That Fit Friend: From a 99% Drop to Double the Peak
Jake Boly's fitness site went from about 145,000 monthly visits to roughly 900 after a Google update. Today it gets nearly double its old peak.
Here is the part I did not expect. His income is still below what it was at the top, and he says that is by choice.
I watched Jake walk through the comeback of That Fit Friend with Sam from the Ahrefs YouTube channel. If you run a review site or an online store that lives on Google traffic, his story shows what a recovery costs and what you do once the traffic is back.
From 145,000 visits to about 900
That Fit Friend started as a site about workout training and product reviews, mostly shoes. It is an affiliate business, so traffic from Google turned straight into commissions and ad revenue.
Then Google's helpful content update hit. Jake puts the loss at 90 to 95% of his traffic. The Ahrefs data shown in the video is worse: a peak of about 145,000 monthly visits, then a floor of around 900.
Sam had met Jake before and shared some tips. Looking back, he sees three problems the site had. Finding your way around it was hard. There was no quick summary of the information, so a casual visitor had to dig to find an answer. And there was no visual proof that Jake had tested anything, even though he had. Sam thinks these were likely a big factor in the drop.
If your own pages fell in an update and you are not sure where to start, our guide on how to fix SEO ranking drops covers the diagnosis side.
→ He could test shoes all day, but readers couldn't see any of that testing on the page.
What he changed on every review
Jake did not chase a technical fix. He rebuilt the structure and navigation of the whole site, then changed how each review is laid out.
A review now opens with a big image, a very short intro and a quick summary of the entire post. Sam pointed out that this block is basically the searcher's intent answered in one glance.
Below it, the reader gets what a shoe buyer actually cares about, in brief:
- Pros and cons, short, not a wall of text.
- Price and a rating score.
- Size and fit, which Sam called the thing anyone buying a shoe needs most.
- Proof of testing: high quality video of Jake in the shoes and his own experience wearing them.
- His brand colours, so the page is easy to skim and looks like his.
His rule now is that a reader should get everything they need in the first five seconds of scrolling. He calls it putting "the meat and potatoes above the fold." Anyone who wants to go deeper still can, but he stopped assuming every reader wants to go as deep as he does.
That last point was the big shift for him. As the creator, he loved the detail. Most visitors just wanted to know if the shoe fits and whether it is worth the money.
→ He kept all of the depth and put it after the answer instead of before it.
Giving readers options on his own site
The second change Sam had pushed was optionality. Someone searching "best gym shoes" wants choices, not one verdict.
Jake added native shopping pages for shoes directly on That Fit Friend. A reader can compare and pick without bouncing off to five other sites. The idea was to remove friction for people who just want the right shoe, which encourages affiliate purchases.
Around the same time, he decided to stop making content for traffic and start building a brand. Sam's view was that this is exactly where the graph turns. With AI answers rewarding brands, a site that people recognise has an edge over one that only ranks.
→ When people search "best X," a page that shows them several good options keeps them on your site.
Double the traffic, less money
This is the bit that makes the story worth telling. Sam assumed that with traffic close to double the old peak, income must be close to double too. At the peak, Jake had told him he was making about $20,000 a month.
Jake said no. Income is not even back at that peak.
Most of the old money came from display ads, and he has turned his ads down a lot because he thinks they ruin the experience. So he has more traffic and fewer ads, and the cheque is smaller.
He calls the update the best thing that could have happened to his business. It forced the question of whether he really wanted to do this, and if he did, the answer had to be more than content. Google traffic alone was not going to carry the business.
I think most site owners would make the opposite call. When traffic comes back, the instinct is to monetise every visit before the next update takes it away. Jake decided ad revenue was the fragile part.
→ A traffic chart can recover while the business model underneath it stays exactly as fragile as before.
A pop-up shop inside a gym
His first move beyond Google came from his readers. YouTube comments and site comments kept saying the same thing: there are too many shoes, and it is hard to know which one will fit or perform best.
So he planned a physical store. The original idea was a brick and mortar shop in Austin, Texas, with a squat rack and a deadlift platform, where you could demo shoes and actually train in them.
Then his dad passed away. He moved back home to St. Louis to be with his mom, without knowing how long he would stay. Over breakfast, two guys who were opening a gym asked him to run his pop-up shop alongside their opening. That gave him a place to test the concept without signing a lease.
→ He built the shop to solve a problem his readers kept telling him about in the comments.
His own shoe, 500 pairs in five days
At the pop-ups, Jake first sold inventory from brands he liked in his reviews. Then a friend who runs a barefoot shoe company in Hong Kong, whose family has worked in shoe factories for a long time, offered to help him build his own.
The result is the Forged and Tested Catalyst, a shoe designed to sit between a traditional barefoot shoe and a modern training shoe.
He shipped 500 pairs in about five days without any paid marketing or hard push. Then he was out of stock, with people asking when more would come.
His goal for the summer was to get 2,000 people trying the shoe. He was clear that he did not mean 2,000 sales. He wanted 2,000 people wearing it and sending feedback so he could improve it. He talked about growing slowly on purpose, partly because he is a bit scared of the shoe growing faster than he can keep the quality.
→ His review audience bought a brand new product before he spent a dollar on ads.
Five moves for the next stage
Sam came with five ideas to push the business further. The theme was brand: getting known matters more at this stage than links or one more ranking.
1. Tie the personal brand to the shoe. Jake had kept some distance between himself and the Catalyst, worried about people saying he only reviews his own product. Sam's answer was that people follow Jake, and most of them want to support the person behind the product. Hiding it makes no sense.
2. Promote the shoe where the clicks already are. His top review pages bring about 160,000 visits a month from the US alone. A simple box on those pages saying "I built my own shoe" puts the Catalyst in front of people already shopping for a training shoe. Sam's point was that this could earn more than the ads it replaces.
3. Build Catalyst vs pages. Jake reviews dozens of shoes. A comparison page between the Catalyst and each of them gives searchers a direct answer and gives AI systems context: when they look at "best gym shoes," they keep finding a shoe called the Catalyst next to the big names. I wrote more about why this works in our piece on comparison pages for AI search.
4. Show up in the Reddit communities. While they were filming, a stranger posted about the Catalyst on Reddit and the comments were positive. Sam's advice was to take part and thank people, not spam threads. In the gym shoe niche, Reddit gets cited a lot in AI Overviews, so those threads travel further than they used to.
5. Get named on the pages AI already cites. Ranking is not always enough to land in every "best training shoes" answer. The move is to look up those queries, find the pages the AI answers pull from, and offer the owners a pair. His best gym shoes post alone showed up in 297 AI Mode and AI Overview responses in the Ahrefs data from the video. Do this while sales are good, not when you are short of leads, and collect a back-in-stock email list so demand waits for you.
A few months after the meeting, the Catalyst was showing up in Google's AI Overview for "best gym shoes."
→ Once the traffic is back, the job is to point it at something you own.
Where Distribb fits for a store like his
Look at that list of five moves. Every one of them is good, and every one of them is work: dozens of comparison pages, outreach to every site AI cites, keeping an eye on whether AI answers mention you at all. Jake has shoes to ship and a pop-up to run. That gap is what Distribb is built for.
If your store runs on Shopify, you connect it once and Distribb pulls in your product catalog. It finds the searches your buyers make before they purchase, then writes articles around the products you actually sell, with your real prices and links to your product and collection pages. Competitor products that come up in research are never recommended. Every link is checked before the article publishes to your Shopify blog through the official Shopify API, on a content calendar you never have to manage.
For move five, Distribb's AI visibility tracking shows when AI answers cite you. Link Outreach reverse engineers the listicles ranking on Google and the sources ChatGPT cites, finds each author's contact and drafts the pitch to get you added. The backlink exchange adds 3 to 5 contextual links a month from real businesses in your niche.
Pro is $97 a month with 30 articles. Accelerator is $495 a month with 90 articles, done-for-you link outreach campaigns, videos and Medium articles. Both start with a free trial.
What I'm taking from Jake
Show your testing on the page. His testing was always real. It only started counting once readers could see it on the page.
Answer first, depth second. The summary block at the top did more than any extra section further down.
Watch what the traffic is paying for. His traffic doubled and his income didn't, and he was fine with that because the ads were the weak link. Know which part of your model the next update can take away.
Your comments are a product roadmap. The pop-up and the shoe came from readers saying they couldn't choose.
Put your own product where you already rank. The cheapest distribution most site owners have is the traffic they already get. Our ecommerce SEO strategy guide goes further on turning content traffic into product sales.
Watch the full video
The video is "The Greatest Google SEO Recovery of All Time?" on the Ahrefs channel, about 17 minutes. It is worth watching for the before and after of his review pages, which are hard to describe in text.
FAQ
What happened to That Fit Friend?
That Fit Friend lost most of its Google traffic in the helpful content update, falling from about 145,000 monthly visits to around 900 in the Ahrefs data shown in the video. Jake Boly rebuilt the site's structure and review layout, and traffic later climbed to nearly double the old peak.
Who is Jake Boly?
Jake Boly is the founder of That Fit Friend, a fitness site known for shoe reviews and training content. After the site recovered from a Google update, he opened pop-up shoe shops and launched his own training shoe, the Forged and Tested Catalyst, which sold 500 pairs in about five days.
How did That Fit Friend recover its traffic?
It recovered by putting the answer first. Each review now opens with a short intro and summary, then brief pros and cons, price, rating, size and fit, plus video proof that Jake tested the shoe. He also overhauled navigation and added shopping pages so readers could compare options on his site.
Does more traffic mean more money for an affiliate site?
Not always. Jake's traffic nearly doubled past its old peak, but his income stayed below the roughly $20,000 a month he made back then, because he turned down his display ads to improve the experience. He moved toward selling his own shoe instead of relying on ad revenue.
How do you get your product into Google AI Overviews?
The approach in this video is to make AI systems see your product next to the names they already trust. Build comparison pages against the leading products, take part in the communities AI cites, such as Reddit, and get mentioned on the pages that AI answers already pull from for your category.
Start with the pages that already get clicks
Jake's next stage starts with the 160,000 monthly visits he already has, not with new traffic. If you sell products, the same is true for you: your best pages are your cheapest shelf. If you want those pages, the comparison content and the outreach to run without you, see how Distribb runs SEO for Shopify stores.