Chi Dog growth plan and audit

What we heard

From our call on October 21. Correct anything we got wrong and we'll rerun the numbers.

1. 01
   About $4M to $5M a year, Shopify onlyDirect to consumer, plus small wholesale to boutiques and vet clinics. No Amazon, by choice.
2. 02
   Subscriptions are the business85% to 90% of orders are subscriptions, average order $100 to $150, about 85% of customers stay, and the average customer stays around six years.
3. 03
   Customers come from Google and vetsOrganic search plus vets met at conferences. Vets earn 5% of a customer's first four orders through Refersion. Gen3 Marketing runs an Awin affiliate program.
4. 04
   The askShow up in Google and in AI answers (ChatGPT and the rest) against The Farmer's Dog, Ollie and the big names. Start as soon as possible, start sensibly, and prove it.
5. 05
   How you workDr. Bohrer signs off on the big decisions. One contract developer handles the site. You want us inside your tools, not a new platform to log into.

The short version

Chi Dog has the thing the category leaders don't: a practicing vet founder, a veterinary nutritionist on the formulas, food therapy recipes by condition, and customers who stay for years. Almost none of that is visible to Google, to AI answers, or to the sites that rank fresh dog food. The biggest gaps:

1. 01
   The best content is hidden45 of 61 vet-written articles have no path from the blog index, including the pancreatitis, kidney, liver, IBD, cancer and seizure guides. These are the searches Chi Dog should own.
2. 02
   Chi Dog is missing from the pages that sell fresh dog foodListed on 4 of 52 best-of roundups. Forbes Vetted, NBC Select, Business Insider, Top10, Dogster, Rover and Wag's own guides all skip it.
3. 03
   The affiliate offer is too small to get listed5% of the first four orders is about $25 per customer, paid out over months. Competitors pay publishers $40 to $75 up front, and the Awin program is not visible in Awin's public directory.
4. 04
   Condition searches are big and cheapAllergies, sensitive stomach, pancreatitis and kidney searches total well over 100,000 a month at $2 to $8 a click, versus $12 to $55 for "fresh dog food". Chi Dog ranks top 20 on only 4 non-brand terms we checked.
5. 05
   Reviews don't show up where they countProduct pages carry no rating markup, so no stars in Google. The site shows four different ratings depending on where you look (4.6, 4.5, 3.6 and Trustpilot's 860).
6. 06
   The first offer is small and mixed20% in some places, 30% in a popup, and the cart shows full price. The Farmer's Dog leads with 50% off, Ollie with 70%.
7. 07
   Price is three screens down on mobileEach recipe page loads all five recipes (1.9 MB of HTML). No calories, no feeding calculator, no vet names on the page.
8. 08
   About 100 old pages and 17 vet referral pages return 404Leftovers from the pre-Shopify site, including pages vet clinics still link to.
9. 09
   Big dogs get the worst dealDogs over 45 lb can't buy a 4-week plan, and over 80 lb only 1 week at a time. They're the most valuable subscribers in the category.
10. 10
    AI barely knows Chi DogNamed in 1 of 61 AI answers to category questions; The Farmer's Dog in 27. ChatGPT thinks "chi dog" is a Chicago hot dog.
11. 11
    Some product copy says the diets "treat" diseasesThat wording invites scrutiny from regulators and ad platforms. Worth a review with your regulatory advisor; "supports" and "formulated for" read just as well.

Search demand

Pulled from Google's Keyword Planner on October 21, US searches, monthly average over the last 12 months. Bids are Google's top of page range.

Source. Google Ads Keyword Planner, Oct 2025 to Sep 2026. Rankings from a live Google check on Oct 21, 2026 (positions can move a few spots by location). Full list of 7,586 searches in the model appendix on request.

The read: Chi Dog can't outbid The Farmer's Dog on "fresh dog food", and doesn't need to. The searches that match what Chi Dog actually is (vet-made food for dogs with a health problem) cost a fraction as much and convert better. About half of the "chi dog" results page is Chihuahua and CHI grooming content, so brand search needs its own care too.

SEO audit

We crawled all 152 URLs on chidog.com, tested every template on mobile and desktop, and compared the content footprint to the four biggest fresh brands.

Crawling and indexing

Structured data and trust

Speed

Lab tests on mobile: home 57, product page 42 (out of 100). The home page makes 494 requests and loads 2.2 MB of JavaScript from 36 outside services. Desktop layout shift fails on three templates. Speed matters most on the product pages, where the fix is mostly not loading all five recipes at once.

Content compared to the leaders

Source. Public sitemaps, Oct 21, 2026.

Chi Dog won't win by writing 900 articles. It wins by owning the ground nobody else can: food therapy by condition, written and reviewed by named vets. Today there are about four pieces on TCVM food therapy, and no competitor has any.

Fix list, first two weeks

Weeks 2 to 6 add: index cleanup, titles and descriptions, calories and a public feeding calculator, merging overlapping condition posts, the new content program, product page speed, server-side tracking, and one quiz entry point. The full 25-item list is in our working file.

AI answers (GEO)

We asked 22 questions a pet parent would ask ("best fresh dog food", "best food for a dog with pancreatitis", "farmer's dog alternatives", "best fresh cat food delivery", and more) across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Bing's AI search on October 21, and recorded every brand named and every source cited. 61 category answers and 14 branded answers.

By engine. ChatGPT 0 of 18, Perplexity 0 of 13, Google AI Overviews 0 of 11, Bing 1 of 18. One run per question per engine, so read it as a snapshot. Full answers and sources in our working file.

What AI gets wrong about Chi Dog

Where Chi Dog should be winning

Why, and the fix

AI answers repeat what a handful of sites say. In this category they cite Forbes, PetMD, Business Insider, Dog Food Advisor, VCA, Vetstreet, NBC Select, Dogster, Reddit and YouTube. Chi Dog is on two of those, and only for branded questions. The one category answer that named Chi Dog (Bing, "whole food diet for dogs brands", Chi Dog first) quoted plain, specific lines straight from chidog.com. The site just has too few of them.

1. 01
   Make Chi Dog one clear entityOrganization and Person markup for Dr. Bohrer, Dr. Berg and Dr. Moser with credentials; a real About page; consistent name, founders and claims everywhere.
2. 02
   Rewrite llms.txt and the FAQ as answersWho, credentials, what each diet is for in plain words, price per day ranges, shipping, cat line, the copper question.
3. 03
   Answer pages that match the questionsChi Dog vs The Farmer's Dog, Ollie and JustFoodForDogs; kidney, pancreatitis, allergy and senior hubs; a TCVM food therapy hub. Each vet-written and vet-reviewed.
4. 04
   Get on the pages AI already trustsThe roundups and vet editorial in the next two sections, plus Reddit and YouTube where the conversation already is.
5. 05
   Measure it monthlyWe rerun these 22 questions every month and report share of voice by engine.

Backlink audit

Every site linking to chidog.com and to ten competitors, from the Common Crawl web graph (July to September 2026, 2.15 billion site-to-site links). Common Crawl samples the web, so read these as comparisons, not totals.

Strong = linking sites that aren't link farms or spam. Source: Common Crawl host graph, cc-main 2026 Jul to Sep.

Sites that link to competitors but not Chi Dog

We found 59. The ones to go after first:

Ninety-day target: 25 to 40 new linking sites, at least 10 of them strong, starting with the fixes and unlinked mentions that cost nothing.

Pages Chi Dog is on, and should be

We checked 58 pages that rank for the money searches (best fresh dog food, best delivery, Farmer's Dog alternatives, best for allergies, best fresh cat food). Chi Dog is on four: Dog Food Advisor (#7 of 9, "Best vet-owned"), Canine Bible (#16), Canine Journal (#5 of 13), plus untracked reviews on Vetstreet and Kinship. The Farmer's Dog is on 36, Ollie 34, JustFoodForDogs 32.

Source. Our check of each page on Oct 21, 2026. Order is our estimate of traffic potential.

This is the part we can speed up most. We know the people who run most of these pages, and we'll make the introductions. What gets a brand on them is a payout that competes and a reason to pick you, and Chi Dog has the reason.

Affiliate and vet programs

Source. Public program terms and third-party listings, Oct 2026. Some listings conflict; treat competitor payouts as approximate. 11 of 15 fresh brands we traced pay publishers through Impact.

1. 01
   Keep vets on Refersion, raise the dealA first-order bounty plus a share of autoship orders for 12 months, staff pricing for clinic teams, and freezer wholesale for clinics. Vet-referred customers cost a fraction of paid ones, so this is the cheapest growth in the plan. (Worth a quick check on vet-ethics rules for referral pay.)
2. 02
   Open a real publisher programA flat payout per new subscriber in line with the category, a 30-day cookie, and volume tiers, on the network the category already uses. Publishers can't join today: the affiliate page is a vet clinic form, and the Awin program doesn't appear in Awin's directory.
3. 03
   One tracker of recordRefersion and Awin both fire on every page today, so one order can be credited twice.

Paid search, second

Google's Ads Transparency Center shows Chi Dog LLC has run 35 ads since June 2023: condition diets, "veterinarian owned", Chi Cat, and a 4.6-star seller rating. The direction is right. What we'd change: drop ads that promise homemade recipes (people looking to cook, not buy), translate the Fire and Wood diet names into plain language, and lead with an offer. We'll confirm spend, keywords and results once we have read access.

Paid starts in month 3 as a $5,000 a month test on condition searches only (plus keeping your brand name covered). The other campaigns below only come in once that test hits the $300 target.

Optimized to new subscribers, not all purchases, with enhanced conversions. It only grows when a new subscriber costs $300 or less in media and paid customers are holding at 75% after 60 days. If it misses, we pause it and keep the focus on organic. Meta comes second (retargeting, then condition-specific creative with your vets on camera), TikTok after that as a small test.

Buyer experience

For context: the price per day runs from $5.01 for a small dog on a 4-week plan to $37.56 for a 100 lb dog on a 1-week plan. All five recipes are priced the same.

The numbers

Organic search and AI answers come first. That's what the retainer pays for, and it's where Chi Dog has the biggest gap and the lowest cost per customer. Paid search comes second, as a small test that only grows if it pays for itself.

All of it rests on the same four inputs. Send us your real numbers and we'll redo this with them.

1. Organic search and AI answers (the retainer)

We picked 30 searches Chi Dog can realistically win: 252,390 searches a month across condition, senior, vet formulated, cat and comparison terms. If Chi Dog reaches the positions we're targeting (top 3 to 10 depending on the search), those pages bring about 8,012 visits a month. Fixes land in months 1 and 2, pages climb from month 3, and full traffic arrives around month 11.

What changes between scenarios. Conservative: pages land a few spots lower than target (60% of the expected traffic) and 0.75% of visits subscribe. Expected: target positions, 1%. Best: slightly better positions (125%), 1.25%. Cost is the $6,000 retainer in every case. Visits from AI answers and from the best-of lists below aren't counted here, so this is the floor for organic.

What to expect: year one lands between a small loss and a solid gain depending on how fast pages rank, because subscribers pay back over months. By month 12 every scenario is net positive each month, and in the expected case organic is adding $65,971 a month in revenue that keeps compounding with no media spend.

AI answers and best-of lists

These don't go into the dollar math because we can't yet measure AI referrals cleanly, so we hold ourselves to these targets and report on them every month:

2. Paid search (second, and only if it works)

Paid starts in month 3, after tracking and condition landing pages are live, with a $5,000 a month test on condition searches only. After 3 months the rule is simple: if a new subscriber costs $300 or less in media, we add $5,000 a month, up to $25,000. If it doesn't, we pause paid and keep the money in organic.

What changes between scenarios. Media cost per new subscriber: $350 (misses the $300 target, so paid pauses after the test), $225 and $150. Those come from Google's own click prices for these searches ($2 to $6) and a 1% to 2.5% click to subscription rate. Ad spend and our 15% fee rise only in the cases where paid is working. At $350 the test customers still roughly pay back within the year, just slowly, so that money does more in organic.

Both together, year one

How to read it. Year one carries the startup cost (pages ramping, subscribers paying back over months). The month 12 rows show where it's headed: what the program adds every month going forward, net of everything you pay us and spend on media.

Vets

A vet-referred customer costs about $25 today. Even a much richer vet offer stays far below what a paid search customer costs, so the vet program grows next to organic, not instead of it.

First 90 days

Every change to the site or the ads that's a real decision goes to Dr. Bohrer for a yes before it ships. Your developer stays in the loop on anything we touch in Shopify.

Pricing

• Month to month. No minimums, no long contract.
• 30 days notice so we can hand everything over cleanly. Chi Dog owns every account, page and asset.
• No setup fee.
• If paid search never passes the test, you pay the retainer plus 15% of a $15,000 test, and that's it.

What we'd need from you

1. 01
   AccessShopify (collaborator), GA4, Search Console, Google Ads, Klaviyo, Recharge, Refersion, Yotpo, Trustpilot, Google Business Profile.
2. 02
   Three numbersContribution margin per order after food, packaging and shipping; ship cadence mix; and retention by month for customers who came from paid ads, if Recharge can export it.
3. 03
   Vet timeAbout an hour a month from Dr. Bohrer or Dr. Berg to review condition pages and take press and publisher quotes.
4. 04
   Your developer's contactSo we can coordinate anything in the theme.

How we work together

Our team runs the day to day inside your tools. No new platform to log into, and nothing you'd lose if we parted ways. Travis owns the strategy and the numbers and is a call or text away, and stays hands on through the first 90 days. You'll always know what we spent and what it brought in.

Happy to walk Dr. Bohrer through any of this on a call.