How a Port Klang logistics firm shows up in AI search: the DNE case study

A real, AEO-built Malaysian SME site is already showing up in AI search. DNE Logistics, a Port Klang freight forwarder and Acclaira's own live reference, drew about 1,785 sessions in 28 days. Its WhatsApp enquiry button fired 52 times. A measured "AI Assistant" channel sent 83 of those sessions, and the site converts steadily across all of them.

Last updated: 24 June 2026.

Key takeaways

• This is not a before-and-after story. We have no earlier baseline, so we claim no growth percentage. It is an honest snapshot of what one AEO-built Malaysian site is doing right now, from DNE's own Google Analytics, 28 days to 24 June 2026.
• In that window the site drew about 1,785 sessions and 1,403 users, and its WhatsApp enquiry action fired 52 times, roughly 1.5 to 2 enquiries a day.
• Google Analytics shows a distinct "AI Assistant" channel of 83 sessions, alongside 101 referral and 696 direct sessions. AI assistants are visibly sending people to the site.
• The true AI-influenced share is hard to pin down, because some AI-assistant visits land in the Direct or Referral buckets instead. So we report the measured channel honestly and do not claim a precise lead count from AI.
• The point is simple. With Malaysian internet penetration at 98.0 percent (DataReportal, 2026), being the named, machine-readable answer is now a real source of enquiries, and you can measure it.

Whose site is this, and why use it as proof?

This is DNE Forwarding (M) Sdn Bhd, a family-run Port Klang freight forwarder operating since 1999. It runs JKDM-licensed customs clearance, KA-licensed container haulage, and sea and air freight forwarding for manufacturers across Selangor. It is the founder's own logistics company, not a paying Acclaira client.

We use it as the honest proof for a reason. Most agencies show you polished case studies you cannot check. DNE is the one site we can open the analytics on and show you the raw numbers, good and imperfect, because we built it and we own it. Acclaira is the studio. DNE is the live, audited reference behind the work.

What does the site actually do?

In a recent 28-day window the DNE site drew about 1,785 sessions from around 1,403 users, and served 2,106 page views. The job that matters most, a customer tapping the WhatsApp enquiry button, happened 52 times, of which 44 were counted as key conversion events. That is roughly 1.5 to 2 real enquiries a day from the website alone.

These are modest numbers by consumer-brand standards, and that is the point. This is a niche business-to-business logistics firm in Port Klang, not a viral shop. For an SME, a site that quietly produces one or two qualified WhatsApp enquiries a day, every day, is a working sales channel. The figures here are from DNE's own Google Analytics, 28 days to 24 June 2026, in the Asia/Kuala Lumpur time zone.

Where does the traffic come from?

The 1,785 sessions split across six channels, and so do the 44 key lead actions. Organic Search is the largest source by volume and by leads, but the more interesting story is in the smaller channels: a measured AI Assistant channel, a healthy Referral channel, and a large Direct bucket that hides as much as it reveals.

Two things stand out. First, Organic Search does the heavy lifting, which is what a well-structured, answer-first site should do. Second, Referral converts hard for its size: 101 sessions produced 12 lead actions, a sign that people arriving from another site already trust DNE by the time they land. All figures are from DNE's Google Analytics, 28 days to 24 June 2026.

Is AI really sending visitors?

Yes. Google Analytics records a dedicated "AI Assistant" channel, and in this window it sent 83 sessions to the DNE site. That is a measured number from the analytics, not an estimate. People are asking assistants like ChatGPT and Google's AI a question, seeing DNE in or beside the answer, and clicking through.

This fits the wider shift. More than 200 countries and over 40 languages now get Google's AI Overviews, with Malay added in 2025 (Google, 2025). And when an AI summary appears, users click a traditional search result only 8 percent of the time, against 15 percent without one (Pew Research, 2025). The answer has become the destination, so being named in it, as DNE increasingly is, is what puts you in front of the customer. We explain the mechanism in plain terms in our guide on why your business may not show up in ChatGPT or Google AI.

How big is the AI Assistant channel, and is it the full picture?

It is 83 sessions out of about 1,785 in 28 days, so a small but real slice, and it is not the full picture. The 83 figure is what Google Analytics could clearly tag as coming from an AI assistant. It is a floor, because assistant visits that arrive without a clear referrer fall into the Direct bucket (696 sessions) or the Referral bucket (101 sessions) instead. The honest reading is a measured, named channel that is almost certainly larger than the label alone shows.

How honest is the AI attribution?

Honestly, the 83 AI Assistant sessions are a floor, not the full picture, and the true AI-influenced number could be higher or differ in shape. Analytics cannot always tell where an AI referral came from. Some assistant visits arrive with no referrer and land in Direct. Others pass through a link wrapper and land in Referral. So the real AI contribution is genuinely hard to isolate.

That is why we will not tell you "AI drove X leads" with false precision. What we can say with confidence is this: there is a real, measured AI Assistant channel of 83 sessions; it sits alongside 696 Direct and 101 Referral sessions that may include further AI-influenced visits; and the channel is one we expect to grow. The wider trend backs that up: visits to retail sites from generative-AI sources rose more than 1,300 percent over the 2024 year-end season compared with a year earlier (Adobe Analytics, 2025). Reporting the uncertainty is part of the proof. Numbers you can trust are worth more than numbers that flatter.

Through rigorous evaluation, we demonstrate that GEO can boost visibility by up to 40% in generative engine responses. Aggarwal et al., the Princeton GEO study (ACM KDD 2024).

What did we do to get here?

We built DNE the way an answer engine needs to read a business. The work is plain, not magic, and it follows the same AI-search visibility programme Acclaira runs for any Malaysian SME.

1. Answer-first content in real text. Every service, location and credential is stated in clear, crawlable words, not locked inside images. JKDM-licensed clearance, KA-licensed haulage, sea and air freight, Port Klang, Selangor. The facts an assistant needs are right there to read.
2. Structured data and consistent facts. Schema describes the organisation, its services and its area served, and the same name and details appear consistently across the web, so an assistant can resolve who DNE is with confidence.
3. Question-shaped pages and guides. The site and its insights answer the exact questions a manufacturer would ask an AI, which is what gets a page pulled into an answer. Adding clear statements, statistics and citations is a measured lever, worth up to a 40 percent visibility lift in Princeton's GEO study.
4. Measurement from day one. Google Analytics with a defined AI-Search channel and a WhatsApp key event, so we can see what is actually working rather than guess. That is how we can show you these numbers at all.

Which fixes mattered most?

The most useful work was the least glamorous: making DNE's basic facts machine-readable and consistent. We will not rank these by exact contribution, because the analytics cannot cleanly separate one lever from another. But this is the concrete checklist we worked through for DNE, and it is where any Malaysian SME should start.

• Schema.org structured data describing the organisation, its services and its area served, so an assistant can parse who DNE is without guessing.
• Services stated as real, crawlable text, not images. Clearance, haulage, sea and air freight, and the locations served are written in words a crawler can read, not trapped in a picture.
• A complete, consistent Google Business Profile, with the same name, contact details and services that appear on the site, so trusted sources agree about DNE.
• An FAQ that answers the real questions buyers ask, phrased the way a manufacturer would actually ask an assistant, which is what gets a page pulled into an answer.
• A fast, crawlable build where the content is in the page itself, not loaded later by script, so AI crawlers and Google can both read everything.

What can your business take from this?

That an ordinary Malaysian SME, in an unglamorous industry, can be the named answer and turn it into steady WhatsApp enquiries, and prove it with its own analytics. You do not need a huge audience. You need to be the clearest, most trustworthy, most machine-readable option for your customer's question, and a way to measure the result.

Acclaira runs a free AI-visibility check for Malaysian businesses. We ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Google the exact questions your customers ask, show you whether the answer names you or a competitor, and hand you the single highest-impact fix to earn your first mention. It is the same starting point we used for DNE, and it costs nothing. You can also browse the rest of our Insights library for the how-to behind each step.

When your customer asks AI who to trust, you want one name to come back. Make it yours. Be the answer.

Sources

• DNE Logistics, Google Analytics 4 (first-party data), 28 days to 24 June 2026, Asia/Kuala_Lumpur time zone. Held privately by DNE, not a public URL.
• Pew Research Center, 2025, Google users are less likely to click links when an AI summary appears: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results/
• Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, Princeton (ACM KDD 2024): https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09735
• Google, May 2025, AI Overviews expansion to 200+ countries and 40+ languages: https://blog.google/products/search/ai-overview-expansion-may-2025-update/
• DataReportal, Digital 2026 Malaysia: https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2026-malaysia
• Adobe Analytics, 2025, generative-AI traffic to retail sites: https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2025/03/17/adobe-analytics-traffic-to-us-retail-websites-from-generative-ai-sources-jumps-1200-percent