About GNC
For over 90 years, GNC has been a trusted partner in the health and wellness journeys of millions, from its flagship retail locations to the digital channels where today's consumers discover and buy. As one of the supplement category's most recognized retailers, GNC operates at significant scale: more than 2,000 stores, a 3,000+ SKU catalog, and one of the largest paid search programs in its category. In the digital age, GNC is doubling down on that scale by leading the charge in AI-native commerce.
The Challenge: Winning the Next Generation of Product Discovery
As a long-standing leader in the wellness industry, GNC has always been at the forefront of customer-centric innovation. The digital challenge wasn't just replicating the personalized, high-touch guidance of an in-store experience, it was doing so across the catalog, at every touchpoint, and in an entirely new set of discovery surfaces.
GNC approached FERMÀT with three core problems.
Converting paid traffic. GNC drives substantial paid traffic to product pages each month. The team needed those clicks to convert and a way to test and optimize the post-click experience without pulling in engineering every time.
Personalization at catalog scale. Generic, one-size-fits-all product pages couldn't differentiate by traffic source, intent, or audience segment. Running meaningful experiments across hundreds of thousands of SKUs required infrastructure that didn't yet exist.
Visibility in AI-powered search. GNC had no way of knowing whether its products appeared when consumers asked AI tools for supplement recommendations. With AI-powered discovery reshaping how people shop, that blind spot was a strategic risk the team couldn't afford to ignore.
The Solution: A Partnership Built for Compounding Growth
GNC chose FERMÀT to address all three challenges — not as a point solution, but as a unified platform where marketing could build, test, and scale across paid media and AI search without engineering overhead. Built on Anthropic's Claude AI models, FERMÀT powers the personalization and experimentation behind these results across every touchpoint.
From the start, FERMÀT gave GNC's marketing and merchandising teams direct control over the post-click experience: the ability to launch tailored, product-specific experiences tied to paid campaigns across five categories, Protein, Performance, Food & Drink, Vitamins, and Weight Management, without any engineering overhead. For the first time, the team could run multiple experiments in parallel, testing what resonated with each audience and scaling what worked, in days rather than weeks or months.
Central to this was FERMÀT's adaptive product experiences that replace static PDPs with pages tailored by category, intent, and traffic source. Different product categories attract shoppers with fundamentally different intent and browsing behavior. For example, a Protein shopper typically arrives knowing what they want and responds to a benefit-focused experience that reinforces why this is the right product for them, while a Vitamins or Supplements shopper often needs education and discovery to feel confident. FERMÀT builds category-specific templates that match the page experience to how that shopper is actually thinking. Each variation was built automatically from GNC's catalog data, launched without engineering effort, and tested against the existing site in real time.
Alongside conversion optimization, FERMÀT tackled GNC's AI discoverability problem head-on. GNC's catalog was rich with expertise, but none of it was structured in a way that AI models could find, understand, and cite. FERMÀT built the infrastructure to change that: generating and publishing content specifically designed to surface in AI-generated recommendations, from ChatGPT to Google AI Overviews, and establishing GNC as a credible voice wherever shoppers turn for guidance.
By rolling capabilities out in deliberate phases, the team could move fast: testing, learning, and scaling in real time. By organizing and activating a massive product catalog across layered marketing efforts, the team turned a complex catalog into a competitive edge.
From Invisible to Cited: GNC in the Age of AI Search
When someone asks ChatGPT: “what’s the best protein powder for a 28-year-old trying to bulk?” or “what creatine supplement do you recommend for 40-year-old women?”, does GNC show up? That question, once unanswerable, is now central to GNC's digital growth strategy.
The results arrived within the first week of reaching full content coverage and have compounded every week since.
"With FERMÀT, once we reached full crawl coverage, we began seeing our AI-optimized content cited across AI models, like ChatGPT, within the first week. Over the following weeks, those citations continued to increase as we iterated together. The FERMÀT team has been a highly collaborative partner, moving quickly and helping us navigate a fast-changing strategy in this emerging channel."
— Amanda Carvell, Sr. Director of Ecommerce, GNC
To date, the results have compounded across every metric that matters:
As measured by FERMÀT's AI citation tracking across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and other models.
FERMÀT's reporting gave GNC's team the first quantitative view of their AI presence: which queries were driving citations, where competitive gaps existed, and what to prioritize next. For the first time, GNC could see, and act on, their AI presence.
Paid Media: Every SKU, A Personalized Experience
When a shopper clicks a Google Shopping ad for a protein powder, they don't want a generic product page, they want to feel like the brand anticipated exactly what they're looking for.
Rather than static bestseller grids, FERMÀT’s merchandising algorithms are trained on real behavioral signals, what shoppers actually browse, add to cart, and purchase in relation to that specific product. Recommendations reflect genuine purchase intent, not just catalog similarity. The result is a cross-sell and discovery layer that adapts to each category's unique shopper patterns. With higher traffic arriving from mobile, every experience was purpose-built for how GNC's shoppers actually browse: thumb-first, on the go, and looking for the fastest path from curiosity to cart.
The results held: consistent lift in add-to-cart rate versus GNC's standard pages across all five category experiments, with checkout initiation rates following the same upward trend. Each experiment informed the next, each category surfaced new insights, and each week GNC's team moved faster than the last.
What's Next: Search to Conversation
The partnership between GNC and FERMÀT is accelerating. GNC's AI citations are compounding, reinforcing their authority week over week — and making displacement harder as AI-generated answers become the default discovery channel for the next generation of shoppers. As FERMÀT’s coverage expands across the full catalog, the system creates a closed loop: AI search drives qualified visitors, dynamic pages convert them, and the data feeds back into smarter content and more targeted experiments.
The work GNC has done with FERMÀT isn't just about this season's results, it's about building the infrastructure to win in every new search surface, for every generation of shoppers.
