DTC · AI Search & Visibility
Sample writeupCited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
A DTC consumer brand was watching organic traffic shrink as AI Overviews ate their long-tail. We embedded with their content team, rebuilt their on-page + schema + content stack for AI citation, and tracked them onto AI Overview, ChatGPT, and Perplexity results inside one quarter.
- Client
- Anonymized · DTC Consumer Brand
- Industry
- Direct-to-Consumer
- Region
- United States
- Duration
- 12 weeks
The challenge
Organic traffic down 28% YoY; AI Overviews now appeared on 47% of their tracked queries with their content nowhere in the citations. The internal team had no way to even measure which prompts they were and weren't being cited in.
The approach
Identify. Build. Adopt.
Identify
We built the prompt set first: 120 buyer queries across consideration, comparison, and purchase intent. Ran them against ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, and Bing Copilot weekly. Baseline: cited in 8 of 120. We had the measurement before we changed a thing.
Build
Rewrote the 40 highest-leverage pages for passage-level citability, deployed Product + FAQ + HowTo schema, fixed llms.txt and crawler access, and stood up a content workflow with the brand's existing writers. The site rebuild used Next.js for the parts that needed it.
Adopt
Weekly AI-visibility report shared with leadership. We trained the content team on the citation patterns the AI engines reward, and embedded with them for two production cycles until they could ship without us.
Outcomes
What changed, measurably.
We used to argue about whether AI search was real. Now we report on it weekly and we're winning the prompts that matter.
Got a similar leak?
30 minutes with the founders. Bring us the workflow that hurts most. We'll cost the leak live and tell you whether the same playbook deploys here.
More work