From 8% to 28%: How Mando turbocharged its AI search Visibility
AT A GLANCE
Mando was invisible amongst men's deodorants on AI search. In four months it became the source 2nd most cited by AI, driving visibility from ~8% to 28%. Bodhium wrote 5 of the top 6 cited Mando articles.
The challenge
Mando was nearly absent from AI search in its highest-intent category: comparison questions like “best deodorant for sensitive skin.”
AI answers are winner-take-most. The brands an assistant names are the shortlist, and there is no page two.
In March, Mando appeared in under 8% of those answers and close to zero on ChatGPT. Its owned pages were built to sell, not to answer the question shoppers were asking.
The approach
Bodhium ran a precision Answer Engine Optimization program built for how AI assistants actually source and cite recommendations. Mando makes whole-body deodorant for men (72-hour, aluminum-free, mandelic-acid based), and the work paired that product truth with content engineered for AI consumption, not for a human skimming a results page.
Map the questions, then own them. We identified the highest-intent questions real shoppers ask in Mando’s category and built content to answer them directly: 10 comparison and head-term articles on March 27, then 11 whole-body use-case articles on May 27 to 29. 21 live articles in total.
Engineer each page to be cited. Five choices did the heavy lifting: match each article to the sources a given engine already trusts; open with a self-contained, quotable answer; repeat one named causal mechanism (mandelic acid lowers skin pH so bacteria cannot turn sweat into odor); back claims with specific, compliant clinical detail (72-hour control, tested by Princeton Consumer Research; target pH 4.7 to 5.75); and own the category vocabulary and the under-served zones competitors skip.
The results
We tracked 2 clear wins: Search Visibility and ChatGPT User-Bot Traffic.
Non-branded AI visibility more than tripled in four months, from 7.8% to 28.1%.
Mando’s own site became a top source, not just a mention: shopmando.com is now the #2 most-cited domain on non-branded questions across the category, ahead of Reddit and YouTube — only trailing the incumbent Dove.
Gains were broad, not one lucky channel. Gemini rose 10.8% to 44.4%, Perplexity 11.6% to 30.5%, and Google AI Overview reached 33.7%.
Real ChatGPT shoppers are reading Mando’s content, live. Beyond tracked visibility, we watched the hardest signal available: the ChatGPT-User bot, which fires only when a real person asks ChatGPT a question and it fetches a Mando page to answer them. Every visit is Mando’s content being read back to an actual shopper in real time.
Period | ChatGPT-User visits per day |
|---|---|
Before launch | 393 |
After launch (sustained) | ~1,300 (3.3x) |
Peak week (early May) | 2,696 (~7x) |
Settled level | ~1,040 (~2.6x) |
