The overview
When this health industry startup came to us, they had no presence at all in AI search. Their visibility score was at zero, which meant they weren’t showing up in ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity when people asked about their category, even though they already had a strong foundation: a great product, powerful customer testimonials, and compelling case studies that should have built credibility. Yet none of it was being credited in AI-driven answers. We started by running an in-depth AEO audit that revealed missing and misconfigured LLMs.txt and Robots.txt files, and then we helped them build a clean, AI-citable launch page with structured customer reviews. We also set up a visibility dashboard so they could track exactly how often they were surfacing in top AI answers. Within just two weeks, their visibility score rose to 4%, and in the first week of starting doing AEO, they gained a paid conversion directly from ChatGPT. What began as complete invisibility turned into their first proof that AI search could drive real business outcome.
The story and pain point
This AI healthcare startup reached us with zero exposure to AI search results. Their visibility in AI search wasn’t low, it was nonexistent, which meant that no matter how many times people asked ChatGPT or other AI platforms about healthcare platforms, their name never appeared, despite how solid the product was. At the same time, the team was uncertain whether AEO could actually deliver results at all, and they weren’t sure how to even begin.
They had tried publishing blogs online and being active on Reddit and other social media platforms to gain attention, yet the content was not optimized for AI systems to comprehend or for customers to easily engage with, which resulted in minimum impact online and no visibility in AI-generated answers. What made matters worse was that their domain sites were missing files from LLMs.txt and Robots.txt, meaning the AI engine and even the search engine did not have the key to their content door. The site offered no clear entry point for the engines to learn. For a team trying to break into a competitive healthcare market, this was a serious setback.
The turning point
Frevana’s first step was running a comprehensive and in-depth AEO report that showed the team exactly where they posited, what their competitors did good and wrong, and how visibility is measure in AI search. The visibility score is determined by how frequently a brand appears in the top list out of AI search answers across various product/service related queries. And starting at ZERO did give us both a challenge but a large room of improvement.
We then moved quickly to identify the problem, missing LLMs.txt and Robots.txt, and fix the foundation by providing an optimized data structured so AI platforms could finally read and trust their site. The we created a well-formatted launch page, which the content is both human-readable and Ai-citable, presenting their product details in a way that triggers most questions consumer often ask. Finally, we created a visibility dashboard so the team could not only track their progress but also monitor their competitors’ performance.
The outcome
Within just two weeks, their visibility score rose from 0% to 4%. That may sound small, but for them it was a breakthrough, which is their first measurable step into AI visibility. More surprisingly, in the very first week of launching their landing page, they gained a paid conversion that came directly from ChatGPT result recommendation. This achievement was so exciting that the founder of the team added five exclamation marks when sharing this good news. Therefore the pathway is clear: instead of writing blogs and craving for engagement, they were producing content that both humans and AI could recognize, trust, and cite.
The future look
The direction for this AI healthcare startup, and projecting to all startups, is clear. This company have shifted from chasing tradition SEO to building a presence for AI discovery. They planned to continue refining their landing pages, optimizing their domains, and expanding their content in ways that work for both readers and AI engines,
At Frevana, we cherished this opportunity as a proof of a larger trend: the diminishing of endless SEO operating and the rising of building structured, citation optimized content for AI search results. We believe AEO will define the future of discoverability, and case like this show why. By helping the startup move from zero to one, we’ve seen firsthand how quickly the right approach can turn invisibility into visibility, and visibility into real business growth.