How Awesomic became the #1 design subscription brand in AI search – in 3 months

The category where buyers ask AI first

Awesomic sells design as a subscription – unlimited design work for a fixed monthly fee. It's a competitive market. Superside, Kimp, and a dozen other well-funded brands had been building their online presence for years. Awesomic had real customers, a strong product, and solid brand recognition.

The challenge was a channel shift that none of their competitors had fully responded to yet.

Buyers searching for a design subscription increasingly start with a question, not a Google search. They ask Claude, ChatGPT, or Perplexity what the best design subscription companies are, which agencies offer unlimited graphic design, or how Superside compares to Awesomic. The model reads the answer, picks a brand, and starts a trial. If Awesomic isn't in those answers, it's invisible before the buyer even opens a browser tab.

When I started working with Awesomic, their LLM visibility was inconsistent. The brand appeared in some AI-generated responses – but not reliably, and not as prominently as its position deserved. Traditional SEO was holding steady without meaningful growth. And Reddit – where design buyers research and compare services, and where LLMs draw heavily from – had almost no Awesomic presence at all.

The goal wasn't more traffic. It was to become the brand AI recommends when someone asks which design subscription to use.

That's a different problem from traditional SEO. The signals that shape LLM outputs overlap significantly with what good SEO already requires – traditional ranking factors, repeated mentions across trusted sources, community presence, citation patterns across the web – but the goal shifts. You're not trying to rank first. You're trying to become part of the answer.

In three months, Awesomic went from inconsistent AI mentions to owning the category.

What we built

The engagement ran across six workstreams. Each one was designed to increase the signals that shape how LLMs answer category-level questions – while also reinforcing the traditional SEO foundation those models draw from.

Technical foundation

Before any content or distribution work, I ran a full technical SEO audit. Technical health matters for LLM visibility more than most people realise. Models are trained on crawled web data. Pages that search engines can't crawl don't get referenced – by Google or by anyone else.

The audit cleared accumulated technical debt: broken internal links, missing meta information, and crawl gaps. Clean foundation first. Everything built on top of it compounds correctly.

50+ listicles targeting category-level queries

LLMs learn which brands belong in a category by reading content that categorises them. The strongest signal is appearing repeatedly in "best of" roundups and comparison pieces – the same content that ranks in Google for category searches.

I produced over 50 listicles targeting queries like "best product design subscription companies," "best agencies for unlimited web development," and "best monthly graphic design services." These weren't generic lists padded to hit a word count. Each was properly researched, positioned Awesomic against real alternatives, and built to rank for its specific query.

The overlap between SEO and AEO is intentional. Content that ranks in Google gets crawled, indexed, and referenced by LLMs. A listicle on page one of Google for a category query influences model outputs for the same query. Both channels reinforce each other when the content is built for both.

100+ pSEO pages around "hire {usecase} designer"

I built over 100 pages targeting the "hire [usecase] designer" query cluster – hire a UI designer, hire a brand designer, hire a product designer, hire a motion designer – each tailored to a specific design discipline with service descriptions, trust signals, and CTAs matched to that buyer's intent level.

The programmatic layer served two goals at once. For traditional search, it captured long-tail queries that Awesomic's main pages weren't reaching. For LLM visibility, it multiplied the contexts where Awesomic appeared alongside specific design use cases – teaching models to associate the brand with a wide range of tasks, not just the category head terms.

A model that has seen Awesomic mentioned in the context of hiring a UI designer, a brand designer, and a motion designer is more likely to recommend Awesomic when someone asks "which company should I use for ongoing design work."

Internal linking

With 150+ new pages across the two content programmes, internal linking became a real decision. I mapped the link structure so that listicles, pSEO pages, and main product pages all reinforced each other. Pages that ranked well linked to pages that needed support. Designer hire pages linked to relevant service pages. Every new page built topical authority instead of sitting as an isolated URL.

Topical authority is one of the signals models use to decide which brands are credible enough to recommend. A site with 150 tightly interlinked pages on design subscription topics sends a stronger signal than a site with 10 loosely connected ones.

Reddit presence and community engagement

Reddit sits above Awesomic in citation rankings for the design subscription category. That's expected – Reddit threads appear prominently in Google results, and LLMs are trained heavily on Reddit data. The conversations happening in design and marketing subreddits directly shape the answers models give when someone asks for a design agency recommendation.

I built an active Reddit presence across the communities where Awesomic's buyers research and compare services, contributing 50+ comments and posts across relevant subreddits. The goal wasn't to promote. It was to be part of the conversations LLMs learn from – and to be the brand mentioned when community members ask each other for design subscription recommendations.

The reddit-post-automation (linked in the sidebar) drives the consistent cadence that makes this sustainable. Community presence built in a single burst decays. Presence built through ongoing participation compounds.

Link acquisition

I built a structured outreach process generating 20+ backlinks a month from real sites with genuine traffic and editorial standards. Quality links in the design and SaaS space build both traditional domain authority and the citation patterns LLMs weigh when deciding which brands to surface.

Same approach as every other engagement: relationships with real publishers, not payments to directories.

LLM visibility tracking

To measure progress – and know what to improve – I built a custom LLM visibility tool that queries multiple models across 107 brand-relevant prompts. The tool tracks which prompts mention Awesomic, how prominently, and how that compares to named competitors week over week.

Standard SEO tools don't capture this. Keyword rankings tell you where you appear in Google. They tell you nothing about whether Claude recommends Awesomic when a buyer asks for a design subscription. The visibility tool turns AEO from a theory into something with a scoreboard.

What I delivered

• The 107-prompt LLM visibility tracker, queryable across multiple AI models with competitor comparison built in
• 50+ listicles targeting category-level design subscription queries, each researched and positioned for its specific keyword
• 100+ pSEO pages across the "hire [usecase] designer" cluster, with intent-matched service descriptions and CTAs
• A full internal link map connecting listicles, pSEO pages, and main product pages into a coherent topical structure
• 20+ backlinks per month from real editorial sites in the design and SaaS space, ongoing
• Active Reddit presence across relevant subreddits – 50+ posts and comments building community citations at scale
• The reddit-post-automation for sustaining community participation without manual effort

The numbers

• 30% share of voice across 107 monitored prompts for category-level queries
• #1 most-mentioned design subscription brand of 12 tracked, ahead of Superside and Kimp
• 4th most-cited website in the category – behind only Google, YouTube, and Reddit
• 200-300 weekly sessions from AI search referrers, still climbing

What changed in 3 months

Awesomic is now the brand AI names first when someone asks which design subscription to use – ahead of every tracked competitor, in a category it was only inconsistently mentioned in three months ago. The specific prompts tell the real story:

These are the exact questions buyers ask when they're starting to evaluate vendors. Awesomic is now consistently in those answers.

The citation result surprised even me. Among all websites referenced in design subscription queries, Awesomic ranks 4th – behind only Google, YouTube, and Reddit. Three of the four most-cited sources are platforms with hundreds of millions of pages. Awesomic is the only brand in that tier. In three months.

Traffic from AI search is real and measurable. The engagement generates 200 to 300 sessions per week from LLM referrers – people who clicked through from an AI-generated answer where Awesomic was named. That number is still climbing as content gets ingested and community presence compounds.

Traditional SEO held throughout. Organic traffic didn't drop while the AEO build was running. The technical improvements and new content supported existing rankings instead of competing with them.

Honest caveats

• There's a lag between publishing and LLM ingestion that no amount of optimisation fully eliminates. Models update their training data on their own schedule. Some content published in month one was still working into model outputs at month three. The visibility numbers will keep growing as that ingestion catches up – without any additional investment. That's either reassuring or frustrating, depending on how patient you are.
• The strategy works best in categories where buyers are already asking AI for recommendations. Design subscriptions fit that pattern cleanly. If your category is earlier in the AI-search adoption curve, visibility gains may be slower to appear in traffic data even when LLM mention share is climbing.
• The position is easier to defend than it was to build – but only as long as you maintain the content and community programmes that built it. Awesomic's competitors aren't measuring their LLM visibility yet. When they start, the advantage narrows.

Want to own your category in AI search?

Book a 30-min call. Bring the queries where your buyers currently find your competitors. We'll pull the LLM visibility data live on the call and show you exactly where you stand – before you commit to anything.