A nutrition retailer gets mentioned more in AI answers
An online performance nutrition store was losing AI answers to the big marketplaces. A campaign on the sites AI tools learn from got it named far more often.
The results
Where things stood
The client is an online store that sells performance nutrition made by other brands. It works a lot like a marketplace in that category. It doesn't make the products. It sells many brands in one place, so its growth depends on people finding the store when they look for those brands.
Most people start their search with a brand they like, a product type, or a question about where to buy online. Only a few type the store's name. So the store has to show up for all of those searches, even though none of them are about the store itself.
A growing share of those questions now go to AI tools. People ask ChatGPT or read Google's AI Overviews to find out which brands are worth trying and which stores carry them. Those answers usually name a handful of places to buy from.
For this store, the answers leaned heavily toward the big marketplaces. It had far less visibility in AI answers than they did. That was true for questions about the third-party brands it carries, and for questions about which online retailers to buy from.
If an answer only names a big marketplace, the store misses that shopper before they ever see its site.
What we did
We ran an AI visibility campaign aimed at the early questions people ask while they're still deciding. The campaign covered two kinds of questions. The first was about the brands the store carries. The second was about where to buy those products online.
AI tools build their answers from what the wider web says about a category. They lean on reviews, roundups, comparison articles and other sites that write about the products. Changing the store's own pages wouldn't have been enough, so most of the work happened on other sites.
We started by mapping the questions that mattered and checking which sources AI tools cited when they answered them. Then our in-house writers created articles for trusted sites in the field. The goal was for the store to come up naturally whenever those sites talked about the brands it sells or the best places to buy them. We tracked how often each AI tool named the store as the campaign ran, so we could see which questions were moving and which needed more work.
What changed
Both numbers count how often AI tools named the store when people asked about the brands it sells and where to buy them. More mentions put the store in front of more shoppers before they reach a marketplace.
What other retailers can take from this
If you sell other companies' brands, your own name isn't what most shoppers search for. They search for the brands, the product type, or the best place to buy. Ranking your own site still matters, and AI answers now matter too, because more of those questions get answered before anyone clicks a link.
Big marketplaces get mentioned by default because so much of the web talks about them. A smaller retailer can still earn its place in those answers. It takes a steady presence on the sites AI tools trust, built around the brands and questions that bring in sales.
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