AI Search Visibility for a Haircare Ecommerce Brand
Haircare ecommerce AI search visibility / GEO case study: rebuilding a Shopify haircare brand's entity, product schema, and beauty-media citations so AI engines cite the brand for hair-type, ingredient, and routine prompts. Engagement in progress.
Marrowroot Haircare
A Shopify DTC haircare brand focused on curly and coily hair, with a clean-ingredient formulation story. Loyal repeat customers, but almost invisible in AI answers when new shoppers asked for routine recommendations by hair type.
Industry
Haircare Ecommerce Brand
Focus
AI SEO & GEO
The Challenge
Product pages leaned on brand voice with no ingredient tables. There was no Product schema, ingredient sourcing wasn't extractable, and citations were confined to the brand's own blog instead of the beauty-media sites AI engines quote.
Marrowroot Haircare
Only 5 of 30 tracked shopper prompts cited Marrowroot, while three legacy brands and two 'best of' aggregators owned nearly every recommendation.
The Strategy
Baselined shopper-intent prompts
Tracked 30 shopper prompts (hair type routines, ingredient safety, curl pattern recommendations, sulfate / silicone free product suggestions) across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews.
Rebuilt the brand entity
Cleaned Wikidata, Crunchbase, and 10 beauty / ecommerce directories with consistent founder story, formulation claims, and product line taxonomy.
Rewrote product + routine pages for extraction
Restructured 42 product and routine pages with definitional openings, ingredient tables, hair-type applicability grids, and Product + FAQPage schema so engines could quote ingredients and use-cases verbatim.
Placed citations in beauty media AI engines trust
Earned inclusion in 6 curly-hair-focused publications and 3 clean-beauty roundups that were consistently surfaced by AI engines.
(ChatGPT)
Marrowroot Haircare
- —Only legacy brands cited
- —No Marrowroot mention
- —Ingredient story not surfaced
- —No AI Overview coverage
(ChatGPT)
Marrowroot Haircare
- ✓Cited in top 4 recommendations
- ✓Ingredients quoted verbatim from schema
- ✓Curl-pattern applicability surfaced
- ✓Also cited in Google AI Overview
AI answer mockup - ILLUSTRATIVE ChatGPT answer to 'best sulfate free shampoo for curly hair' now cites Marrowroot.
Keyword Movement
| Keyword | Before | Now |
|---|---|---|
| best sulfate free shampoo curly hair | not cited | cited (ChatGPT + Perplexity) |
| clean haircare brands for coily hair | not cited | cited (Perplexity + Gemini) |
| silicone free conditioner recommendation | cited (1 engine) | cited (Google AI Overview) |
| curly hair routine for fine strands | not cited | cited (ChatGPT + Gemini) |
Representative results based on comparable engagements.
One AI engine kept citing a reformulated ingredient that was no longer in the product.
A single legacy blog post kept getting quoted for a formulation I'd changed months earlier. I updated the post with a clear 'reformulated in [date]' banner, added an update field to schema, and pushed a fresh press cycle - AI answers refreshed within a few weeks and stopped mentioning the old ingredient.
The biggest change wasn't checkout traffic. It was that first-time buyers started arriving already believing our ingredient story - because an AI answer told them the story before we did.
Client name changed for privacy.
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First audit call is free, no commitment.
What happens next
Typical engagement: 4-6 months. First deliverable in week 1: an AI-visibility audit across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews for your top 20 buyer prompts, with a prioritised entity, schema, and citation plan.