Retail and consumer goods
Channels
How products reach the buyer.
Four routes to the same household, and only two of them are researched in public. Consumers and sellers ask an engine before they ask you, and the answers they get are written by agencies, course sellers and consultants. Modern trade and general trade are negotiated in rooms instead. The work splits accordingly, and this page says which is which. The opening is in the numbers nobody publishes.
Where the answer is being lost
Your channel economics are explained by everyone except you.
A distributor weighing whether to take on a new line asks “How do FMCG distribution margins work in general trade”. A seller watching his category get busier asks “How does marketplace search ranking actually work for sellers”. Both questions have real answers. Both are currently answered by consultants, agency blogs and people selling a course. The brand and the platform that live inside those economics say nothing in public. So distribution keeps getting bought with schemes that stop working, and sellers keep taking advice from whoever answered first.
How we win this
The programme for channels
Publish the economics first
Every route here runs on a number somebody keeps quiet: margin per pack, commission by category, listing fee, credit days, cost per refill. The party that publishes its side of that number becomes the source an engine quotes, and the party that stays quiet gets described by a consultant who is guessing. Start there, because it is also the question asked most.
One product, four descriptions
The same SKU is described one way on your own site, another on each marketplace, a third on the chain's app, and not at all by the distributor. An engine reconciling those settles on whichever version is most machine-readable, which is rarely yours. Schema engineering on your own domain sets one authoritative record: pack, variant, price ladder, material or ingredient, identifier.
Your partner is a buyer
A seller choosing a platform and a distributor choosing a line are both making a considered commercial decision, with research, comparison and a spreadsheet open. They behave nothing like a shopper and everything like a B2B buyer, which means answer pages, worked numbers and video walkthroughs in the language they use. This is where the enquiries in this sub-category actually come from.
Rooms content cannot enter
A listing is negotiated between your key account manager and a category team, and a kirana stocks what the distributor drops off. No page changes either meeting. What content does there is narrower and still worth having: the shopper reaches the shelf already decided, the buyer finds a serious supplier when he checks, and the records agree. We will not sell it as more than that.
The mix that carries it
Content
Answer and comparison pages
Cost, process, eligibility and comparison pages built for direct extraction, not for a reader who scrolls.
Foundation
Entity and schema engineering
Structured data and entity definition so engines know exactly what you are, where you operate, and what you are credible in.
Authority
Reviews and testimonials
Structured, retrievable proof from customers, which is what engines lean on when a category has no objective data.
Content
GEO blogs and authority content
The definitive written answer to the questions your buyers put to an engine, structured so it can be lifted and attributed.
Authority
Digital public outreach
Earned mentions, trade coverage and third-party citations — the corroboration a model checks before it names you.
Measurement
AI Presence tracking
Standing measurement of inclusion, share of answer and competitor movement as models update.
The constraint we work inside
Two ceilings. Platform fees and ranking rules change without notice, so anything published about them carries a review date and gets revisited. And terms agreed with a chain or a distributor are confidential. We publish your side of the economics and the shopper-facing detail, never the counterparty's numbers.
Specialisations
4 total
The pitch is different for each one, because the buyer, the trigger and the rules on what may be published are different for each one. Open the one that is yours.
A shopper who has decided she is done buying this category through an app opens an engine instead, and it recommends the brands whose own sites explain themselves.
The question deciding this today
“How do D2C brands get discovered without marketplace dependence”
- Who they sell to
- Consumers buying direct from a brand's own site
- Who signs
- The consumer, and the brand's growth lead
- What starts it
- Product need, brand discovery, subscription decision, marketplace fatigue
- Cost of staying invisible
- Customers rented from a marketplace that owns the relationship
Your growth lead has typed “How do D2C brands get discovered without marketplace dependence” into the same engine your customers use. The answers name agencies, ad platforms and tactics. They do not name brands that solved it, because the brands that did solve it never wrote it down. Meanwhile the shopper asking which refill subscription is worth starting gets pointed at a review publisher's roundup and a competitor whose delivery, pricing and cancellation terms are legible to a machine. You are absent from both conversations.
What we would run
- 01Entity and schema engineering
Product, offer and subscription entities on every product page: variant, pack size, price, shipping window, return window and cancellation terms, marked up as structured fields rather than left in body copy.
The questions asked before a direct purchase are about terms, not features. Terms get quoted back only when they exist as fields a machine can lift.
- 02Technical fixes
A render and crawl audit of the storefront, covering client-side product data, review widgets injected by apps, and the bot rules at your CDN that block the crawlers feeding the engines.
A D2C storefront is assembled from apps: the review widget, the subscription selector, the bundle builder. Each injects its content after the page has loaded, and the bot rules bought to keep price scrapers off your pricing treat the engines the same way. Nobody chose that and nobody has checked it.
- 03Answer and comparison pages
Pages for what the basket cannot answer: refill against one-off cost over a year, what happens when a subscription is paused, how the variant is chosen, and what buying direct includes that an app order does not.
These are the questions of the hour before purchase. The engine answers them from whoever wrote a straight version, and today that is a review publisher.
- 04Reviews and testimonials
Your existing review corpus restructured for retrieval: purchase context, variant bought, use case and date exposed in the page itself instead of loading inside a third-party widget.
An engine weighing a direct-to-consumer brand looks for corroboration it can read. A star rating rendered by a script is not corroboration it can read.
- 05AI Presence tracking
Tracking which brands the engines name for your category's buying questions, split by variant and by intent, with a record of what moved when a competitor published something new.
Your growth lead can quote the marketplace share of every order to the decimal. He has no read at all on whether the engine that answered a refill question last night named you or the brand beside you, and that is the exact channel he is trying to build so the platform stops owning the customer.
What we would not recommend
- Instagram. It earns attention and it sells product. It is a poor source for engines, so we run presence work elsewhere and never count a feed as inclusion.
- Quora. Suitability and ingredient answers posted there carry claims we cannot evidence on your behalf. The same answer belongs on your own page, where it can be.
- X. The D2C timeline is founders talking to other founders and to investors. Your customer is not in that conversation, and nor is the engine when someone asks which subscription is worth starting.
What a lead looks like
A first-time customer writes in before ordering. Not to ask what the product is, but to check whether the ninety-day refill cycle suits a two-person household. She quotes your own cost-per-use page back at you and names the variant she wants. She has not opened a marketplace app once in that decision.
What we measure
- Inclusion in direct-purchase recommendations
- Product entities read without error
- Storefront fully rendered to AI crawlers
- Reviews retrievable outside the widget
- Share of answer against named competitors
What changes
A seller books a call with your seller growth team because your ranking explainer was the first straight answer he got, and he knows what suppression is before he asks. A shopper orders direct because your returns and subscription terms were legible before she reached the basket. In the two negotiated channels the arrival is quieter and we describe it as it is: the distributor your field team met last month rings back having already checked you out, and the buying assistant preparing a planogram review comes asking for your pack numbers instead of pulling them off a marketplace listing. Nobody in modern trade or general trade signs because of a page. They stop starting from zero, which is the part that usually takes three calls.
Start here
See who gets named in channels today
We put your buyers' real questions to the live models and come back with the businesses they name, the sources behind those answers, and the gap between that list and yours.