Frequently asked questions

Brand+Commerce is a search and AI visibility practice for wellness, fitness and fashion brands. We combine SEO and AEO to grow customer acquisition across local, multi-location and ecommerce businesses. The work can include technical and on-page SEO, site structure, schema, location and product content, AI visibility measurement, reviews, editorial coverage and creator programs. Brand+Commerce was founded by Melissa Gellman Weiss, former CMO of Barry’s and a leader at Amazon Fashion, J.Crew and Shopbop.

We specialize in wellness, fitness and fashion brands. That includes studios, gyms, wellness and longevity businesses, beauty and fashion brands, retailers and consumer products. We work across three business models: local businesses that need to win a specific market, multi-location and franchise systems that need scalable local visibility, and ecommerce brands competing for product discovery across Google, AI, publishers and creators. The common thread is an established brand or customer experience with existing marketing assets that should be producing more organic discovery and customer acquisition.

Brand+Commerce starts with the customer-acquisition problem and connects the channels that influence discovery. SEO improves how a brand appears in traditional search. AEO improves whether its information is understood, cited and recommended in answer engines and AI platforms. Content, reviews, editorial coverage and creators supply the evidence both systems use. We bring those inputs together, then measure rankings, citations, recommendations, qualified traffic, leads, bookings and sales. The work is led by senior consumer operators with experience at Amazon, J.Crew, Shopbop and Barry’s.

A Brand+Commerce audit establishes how visible your business is across Google and AI, where competitors appear instead, and which changes are most likely to improve customer acquisition. We assess technical SEO, site structure, schema, content, rankings, AI answers and citations, reviews, local or product pages and relevant third-party sources. For local and multi-location businesses, we also examine Google Business Profiles and market-level consistency. For ecommerce, we review product and category discovery, comparison queries and publisher visibility. You receive the baseline evidence and a prioritized action plan.

There is no single ranking to win. Each platform builds answers differently, and results shift by question, by phrasing and by user context. What is consistent is the evidence they draw on. Every one of these systems is assembling an answer from sources it can find and verify, so the work is making your brand easy to find, understand and confirm across the open web. In practice that means four things. A site that states plainly what you do, who founded it and where you operate. Structured data that connects those facts. Coverage on the third-party sources that engines actually cite, which are usually publications and roundups rather than your own pages. And consistency, so the same claims appear the same way everywhere. Brands that are hard to verify get left out of the answer, even when they are the better choice.

Usually because the platform can find clearer evidence about them, not because they are better at what they do. The most common cause we see is an identity that does not resolve. If a brand’s name is also an industry phrase, or shares a name with another company, engines hedge or substitute someone unambiguous. Adding a founder name, a city and a founding year to your own site often fixes this faster than any content work. The second cause is source coverage. Competitors frequently appear because they are inside the roundups, comparison articles and directories that engines quote. Those are third-party pages your own site cannot rank its way into. We identify which questions matter to your business, which brands currently win them, which sources those answers cite, and which of those sources you have a credible reason to be in.

AI recommendations are influenced by whether a platform can understand your brand and find credible evidence supporting it. That can include authoritative website content, structured data, search visibility, editorial mentions, reviews, backlinks and other third-party references. A brand with a strong, consistent digital footprint gives AI systems more evidence to work with when answering a relevant customer question.

Three related disciplines, aimed at three different destinations. SEO, search engine optimisation, targets the ranked list of blue links. Success is a position on page one and the click that follows. AEO, answer engine optimisation, targets the direct answer above those links: featured snippets, People Also Ask, Google’s AI Overviews. Success is being the source quoted, which often means the answer is read and no click happens at all. GEO, generative engine optimisation, targets assistants that compose an answer rather than return results, such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. Success is being named and recommended inside that answer. They share a foundation. A site engines cannot crawl fails all three. They diverge in what wins: SEO rewards depth and links, AEO rewards structure and directness, GEO rewards being verifiable and widely referenced elsewhere.

Yes, and more than most people expect. AI assistants do not have an independent view of the web. They retrieve from search indexes and from sources those indexes surface. A page that ranks nowhere is usually a page an assistant never retrieves. Google visibility remains one of the strongest observed inputs into whether a brand appears in AI answers. What has changed is that traditional SEO is no longer sufficient on its own. It gets you into the pool of sources. What decides whether you are chosen from that pool is what the rest of the web says: editorial coverage, reviews, roundups, directories and creator content. The practical implication is that SEO and PR stop being separate budgets. Your editorial spend is what AI engines read. The work is making it citable.

There is no single answer, but the types that hold up commercially share one trait: they keep working after the news cycle ends. Product-led coverage is the most reliable for consumer brands. Reviews, shopping guides, comparisons and best-of lists reach people who are already deciding what to buy, and they stay discoverable for months. Expert commentary comes second. Being the named source in a piece about your category builds author authority that both Google and AI assistants read, and it is easier to earn than a full feature. Founder and origin stories still work where there is something genuinely distinctive to tell. They are what make a brand quotable rather than merely listed. What has faded is announcement PR with no news behind it. A funding round is worth a line, not a campaign. We judge any placement on whether a buyer will still find it in six months.

Yes, but the case for it has changed and the old justification no longer holds on its own. Traditional PR earns its place when you have genuine news, a founder story worth telling, or a specific audience you need to reach. Where it falls down is when coverage is the whole deliverable and the reporting stops at impressions and reach. What has changed is that editorial coverage is now an input to search. AI assistants build answers from published sources, and a well-placed feature keeps working long after the news cycle moves on, because it stays quotable. So we judge a placement on whether it will still be doing work in six months. Does it rank for something a buyer searches? Is it the kind of page an assistant cites? Can we point to traffic or revenue from it? Coverage that fails all three was expensive awareness.

Because the value of a placement depends on who finds it, when they find it, and what they do next. A recommendation in a shopping guide that appears while someone is actively deciding what to buy can be worth more commercially than a prestigious feature nobody searches for. One converts, the other flatters. There is a second reason that did not exist three years ago. Ahrefs analysed 75,000 brands and found mentions of a brand across the web correlate with AI visibility at 0.664, against 0.218 for backlinks. What other people publish about you now outweighs what you publish about yourself. That makes editorial a discovery channel rather than a reputation exercise. The strongest placements influence a customer directly, and then keep influencing the next one through Google and the sources AI platforms read.

Often, yes, and it is one of the more reliable routes into that kind of coverage. Editorial affiliate earns placements in shopping guides, product reviews, gift guides, roundups and best-of lists published by established media. The publisher earns a commission when their recommendation drives a sale, which gives them a commercial reason to include products that genuinely perform. That alignment is what makes it work where a straight pitch often does not. You are not asking for a favour, you are offering a product their readers will buy. It matters more than it used to because those lists are exactly what AI assistants quote when someone asks for a recommendation. Getting into a roundup is not just referral traffic any more, it is a source an engine can cite. Neither outcome is guaranteed, and the product still has to stand up.

They are aimed at different moments in the customer’s decision. Traditional PR earns coverage through a story: an announcement, a launch, a founder angle, a point of view. The publisher runs it because it is interesting. Editorial affiliate earns coverage through commerce. The publisher is helping a reader decide what to buy, and they include you because your product answers that question. The story angle matters far less than whether the recommendation holds up. For consumer brands, the practical difference is where you show up. PR puts you in features and interviews. Editorial affiliate puts you in the reviews, comparisons, shopping guides and best-of lists people read with their card already out. Most brands need both. They work on different timelines and they persuade different people.

Start from what already ranks, not from a media wish list. We look at the guides and roundups customers actually reach when researching your category, then work out which of them you have a credible reason to be in. A brand with no reviews and no proof will not hold a place in a comparison piece, however good the pitch is. From there it is four things. The right affiliate infrastructure so a publisher can earn from recommending you. Product information a writer can use without chasing you for it. A reason you belong on that specific list rather than a generic pitch. And direct outreach to the editor who owns the page. It is slower than most people expect. Editorial calendars run months ahead, and the highest-value lists are the hardest to enter.

It supplies the evidence both systems rely on. For Google, editorial coverage creates credible mentions and links from sites that already have authority, which is one of the harder signals to build any other way. For AI search the mechanism is more direct. Assistants compose answers from published sources, so when someone asks for a recommendation in your category, the engine is reading roundups, reviews and articles. If your brand appears in those, you can be named. If it does not, you cannot be, regardless of how good your own site is. This is the argument we make most often to clients weighing PR against performance spend. Your editorial investment is what AI engines read when deciding what to recommend. The work is making sure that coverage is specific, current and quotable enough to be used.

No. Relevance and credibility with a specific customer beat follower count almost every time. For a studio or a store, a trusted local creator with 8,000 engaged followers in one city will usually drive more visits than a national account with a million. The audience overlaps with your catchment. Most of the larger account does not. For a product brand, a niche creator with real category authority tends to convert better than a general lifestyle account, because their recommendation carries weight in the exact area you are selling into. There is a search dimension too. Ahrefs found YouTube mentions to be the single strongest correlate with AI visibility across the brands they measured, at 0.737. Video content about your brand is disproportionately likely to be read by AI systems. We select creators against the customer and the objective, not the follower number.

Usually a combination, weighted by what you are trying to achieve. Paid creators give you reach and usable content on a predictable timeline. You know what you are getting and roughly when. Affiliate creators are paid on performance, so the risk sits with them rather than you. They suit brands with a clear conversion path and a product that sells itself once someone sees it. Ambassadors are the long game. Repeated exposure from the same trusted face builds recognition that one-off posts do not, and they tend to work hardest for location-based businesses where familiarity drives the first visit. For a multi-unit brand we often run ambassadors locally and paid creators nationally, so each location has a familiar face while the brand keeps a consistent voice above it.

Specific content that answers a question a real customer asks, in language they would recognise. In practice that means service pages describing one thing rather than eight, location pages with genuine local detail, comparison and buying guides, and FAQ answers substantial enough to be quoted rather than skimmed. Length matters more than most people think. SE Ranking analysed 2.3 million pages and found sections of roughly 100 to 150 words are the most frequently cited by AI systems. Shorter than that and there is nothing to lift; much longer and the passage stops being self-contained. Freshness matters too. In their ChatGPT study, content updated within three months averaged around six citations against 3.6 for outdated pages. The common failure is content written to cover a keyword rather than to answer a question. Engines are increasingly good at telling the difference.

Local visibility is an evidence problem, and most of the evidence sits outside your website. The foundation is a complete and accurate Google Business Profile, consistent name, address and phone details everywhere they appear, and a location page with real specificity: what happens at that site, who works there, what the neighbourhood is, opening times that are actually correct. On top of that sit the signals you do not control. Reviews, local press, city guides, directories and creators who mention you by name. These are what an assistant reads when someone asks for a recommendation near them. AI recommendations for physical businesses are still thin territory. Most of the published advice is written for ecommerce and does not transfer, which is the area we have deliberately specialised in. If you have several sites, each one needs its own evidence, not a shared page.

Work backwards from what already appears when a customer searches your category in your city. That set is usually smaller than people expect: two or three local publications, a city guide or two, a handful of directories, sometimes a national title with a local section, and a few creators who cover the area. Those are the pages an AI assistant reads when asked for a recommendation near someone. Once we know the list, the question is what makes you includable. A studio with forty recent reviews and a clear point of difference is an easy inclusion. One with six reviews and generic positioning is not, whatever the pitch says. So the sequence is usually reviews first, then a sharpened description of what you actually do differently, then outreach. Going straight to outreach is what makes most of these campaigns fail.

Start about eight to twelve weeks before the doors open, because search visibility does not appear on demand. The first move is a live location page for the new site, published early with an opening date. Google needs time to find and index it, and a page created the week you open has none of that. Alongside that, claim the Google Business Profile as soon as the address is confirmed, brief local creators and ambassadors before opening rather than after, approach local press while there is still a story to tell, and start collecting an email or waitlist so day one has an audience behind it. The aim is to open into existing demand instead of starting from nothing. A location that opens invisible spends its first quarter buying the attention it could have earned beforehand.

Centralise what benefits from scale, localise what the customer actually experiences. Brand strategy, creative direction, technology, measurement and reporting should sit centrally. Duplicating those per site multiplies cost without improving anything, and it is how brand consistency erodes. What has to be genuinely local is the evidence for each site. Its own page with real detail, its own Google Business Profile, its own reviews, its own relationships with nearby press and creators. Search engines and AI assistants evaluate each location on what they can find about that location, not on the strength of the parent brand. The most common failure we see is a location directory of near-identical pages differing only by city name. That satisfies nobody. Each site needs enough of its own substance to compete in its own market.