5x Competitor Citation Rate in Scar Treatment AI Search

Lyra Collective is a portfolio of brands in the Personal Care and Family categories. In early 2025, the team began seeing an increase in session traffic referrals from ChatGPT to their brands' DTC websites, a strong signal that Generative Engine Optimization had become a real channel.

Before Athena, the team didn't have a clear motion for AI-driven discovery. They had a working SEO motion, but weren't sure how to adapt it for a new medium where users ask, rather than search, and where models choose which brands to surface.

For Nuvadermis specifically, the challenge was sharper. The scar treatment category is dominated by established heavyweights with deeper content libraries and more channels. Without visibility into how AI engines were describing the category, Nuvadermis risked being left out of every recommendation.

Two signals converged. External: session traffic from ChatGPT was growing across the brands' DTC sites in early 2025. Internal: AI-driven discovery was something the team knew was picking up steam from anecdotal customer experience and shifts in DTC referral source mix.

The team also saw GEO as a core pillar of their agentic commerce strategy. As they thought about positioning the portfolio for a world where agents shortlist and transact on behalf of consumers, owning the AI narrative wasn't a "nice to have", it was foundational.

GEO also became a key part of their New Product Launch playbook. In the months leading up to a launch, the team begins tracking prompts related to the new product and activates onsite and offsite content for those prompts to ensure a warm, primed audience on launch day.

The team initially managed Athena as a 1-person operation. Onboarding was quick, and the focus started onsite where the low-hanging fruit was clearest. Athena's content generation capabilities made it possible to drive a major impact with a lean team in a short period of time.

Today, day-to-day management is decentralized across Brand and Marketing teams:

Brand managers handle on-site tasks: blog creation, PDP optimizations, and content generation inside Athena.

Social marketers use Athena's Prompts and Sources sections to identify the most relevant Reddit, YouTube, and publisher targets, and maintain brand presence on those platforms.

External PR is now activated using Athena's Sources view to guide which publishers the agency focuses on, turning Athena into the source-of-truth brief for offsite earned media.

Lyra views Share of Voice as the north star KPI for GEO. Brand managers regularly review prompts to make sure they reflect each brand's go-forward strategy, then create content inside Athena's platform.

The team narrowed their topic list to product categories for each brand, then layered in Google Search Console data to surface the most relevant keywords. From there, they prioritized the highest query-volume prompts.

Over time, the prompt list iterates as new products launch, marketing campaigns ship, and fresh brand messaging gets tested. Prompts are not a one-time setup, they are the operating manifest for GEO at Lyra.

Within 3 months, Nuvadermis saw a 3x increase in Share of Voice, and on-page citation rate grew from single digits to 20%+, compared to a competitor average of just 4%. That is roughly 5x the category.

The strongest internal signal that Athena had become mission-critical was a measurable lift in website traffic to nuvadermis.com, particularly from Athena-generated content. People weren't just finding the brand name in AI search results, they were clicking the citations.

In a category dominated by scar treatment heavyweights with vastly larger budgets, Nuvadermis is now owning the narrative and quickly taking share from incumbents.

AI has fundamentally changed how people search for and discover information, so GEO is now a core pillar of Lyra's organic digital marketing strategy.

Athena is embedded into team workflows in a deeply cross-functional way. The team holds bi-weekly calls to share best practices and call out areas for improvement. The platform isn't a side project, it's the operating layer the entire org coordinates around.

Not every brand is treated the same. The team allocates more credits and budget to categories where they believe they have a right to win, based on three inputs:

1. Query volume in the category
2. Relevance of the brand's products to those prompts
3. Starting position, brand mention rate and citation rate baseline

This approach prevents spreading thin and concentrates investment where compounding is most likely.

Thinking with the end in mind is critical. There’s an enormous amount of data Athena surfaces, but the leverage comes from first defining what “good” looks like in Share of Voice growth, then deciding on the top X actions, onsite and offsite, that will get you there.

You can accomplish an incredible amount with excellent software and a clear vision. The team estimates Athena requires only a few hours per week of executive oversight, mostly to test new features and provide content guidance to Brand and Marketing.

Athena plays a critical role in deeply understanding the full funnel of customer acquisition. The platform allows operators to think holistically about a brand's broader marketing strategy, not just GEO metrics in isolation.

The visibility into Sources capacitated the team's efforts to fine-tune their Reddit engagement strategy and shift their creator strategy toward YouTube Shorts. Investing in certain Source platforms over others let them double-dip, the same effort drove community engagement and SEO/GEO outcomes.

Athena's signature is being action-oriented. The platform automates the path from data to insight to action, with an educational onboarding path that gets users up to speed on GEO fundamentals fast.

Be laser sharp on your competitor list and the prompts you're tracking. These two inputs are the basis for every GEO insight. If you're not tracking prompts that are actually relevant to your brand or its competitors, you will get misleading guidance.

Get those two right, and the rest of the system, citations, mentions, Share of Voice, sources, can compound.

1. Treat GEO as a core pillar of organic strategy, not an experiment
2. Decentralize execution across Brand and Social, not a single GEO owner
3. Make Share of Voice your north star KPI
4. Use GSC + product categories to seed your prompt list, then iterate
5. Concentrate spend on categories where you have a right to win
6. Bake GEO into product launches by warming prompts in advance

Nuvadermis is a scar treatment brand competing in a category dominated by incumbents many times its size, yet it is quickly taking share in AI search by owning the narrative around scar care.

The brand is built around effective, accessible scar treatment that holds up to scrutiny in both AI answers and customer reviews. Learn more at nuvadermis.com.