Background
Reuzel is a men’s grooming brand born out of Schorem Barbier, the Rotterdam barbershop that helped bring classic barbering back into the mainstream. Its pomades, clays, tonics, beard products, and tattoo care are sold through its Shopify store, Amazon, Ulta, and thousands of barbershops and distributors around the world.
It was already a well-known brand. The problem was that AI knew Reuzel very unevenly. When ChatRank first measured the questions shoppers were asking across ChatGPT, Google, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity, Reuzel showed up in 77% of answers around its core high-hold pomades. But visibility dropped to 26% for matte clays, 10% for beard care, and just 5% for tattoo aftercare — all categories where Reuzel had real products and real expertise.
That matters because people are changing how they shop. Someone looking for a matte clay for fine hair or comparing tattoo balms doesn’t necessarily search Google, open five tabs, and research every brand anymore. They ask ChatGPT what to buy and start with the handful of products it recommends. Reuzel had spent years building the expertise. It just wasn’t getting into the answer.
What they did
We started by figuring out exactly where Reuzel was winning, where competitors were beating them, and what sources the AI models were actually using to make those decisions.
Then, instead of telling the team to simply “create more content,” ChatRank found specific questions where Reuzel had a product and something useful to say, but almost nothing on its own site for an AI model to read. We used those gaps to build new content pieces around topics like clay pomades, water-based versus oil-based products, hair tonics, thinning hair, textured crops, and tattoo aftercare.
The important part was what came from Reuzel. Their barber educators know things about hold, shine, texture, application, and washout that aren’t sitting in a generic SEO article somewhere. ChatRank handled the research, competitive analysis, recommendations, drafting, and measurement. Reuzel added the expertise a model couldn’t make up.
We also followed the models outside of reuzel.com. When the data showed that Reddit and other community sources were heavily influencing answers in this category, we helped Reuzel build a strategy for getting its actual barbers and educators into those conversations authentically.
What happened
Reuzel’s website went from being a brand AI knew about to a source AI actually used. More Reuzel URLs were being cited by AI models each week, with editorial content driving most of the increase. Within six months, 3x the number of Reuzel pages were being cited than at the start.
The visibility moved with it. Reuzel became substantially more visible for matte styling clays and tattoo aftercare, and most of the prompts we tracked finished ahead of where they started. And the content moved quickly — some new Reuzel articles began appearing in Google AI Overviews within three days of publishing.
The part that matters
Referral traffic from ChatGPT to reuzel.com grew roughly 5x over the engagement. These are people arriving at Reuzel after asking an AI assistant what product they should buy and getting Reuzel somewhere in the answer. That’s about as high-intent as ecommerce traffic gets.
During this period, Reuzel’s direct-to-consumer sales grew double digits, site conversion rate climbed 40%, and sales attributed to Google were up almost 30% — all while the company reduced paid search spend significantly.
For an ecommerce brand, that’s ultimately what we’re trying to create: a new source of customers that grows because the brand is earning the recommendation, not paying for every click.
Why it works
Most established ecommerce brands already have the thing AI needs. It’s sitting with their product people, their founders, their customer support team, their educators, or the people who have used the product every day for ten years. The problem is that none of that expertise matters to an AI model if it can’t find and understand it.
Reuzel didn’t need to manufacture authority. It already had it. ChatRank showed the team where that authority was missing from the answers shoppers were getting, helped turn their knowledge into something AI could actually use, and measured whether it worked. Reuzel knew the category. We made sure AI could read it.