Website Migration vs SEO Migration: What Businesses Get Wrong
Suffolk, UK
-
-
Office hours 10 AM to 8 PM [ Fri : 10 AM - 1PM ]
Suffolk, UK
Office hours 10 AM to 8 PM [ Fri : 10 AM - 1PM ]
Study
A data study analysing how leading packaging manufacturers perform across search visibility, SEO authority, and emerging AI-driven discovery platforms.
Digital visibility is becoming an increasingly important competitive factor across the global packaging industry. Buyers, procurement teams, and product developers increasingly rely on search engines and digital research when identifying suppliers, evaluating materials, and comparing manufacturers.
At the same time, generative AI systems are beginning to influence how information is discovered. Instead of browsing traditional search results, users are increasingly presented with AI-generated answers that summarise and reference external sources.
To better understand how packaging manufacturers perform in this evolving environment, Weston Dynamics analysed the digital presence of 50 global packaging manufacturers across both traditional SEO indicators and emerging AI-driven discovery signals.
The study evaluates:
The goal is to identify which companies currently achieve the strongest digital visibility and what factors appear to influence discoverability in both traditional and AI-driven search environments.
Each organisation was evaluated across two categories of signals.
These indicators reflect how visible and authoritative a company is within search engines.
The metrics analysed include:
These signals help assess how easily users can discover companies through conventional search behaviour.
As AI-generated search interfaces become more common, additional indicators are emerging that influence digital visibility.
The study therefore also examined:
These signals help indicate whether a company is recognised as a structured digital entity that AI systems can confidently reference.
In addition to discovery signals, the study analysed how frequently companies are referenced within AI responses.
This included:
Together, these indicators provide insight into how often companies appear within AI-generated answers.
To compare companies consistently, the study introduces a Digital Visibility Index, combining indicators from both traditional SEO and AI-driven discovery environments.
The index considers:
AI Mentions
Total times the
domain appears
in AI answers
AI Cited Pages
Number of unique
pages referenced
AI Discovery Signals
Presence in
AI Overviews and
knowledge entities
These signals are normalised into a visibility score that enables comparison across the dataset.
The dataset revealed several companies that appear consistently across AI-generated answers.
1
Georgia-Pacific
6300
2
International Paper
4400
3
Amcor
4200
4
Ball Corporation
3200
5
Sealed Air
2900
These companies benefit from strong domain authority and large volumes of informational content.
When combining the study’s indicators into a composite index, several companies achieve particularly strong visibility.
1
Klabin
61
2
Georgia-Pacific
38
3
Rengo
36
4
Uflex
35
5
International Paper
35
These companies demonstrate both strong entity recognition and significant informational content coverage.
One of the clearest patterns in the dataset is that companies with a larger number of informational pages cited by AI systems tend to achieve higher visibility.
Manufacturers that publish detailed resources such as:
sustainability reports
material science insights
packaging innovation updates
technical documentation
All appear more frequently in AI-generated answers.
This suggests that companies with comprehensive knowledge content are more easily discoverable by AI systems.
Another factor influencing visibility is the presence of strong entity recognition signals.
Companies with established digital entities – such as:
Appear more frequently in AI-generated responses.
These signals help search systems and AI models understand companies as recognised industry entities.
While traditional SEO indicators such as backlink volume and keyword rankings remain useful benchmarks, they should not be interpreted in isolation.
A high volume of backlinks does not necessarily indicate strong authority or trust. In many cases, large backlink counts can be inflated by low-quality links, syndicated content, or legacy link profiles that do not meaningfully contribute to search performance.
For manufacturers and enterprise organisations, the quality, relevance, and topical alignment of backlinks are often more meaningful indicators of authority than raw link volume.
Similarly, a large number of ranking keywords does not always translate into meaningful commercial visibility.
Companies frequently rank for generic or loosely related search terms that generate traffic but fail to attract the right audience.
Effective search strategies require alignment between:
Without this alignment, even strong SEO metrics may fail to generate meaningful business outcomes.
The Global Packaging Digital Visibility Index provides a comparative view of how leading manufacturers perform across search and AI-driven discovery environments.
For organisations operating within the packaging or materials sectors, understanding how their digital presence compares with competitors can reveal significant opportunities.
Weston Dynamics provides independent visibility audits designed to identify:
Companies that understand how they compare with competitors are better positioned to prioritise the changes that will deliver measurable growth.
Digital visibility is becoming an increasingly important factor in how industrial companies are discovered online.
The Global Packaging Digital Visibility Index demonstrates that companies with strong authority signals, comprehensive informational resources, and recognised digital entities are far more likely to appear in both traditional search results and AI-generated answers.
As search technologies evolve, organisations that treat their websites as structured knowledge platforms rather than purely promotional channels will be better positioned to achieve sustained digital visibility.
Enterprise SEO
Consultancy
Opening Times
Mon-Thurs 10am-8pm
Fri – 10am-1pm
