The short version: Craters & Freighters’ national website now ranks #1 in the U.S. for engineered crating, heavy equipment crating, industrial equipment crating and machinery crating, searches it didn’t rank for at all in April 2025. Over the same stretch, AI tools became a real lead source: ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and others sent 33 lead actions in all of 2024 and 402 in the first nine months of 2026, and Google’s AI Overviews now cite the site as a source on 124 searches, up from 23.
The ask
Craters & Freighters is a national network of locally owned crating, packaging and freight locations. The corporate website’s job is to win national searches and send quote requests to the right location. For years the site served both residential and business customers. In 2025 the national site shifted more of its focus to commercial and industrial work: long-term, repeat projects for manufacturers, medical device makers, IT and server equipment, and heavy industrial equipment. Locations still serve residential customers too.
What we did
Our SEO work on the national site started small in 2018. The first job was making sure rankings held through the website redesign, and they did. From there, the program grew.
- Protected rankings through a full rebuild. When the brand’s web developer moved the site to a new build in August 2019, we supplied the redirect map and search settings so rankings carried over. Our September 2019 report showed non-branded search traffic up 197% year over year.
- Rebuilt the content around commercial and industrial work. Pages for engineered crating, heavy equipment crating and robotics shipping now lead the site, alongside the residential services many locations still offer.
- A full engineering section. The site now has a dedicated engineering section: the engineering overview, the engineering process, the engineering team and 10 engineering case studies, from an 88,000 lb. industrial rotor crate headed to Germany to custom aerospace crates. Real projects give Google and AI tools proof behind searches like engineered crating, not just claims.
- Schema markup that ties the network together. Google and AI tools lean on schema markup, code that states a business’s facts in a form machines can read without guessing. In October 2025, markup we designed was installed by the brand’s web developer on the national locations page: it identifies Craters & Freighters as one company with 63 locations, each with its own name, website, address and phone number. Each location’s own website carries matching business details on every page. When someone asks an AI tool for a crating company near them, the facts it pulls are the right ones.
- Navigation built for buyers. A new mega-menu went live on the national site in August 2026 and has since rolled out across the franchise network, putting every commercial and industrial service one click from any page.
What the numbers said
Sources: Google Analytics 4 and Semrush, U.S. national data.
Results: #1 for the commercial and industrial searches that matter
| Search term | April 2025 | October 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| engineered crating | Not ranking | 1 |
| heavy equipment crating | Not ranking | 1 |
| industrial equipment crating | Not ranking | 1 |
| robotics packaging, crating and shipping | Not ranking | 1 |
| crating and shipping solutions for heavy equipment | Not ranking | 1 |
| crating machinery | 12 | 1 |
| crating services (1,000 searches a month) | 2 | 1 |
Across everything the site ranks for, top-three Google positions grew from 130 in January 2025 to 218 in September 2026, up 68% (Semrush, U.S.).
AI is now part of how buyers find a crating company
In January 2025, 7% of the searches the national site ranks for showed a Google AI Overview at the top of the results. By September 2026 it was 70%. More buyers get their answer, or their shortlist, from AI before they ever click.
| Visitors sent by AI tools | Visits | Lead actions |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 220 | 33 |
| 2025 | 1,733 | 298 |
| 2026, January–September | 1,561 | 402 |
AI-referred visitors take a lead action 26% of the time, nearly twice the 14% rate of visitors from Google’s regular results. They now account for about 1 in 9 of the site’s leads from search and AI combined.
Part of that growth is simply more people using AI tools, and no one can take credit for that. What a business can influence is whether those tools name it. In April 2025, Google’s AI Overviews cited cratersandfreighters.com as a source on 23 searches, 5% of the AI Overviews on searches the site ranks for. By September 2026 it was cited on 124 searches, 14%, including engineered crating, industrial equipment crating, machinery crating and robotics crating.
| Cited as a source in Google’s AI Overview | April 2025 | September 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Searches citing cratersandfreighters.com | 23 | 124 |
| Share of the site’s searches with an AI Overview | 5% | 14% |
That’s the job of the schema markup and the answer-first pages: give AI tools facts they can repeat with confidence, so the answer points to Craters & Freighters.
We also asked AI tools 12 questions a national buyer might ask (BrightLocal, October 2026). ChatGPT named Craters & Freighters in seven, first or second each time, including “who can crate and ship heavy industrial equipment?” and “crating and shipping for servers and IT equipment.” We continue to work on improving these results.
Where it stands
We’ll be straight about the trade-off, and it’s a normal one right now: visits and quote requests from Google’s regular results are down from 2024, as AI Overviews answer more searches on the page and the site puts more of its effort into commercial and industrial searches. What’s growing is the work the network wants: #1 rankings for commercial and industrial crating searches, and a fast-rising stream of leads from AI tools.
Next, we’re expanding the commercial and industrial sections with more content, better images and updated videos, and writing every page to be quoted by AI tools, so Craters & Freighters is the name buyers hear when they ask who can crate their machinery.
Questions franchise brands ask us
Should a franchise brand’s national site treat every search the same?
No. Craters & Freighters still serves residential customers, but shifted more of its national focus to commercial and industrial work, where jobs are larger and repeat. Total visits fell, but the site now ranks #1 nationally for engineered, heavy equipment and machinery crating, the jobs that bring repeat business to every location.
Are AI tools really sending leads?
Yes. For Craters & Freighters, visitors from ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and other AI tools produced 402 lead actions in the first nine months of 2026, up from 33 in all of 2024, and they convert at nearly twice the rate of regular search visitors. Part of that is more people using AI overall, but the share of Google’s AI Overviews citing the site also rose, from 5% to 14%.
Does schema markup help a business show up in AI search?
It helps AI tools trust the facts they repeat. Craters & Freighters’ national locations page marks up all 63 locations with their names, websites, addresses and phone numbers, and each location’s site carries matching business details. Between April 2025 and September 2026, the searches where Google’s AI Overview cited the national site grew from 23 to 124.
Want results like this for your business?
We do this for all kinds of businesses, from single-location companies to national brands and franchise networks. See our SEO and AI search services, how we approach AI search optimization, and franchise SEO for multi-location brands. Read what the same approach did for individual locations in Chicago, Pensacola, Tampa and Boston. Then ask us to look at your numbers.
