50% Higher AI Selection in One Week: A Beauty Brand’s Success with Novi

The Challenge

A mid-sized beauty brand, sold in major retailers and DTC, saw a significant drop in click-through-rates (CTR) from SEO and a similar drop in ROAS on Meta and paid search. They had no idea if they were surfacing in ChatGPT and Gemini but they suspected they weren’t because traffic was down to their site overall. Given the rapid uptick in consumer adoption of AI for shopping, and the Holiday Season weeks away, the brand needed a solution that would not only measure their visibility in AI shopping but also help them increase that visibility so consumers could find their products. Kicking off a search for a technology platform that would help them stay relevant, this brand’s general manager knew she needed to increase how often their products appeared in AI in time for the biggest revenue driving event of the year.

Why The Beauty Brand Chose Novi

The brand turned to Novi because of Novi’s expertise in CPG. They already trusted Novi with their product data to increase their visibility across Ulta, Sephora, and Target since 2020. Now, trusted by thousands of brands, Novi was the clear partner to help them optimize their digital footprint for AI shopping.

Novi offered the only software platform that would not only increase discovery for LLMs and track performance, but that would automate the work for them with:
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- Real time visibility monitoring
- Actionable content optimization reports
- Supported claim validation with Retail Badges
- Increased Digital Footprint through retail and AI channel distribution

How Novi Delivered

At the start of using Novi’s AEO product, the brand discovered they had a very low Share of Voice, the percentage of time their products were recommended or surfaced in AI Shopping platforms for their product category.

Novi helped them make a huge impact, and quickly. After a quick assessment, Novi delivered a set of clear quick easy steps to take to improve the way their products (and their product data) were showing up across its digital footprint. After pushing their newly optimized product data through Novi’s direct data feed integrations with major retailers & AI platforms, their Share of Voice climbed to 50% percent over the following week. This increase put them on a strong trajectory heading into the holiday period.

Then Things got Interesting

Just before Black Friday, a booming holiday season seemed much less likely. When the team logged in to Novi, they saw their Share of Voice for their top products had plummeted to zero. Their general manager was panicked, worried that the data optimizations they had made had backfired or that ChatGPT’s recent model update had disrupted performance. “I thought I could just set it and forget it.”

However, alarm bells had already gone off at Novi and the Novi platform was proactively able to pinpoint the issue even before the brand brought it to their attention. 

Through its continuous monitoring feature, Novi quickly determined that, in preparing their site for Black Friday, the brand had pushed a new website update that unintentionally buried their most important machine-readable content. As a result, the brand had become invisible to AI, trapping key product information inside blocks that the LLMs could not parse. While the website update the brand pushed made their product more visually appealing to humans, these updates made their products almost invisible to machines.

The brand’s general manager was relieved with how quickly the issue was able to be discovered and diagnosed. Her agency missed this issue. Even her SEO platform (SEMrush) did not flag in time.

She also realized that growth in Share of Voice would necessitate continual monitoring. This was not a case of setting it and forgetting it, but with Novi’s comprehensive optimization steps and real time monitoring, growing conversion from AI selection seemed well within reach.

The Beauty Brand’s Success Story

Just in time for Black Friday, the brand was able to fix their product data and push those updates across their digital footprint, once more enjoying that increased share of voice they had optimized for shortly after they began their relationship with Novi.

The general manager was especially grateful to Novi for not only increasing how often the brand’s products surfaced in AI shopping, but also for immediately finding a potentially deadly degradation and resolving the issue within days. Because the brand was on Novi, they not only caught the issue early and corrected it before Black Friday, but they grew to a 50%+ increase in their Share of Voice just in time to drive sales for the peak shopping period.