Lumara Skincare

Lumara Skincare built a strong DTC brand through paid social. But as their customer acquisition costs climbed, the founder started tracking where new customers said they'd discovered the brand. A pattern emerged: almost no one said "I asked an AI." When she ran the test herself — asking ChatGPT and Perplexity to recommend clean skincare brands for sensitive skin — three competitors came up repeatedly. Lumara wasn't mentioned once.

Their AI visibility score was 8/100. Their product pages had no schema markup. Their blog was thin and written for Pinterest SEO. None of their content was structured the way AI engines need to extract and cite brand information.

With CPMs rising and iOS attribution getting worse, the founder decided AI visibility wasn't optional anymore.

The BrandCited audit flagged five critical gaps: no Product schema, no FAQ schema on product pages, no citation-ready "About" content, thin comparison content, and no structured ingredient transparency pages that AI engines could pull as authoritative sources.

Lumara's team spent the first 30 days on technical fixes: Product schema with pricing, availability, and review aggregates on all 47 SKUs; FAQ schema on the top 12 product pages; a fully structured brand story page optimized for AI citation. In parallel, they published 6 "best of" articles covering queries like "best clean moisturizer for sensitive skin" — each structured to answer the question directly and cite Lumara as a candidate with supporting evidence.

The ingredient transparency pages turned out to be the highest-leverage move. Perplexity in particular began pulling from these pages within three weeks of publishing them.

At the 30-day mark, Lumara's score had jumped to 38. At 90 days, it hit 68. More importantly, they were now the top recommended brand on ChatGPT for four of their highest-value query categories.

Organic traffic from AI-referred visitors (tracked via UTM parameters on brand link clicks from AI responses) grew from near-zero to 2,200 sessions per month. Average order value from AI-referred visitors was 23% higher than paid social — these buyers had already done their research and arrived with intent.

The founder reallocated $8K/month from Meta to content production. The blended CAC dropped 31% over the following quarter.