pacing on Friday. Two reasonable paths: a one-time sprint add, or stretch Phases 1 through 3 over six months at the current cadence. Either works. Just want to make the call together before Phase 1 kicks off.