Case study · Ecommerce Brands
From invisible to inevitable: a $6M sleep brand’s AI visibility install
When we ran the first scan, ChatGPT named four competitors and never the client. Six months later the brand is cited in 6 of 10 tracked category answers and AI search is its #3 revenue channel.
3.4×
AI-referred sessions, two quarters
6/10
tracked answers naming the brand
#3
revenue channel by month six
Where they started
A $6M Shopify sleep & home brand with strong paid economics and flat organic growth. The opening scan across 40 category queries told the story: the brand appeared in zero AI answers. Four competitors — two of them smaller — were being recommended by name, because review sites and structured product data made them legible to the engines.
What we installed
The standard core install, executed over ten weeks:
- Entity and schema layer across the store: products, materials, certifications, and the brand itself made machine-readable
- Twenty-two answer-pages built around the exact consideration questions shoppers ask assistants (firmness, materials, sleep positions, comparisons)
- Citation-source placement: profiles and reviews seeded on the eight third-party surfaces the engines cited most in this category
- Monthly share-of-answer tracking wired to analytics and revenue attribution
What changed
Perplexity citations appeared in week 5, ChatGPT followed in week 9 as sources re-crawled. By the end of the second quarter: 3.4× growth in AI-referred sessions, the brand named in 6 of 10 tracked answers, and AI search settled as the #3 revenue channel behind Meta and email — at effectively zero marginal cost per session.
Why it worked
Nothing exotic. The engines wanted to recommend a credible sleep brand; the client simply wasn’t legible. Structure made it legible, answer-content made it quotable, and third-party proof made it safe to recommend. That’s the whole GEO thesis — executed in order.