About.
For over 90 years, GNC has been a trusted partner in the health and wellness journeys of millions, from flagship retail 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.
Challenge: scaling personalization and AI search visibility.
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 across an entirely new set of discovery surfaces.
The marketing team needed three things that no point tool could deliver together:
- 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 the 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.
- Citations in AI-powered search. GNC had no way of knowing whether its products appeared when consumers asked AI tools for supplement recommendations. AI-powered discovery is reshaping how people shop. That blind spot was a strategic risk the team couldn't afford to ignore.
How FERMÀT worked alongside the team.
GNC chose FERMÀT to drive AI native transformation across digital product teams. A connected system of AI agents embedded with the team from day one, building, testing, and scaling across paid media and AI search without engineering overhead.
The agents gave marketing and digital teams direct control over the experience. The team could launch tailored, product-specific experiences tied to paid campaigns across five categories: Protein, Performance, Food & Drink, Vitamins, and Weight Management. 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.
Central to this was FERMÀT's adaptive product experiences, which replaced static PDPs with pages tailored by category, intent, and traffic source. Different product categories attract shoppers with fundamentally different intent. A Protein shopper typically arrives knowing what they want and responds to a benefit-focused experience that reinforces why this is the right product. A Vitamins or Supplements shopper often needs education and discovery to feel confident. FERMÀT built category-specific templates that matched the page to how each shopper was actually thinking. Each variation was generated automatically from GNC's catalog, launched without engineering effort, and tested against the existing site in real time.
A similar approach solved GNC's AI discoverability concerns. 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's agents generated and published content designed to surface in AI-generated recommendations, from ChatGPT to Google AI Overviews. The work established GNC as a credible voice wherever shoppers turn for guidance.
Two distinct sets of agents ran in parallel. Merchandising agents personalized PDPs for paid traffic, learning from real shopper behavior on every click. AI search agents generated and published structured content tuned for LLM discovery. Marketing and merchandising chose where to push next. Signal flowed between both surfaces, so what worked in paid informed what shipped to AI search.
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:
- 400+ citations across AI models
- 200+ AI-optimized articles published
- 17,000+ AI agent visits
- ~10% week-over-week citation growth
As measured by FERMÀT's AI citation tracking across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and other models.
For the first time, GNC's team had a quantitative view of their AI presence: which queries drove citations, where competitive gaps existed, and what to prioritize next.
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.
FERMÀT's merchandising agents 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, looking for the fastest path from curiosity to cart.
The results held: consistent lift in add-to-cart rate across all five category experiments, with checkout initiation rates following the same upward trend.
Results.
400+ citations across AI models. 200+ AI-optimized articles published. 17,000+ AI agent visits. ~10% week-over-week citation growth. Consistent add-to-cart lift across all five category experiments.
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. Displacement gets 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. The data feeds back into smarter content and more targeted experiments.
