CASE STUDY · D2C BEAUTY / MATERNITY
House of Zelena
From #6 to #1 across 3 LLMs.
22% → 56%
ChatGPT Mention Share
#6 → #1
Category Rank (3 LLMs)
6 months
Window
Beauty, Maternity
Verticals
The problem
A founder-led D2C brand competing against incumbents with 50× the marketing spend. Discovery was happening in AI, but recommendations were going to the larger brands by default.
The intervention
- 01Top-of-funnel content rewritten to surface as direct LLM answers
- 02Earned-media plays to feed citation graphs LLMs cite
- 03Continuous competitive monitoring across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini
- 04Specific-claim language replacing soft brand voice
The phases
01Foundation & discovery
Months 1-2- →Citation baseline established across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity
- →135 maternity prompts mapped to 4 topic clusters
- →Competitor SoV analysis - 8 brands benchmarked against the founder-led D2C
- →Technical audit: schema gaps, page structure, AI readability
02AI-extractable content + entity reinforcement
Months 2-4- →AI-readable category pages with direct answer blocks
- →FAQ + Product + HowTo schema implementation
- →Brand entity reinforcement through proprietary product terms (BellyLove, Zipless, Peek-a-Boo Airflow)
- →UTM tagging for AI-traffic attribution
03PR + citation amplification
Months 4-5- →Press syndication to Tribune India, ANI, Business Standard
- →Third-party citation signal building across trusted Indian press
- →AI-citable press releases with structured data
- →Cross-platform brand authority reinforcement
04Scaling + algorithm-shift response
Month 6- →Weekly citation tracking across thousands of AI responses
- →Share-of-voice monitoring vs the top 8 competitors monthly
- →Algorithm-shift response and content refresh cycles
- →Topic cluster expansion: postpartum, nursing, activewear
The result
Over 6 months, ChatGPT mention share rose 22% → 56%, and the brand moved from #6 to #1 across three major LLMs in its category.
House of Zelena · 6 months
ChatGPT mention share, 22% → 56%
Measured at baseline and month 6. Category rank moved #6 → #1 across three LLMs in the same window.
Growth table
Metric
Before
After
Change
Category Rank (across 3 LLMs)
#6
#1
5 positions up
ChatGPT Mention Share
22%
56%
+152%
Perplexity Citation Rate
27%
39%
+44%
Total Citations
Baseline
Compounding
Category leader
The full document · 10 pages · PDF
House of Zelena - the full engagement brief
The six-month record of a founder-led brand taking category rank from incumbents with 50× the spend.
- The full six-month phase plan, month by month
- 135 prompts mapped to 4 topic clusters - the method
- How proprietary product terms became citation anchors
- What happened to citations when monitoring lapsed
Key lessons
Lesson 01
Specialisation beats scale in AI search - a focused D2C brand can take #1 from incumbents 50× their size
Lesson 02
AEO compounds like SEO but faster - quarterly model retraining bakes in citation signals cumulatively
Lesson 03
Active management is non-negotiable - citations drop fast when monitoring lapses
Lesson 04
Proprietary product terms become citation anchors - brand-coined names appear verbatim in AI responses
Lesson 05
Press coverage is fuel for AI citation - Tribune and ANI features create third-party trust signals AI engines weight heavily
ROI summary
Investment
AEO retainer
Outcome
#6 → #1 across 3 LLMs, 22% → 56% ChatGPT mention share
Window
6 months
The lesson
Founder-led brands beat large competitors in AI answers when they are more specific. Generic brand voice doesn't survive the citation cut.