Project · Tactical and workwear apparel, e-commerce
Getting an apparel brand named in AI answers
Propper is a US tactical and workwear brand with a large catalogue, in a category where buyers ask an assistant “what should I buy” before they open a search box. The question was never whether the site ranked. It ranked. The question was what ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews said when someone asked about tactical trousers, and whether the brand was in the answer at all.
The problem
Rankings were not the issue. In this category Google shows an AI Overview on close to half the queries the site ranks for, so a page can sit in position three and still be read by nobody, because the answer above it was assembled from three other sites.
There was a second problem underneath it. Nobody had written down what the assistants actually said. Without a baseline, every improvement is an anecdote.
Not “how do we rank in AI” but “which pages are the answers being built from, and are they ours”. Once you know which page an assistant is quoting, AI search becomes on-page work with a different measurement.
What I did
- Built a fixed prompt set from real buying questions and ran it on a schedule across the assistants, recording who was named and which URL was cited each time.
- Rewrote the top of the pages the assistants were drawing from so the answer came first and the context after, with the claim, the number and the definition each able to stand alone.
- Segmented AI referrers in GA4 so the channel was countable, and used Search Console’s generative AI reporting once it existed.
The result
AI and answer-engine visibility rose 38% in one quarter across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews.
Where it stands now
| Semrush, 15 September 2026 | Value |
|---|---|
| Semrush Rank | 18,744 |
| Ranking keywords | 23,609 |
| Keywords in positions 1–3 | 2,799 |
| Estimated organic visits a month | 117,626 |
| Keywords that trigger an AI Overview | 11,218 |
US database, pulled 15 September 2026. These are Semrush estimates describing the domain today, not analytics and not a measurement of this engagement. They are here so the page carries a number a reader can check for themselves.
ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, Google Search Console, GA4, Microsoft Clarity, Screaming Frog, Semrush, Google Sheets for the prompt log.
Not sure what the assistants say about you?
Send me the category and I will run ten prompts before the call. You will hear who gets named, and whether it is you.
Typical reply time: within one working day