Case study · SEO & AEO

MyCursive: higher Google rankings and a top spot in AI answers

MyCursive is owned and run by its founder, a teacher; Topofmind.AI (Keith Motte) has managed its SEO and AEO for about 2.5 years.

MyCursive (mycursive.com) teaches cursive and print handwriting. It has free worksheets, a cursive worksheet generator and text generator, workbooks and a full curriculum for teachers, homeschool families and adults.

All numbers on this page come from SearchAtlas, pulled October 25, 2026. Search numbers are Google Search Console data for mycursive.com, United States, unless a line says otherwise. Each number names its date range.

The starting point

Keith started on MyCursive's SEO about 2.5 years ago. Google Search Console only keeps 16 months of data, so the measured story here starts on June 26, 2025, the oldest day still available.

At that point the site already had real search demand but ranked lower than it does now. From September 26 to October 25, 2025, its average Google position was 6.43, and October 2025 had its weakest monthly average position in the data (6.46).

For a longer view, SearchAtlas Site Explorer, a third-party estimate rather than Google's own data, lists about 9,540 ranking keyword entries for mycursive.com in April 2024 and 11,910 in October 2026.

What we did

MyCursive's SEO and AEO combine hands-on work by Keith with automation. Starting in September 2026, Keith added automation through SearchAtlas: its OTTO optimizer applies on-site fixes through the site's WordPress plugin, and AI-answer tracking checks ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot every week. OTTO's project dashboard (as of October 25, 2026) shows 2,504 of 2,512 found issues fixed, in these areas:

• On-page basics: title tags and meta descriptions on all 161 crawled pages, 95 heading fixes and 753 missing-keyword fixes.
• Structured data: schema markup on 37 pages, plus Open Graph (176) and Twitter Card (147) tags.
• Internal linking: 190 internal links added.
• AEO and entity work: 307 semantic and knowledge-graph optimizations and 300 factual-accuracy ("knowledge-based trust") updates, so AI assistants and search engines can understand and trust the content.
• Measurement: Google Search Console connected to SearchAtlas, a rank tracker on core cursive keywords since August 2025, and AI visibility tracking on ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot since August 2026.

Results: Google Search

Impressions in those 30-day windows were about flat (2,149,063 in 2025 and 2,102,991 in 2026). The extra clicks came from ranking higher and being chosen more often, not from showing up more often.

Organic clicks by month

Monthly Google clicks and average position, Google Search Console (US) via SearchAtlas. The October 2026 bar (dashed) covers October 1–25 only. June 26–30, 2025 (1,353 clicks) is left off the chart because it is a 5-day partial month.

The trend is seasonal: clicks rise with the school year and drop in early summer. Average position improved from 5.0–6.5 in mid-to-late 2025 to 3.0–3.4 in September and October 2026. Clicks in August and September 2026 were still a little below August and September 2025 (27,645 vs 32,222 and 32,113 vs 34,430), even with better positions. October 1–25 is up: 22,255 clicks in 2026 vs 17,251 in 2025.

Top 10 keyword wins

Keywords now in Google's top 10 that gained the most clicks: September 26–October 25, 2026 compared with the same dates in 2025.

Keyword	Avg position 2025	Avg position 2026	Clicks 2025	Clicks 2026	Change
cursive alphabet	2	1	624	2,571	+1,947
cursive letters	2	1	144	410	+266
cursive worksheets	5	2	170	409	+239
cursive writing practice sheets	5	1	115	279	+164
cursive writing practice	7	3	130	281	+151
cursive practice sheets	5	3	351	467	+116
free cursive worksheets	6	2	65	154	+89
free cursive generator	6	3	6	78	+72
printable cursive practice sheets	6	2	26	95	+69
cursive handwriting practice	9	6	71	136	+65

Source: Google Search Console (US) via SearchAtlas, keywords that improved and now rank in the top 10, ranked by click gain. Positions are rounded averages for each 30-day window.

Tracked keywords

SearchAtlas also tracks six core keywords daily. Not every one went up, and we show all six:

Keyword	Aug 8, 2025	Oct 21, 2026
cursive letters	12	5
cursive writing	12	5
how to write in cursive	6	2
cursive g	5	2
cursive alphabet	1	3
cursive generator	11	Not in tracked results

Source: SearchAtlas rank tracker, Google US, position at the first check (August 8, 2025) and the last refresh (October 21, 2026).

Results: AI answers (AEO)

AEO means showing up when people ask AI assistants instead of searching. SearchAtlas has tracked MyCursive in ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot answers since August 26, 2026, across 18 prompts in 7 topics (13 general prompts and 5 that name MyCursive).

AI assistant	Visibility score	Topics where MyCursive appears
Gemini	84.2	5 of 7
ChatGPT	79.2	6 of 7
Copilot	75.9	5 of 7

Source: SearchAtlas LLM Visibility, weekly snapshots August 26 to October 24, 2026.

Where it is strong: shopping-style questions such as "Which cursive curriculum lifetime access options offer phase-based structure and a money-back guarantee?" (visibility 100, ranked #1) and "Where can I buy a cursive curriculum lifetime access with a 30-day guarantee for homeschool use?" (100, #1). Many tracked prompts describe what MyCursive sells, so they test whether AI assistants recommend MyCursive when a buyer describes it.

Where it is weak: open "which workbook" questions. MyCursive does not appear for "Which Cursive Workbooks should I use for kids" (0) and barely shows for adults (8) and teens (25). Those are the next AEO targets.

Visibility also slipped during October: from 90 to 84.6 on ChatGPT, 100 to 69.2 on Gemini and 90 to 53.8 on Copilot between the first check (August 26) and the latest (October 24, 2026).