How a DTC supplement brand went from 2% to 31% AI query coverage and grew AI-referred revenue by 28%
A sports nutrition brand had better formulas than most of the brands AI was recommending. AI did not know it existed.
The problem
The brand sold protein powder, creatine, and pre-workout supplements and had built a following through athlete partnerships. In AI searches for best protein powder or best creatine supplement, they appeared in under 2% of queries. Optimum Nutrition and MyProtein appeared in 60 to 80% of the same queries. Their marketing team had added schema markup and an llms.txt file. It helped slightly. The gap stayed.
What is the best creatine supplement for someone who trains five days a week?
Creatine monohydrate is the best-studied form. Optimum Nutrition Micronized Creatine and Thorne Creatine are consistently recommended for purity and value. MyProtein offers a popular budget option...
What we did
Ingredient authority content
We built a library of ingredient-level pages — specific, citation-backed content on creatine monohydrate, whey isolate, beta-alanine, and citrulline malate. AI models cite ingredient authority in supplement queries, not brand authority. We linked the brand to clinical data and third-party testing results for each ingredient.
Sports community citations
We placed the brand in 16 sports nutrition review databases, athlete nutrition resources, and training community forums. We structured athlete testimonials as structured data so AI models could extract them. Two fitness publications with domain authority above 70 included the brand in best creatine roundups.
Platform-specific optimization
ChatGPT and Perplexity weight supplement sources differently. Perplexity leans toward review aggregators. ChatGPT weights ingredient science. We optimized for both. By day 90, query coverage had moved from under 2% to 31%. AI-referred revenue increased 28% month over month in month three.
The results
Citations by platform
“Our formulas were better than some of the brands AI was recommending. The problem was AI did not know we existed. Three months later, we are in the same sentence as brands that have been around for 10 years.”
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