iROOMit is an AI roommate-matching marketplace with thousands of city pages across the US and Canada. When we started, its sitemap barely loaded and its robots file blocked AI crawlers. Its own engineers shipped our fixes within two months, and over the 90-day pilot Google impressions rose 48% and clicks 33%.
Industry
Marketplace: AI roommate matching and rooms for rent
Engagement
90-day pilot · Jun to Sep 2026
Scope
Technical SEO, crawler and sitemap fixes, city-page templates, content
Markets
Stack
+48%
Google impressions 1.29 million in the pilot, up from 872,000 in the 90 days before.
+33%
Google clicks 24,251 in the pilot, up from 18,254 in the 90 days before.
78,411
URLs in a working sitemap up from an empty sitemap that loaded on two requests in eight.
iROOMit's demand is local: people looking for a roommate or a room in their city. Organic search was already its biggest channel.
On 9 June 2026, the day we started, four problems stood between those city pages and the searches they should win.
The robots file told GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended and five other AI crawlers to stay out.
An empty file that loaded on two requests in eight, on a site with tens of thousands of pages.
Each city page lived at two addresses, both competing for the same search.
A custom site on AWS, so every fix had to go through iROOMit's own engineers.
One template change reaches thousands of pages. We wrote each fix as a spec their engineers could ship on their own, then checked every release on the live site.
A day-one audit of crawler access, the sitemap and redirects, plus a Search Console baseline of demand city by city.
A ready-to-paste robots file went over the day after kickoff. The block was gone within eight days.
Each fix came with the exact rule and the check that proves it landed: the sitemap, the redirect and city templates split by intent.
Once the fixes shipped, we re-audited the site as Google sees it and handed over the next layer in priority order.
In the 90-day pilot, Google showed iROOMit 48% more often and sent 33% more clicks than in the 90 days before.
Most of the climb came late. Weekly impressions held near 80,000 until late July, then reached 137,285 in the last week of August. That month, Google estimates about 13,400 pages got their first impressions.
Search engines and AI assistants can only rank the pages they can find and read. On a marketplace, the template is the strategy. One robots file, one sitemap and one city template cover every page at once.
Baseline. On 9 June 2026 the robots file blocked eight AI crawlers and the sitemap was empty. In the 90 days before the pilot, the site had 871,950 Google impressions and 18,254 clicks.
Method. Search figures are Google Search Console data for iroomit.com, read through the RankZero API, comparing the 90-day pilot with the 90 days before it. Every fix was checked on the live site as Googlebot.
| Figure | Source | Pulled |
|---|---|---|
| 1,293,904 impressions, 24,251 clicks | Search Console, 8 Jun to 5 Sep | 7 Sep 2026 |
| Weekly impressions, 80,915 to 137,285 | Search Console, by week | 14 Sep 2026 |
| About 13,400 pages with first impressions | Search Console's August email | 8 Sep 2026 |
| 78,411 sitemap URLs | Count on the live site | 14 Sep 2026 |
| Eight AI crawlers blocked | Day-one audit | 9 Jun 2026 |
| Fixes live | Post-release audit | 7 Aug 2026 |
We delivered sixteen articles and hub pages, but with no CMS each one needed an engineer, and the team put the template fixes first. None of the growth above comes from our content. The lesson: agree on the publishing route in week one.
In a 1-on-1 with one of our experts, we'll map out exactly where your brand stands in AI search, which prompts your buyers are using, and what it takes to get cited, before your competitors do.