COSGEO.AI · CASE STUDYJOURNEY LOG · APPEND-ONLY · LIVE
THE LIVE CASE · APPEND-ONLY LOG

Case Study: Yanse

Yanse — The Oil & Acne Care Factory — has made oil blotting paper since 2006: an 8,000 m² plant in Fujian, 1,000,000 units/month, 600+ brands across 50+ countries, supplier audits passed for L'Oréal, Watsons, MINISO and Mentholatum, MOQ from 3,000 units. Until June 2026 it had no AI visibility strategy whatsoever. This log records every move we make to change that — entries are append-only and never edited after the fact.

PHASE 0 · BEFORE 2026-06-05 · FOUNDATIONS

A 42-page website and an inconvenient keyword truth

  • New official site yansecos.com launched: 42 pages, Product/FAQ/Organization/Breadcrumb schema throughout, robots.txt explicitly opens GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and OAI-SearchBot.
  • Keyword research delivered the uncomfortable finding: B2B OEM search terms ("oil blotting paper OEM") have ≈0 monthly Google volume. The buyer journey for this category doesn't live in classic search — it lives in AI answers and B2B marketplace internal search. That finding is why COSGEO exists.
PHASE 1 · 2026-06-09 · FIRST MEASUREMENT, MAJOR DISCOVERY

AI already recommended us — through a domain we'd left behind

  • First 4-platform probe: ChatGPT and Gemini were already naming Yanse #1 for blotting-paper OEM prompts — but every citation pointed to the legacy domain, zero to the new official site. Lesson: AI had an opinion about our brand before we had a strategy about AI.
  • Same-day fixes: Organization schema gained sameAs links binding old site, Alibaba store and Made-in-China store into one entity; sitemap (42 URLs) submitted; 10 priority pages requested for indexing.
  • Hours later, a re-probe showed Perplexity citing the new domain and recommending it #1 for two niche prompts. Indexing-to-citation latency: hours, not weeks.
  • Also caught and fixed a trademark-adjacent wording risk in product copy the same day — compliance is part of the method, not an afterthought.
PHASE 2 · 2026-06-11 · RIGOR ARRIVES

A consumer spot-check destroyed our single-run conclusions — good

  • A manual check on the consumer Perplexity app failed to reproduce our API result. Methodology upgraded on the spot: every claim now requires N=5 independent runs; we report visibility rate, not screenshots.
  • First honest baseline (Perplexity Sonar): oil-control film 5/5 (100%, rank #1–2, competing only with Taiki) · bamboo charcoal 3/5 (60%) · head term and one-stop/private-label/US prompts all 0/5 — those answers were owned by B2B directory sources we weren't listed in.
  • Counter-moves shipped same day: full-site 301 from the legacy domain (redirecting the brand equity ChatGPT/Gemini had stored), and an 8-listing marketplace package prepared to attack the directory-fed engines.
  • Industry recalibration logged: llms.txt demoted to maintenance (a 300k-domain study found zero correlation with citations); LinkedIn promoted to P0 (it ranks #2 among AI citation sources); "mentions over backlinks" adopted.
PHASE 3 · 2026-06-12 · THE INTELLIGENCE LAYER

Three-market research, and a vocabulary correction we'll never roll back

  • Completed a 260-claim deep research sweep across the China, Western and Russian-speaking GEO landscapes (the evidence base now cited throughout this site).
  • Permanent calibration: we claim visibility rate, never "rank #1" — because identical prompts return identical brand lists less than 1% of the time (SparkToro 2025). The honest metric became the brand.
PHASE 4 · 2026-06-13 · SCOREBOARD #1 — FULL MATRIX

100% on Gemini, a 48-hour collapse on Perplexity, and a hallucinated domain

  • First full matrix: 6 prompts × N=5 × 4 platforms = 120 runs, $8.76. Blended visibility 44.2% — already above the 40% "strong visibility" benchmark, but dangerously uneven.
  • Gemini: 30/30 with median rank #1–3 across all six prompts. ChatGPT 30% (still citing the legacy domain — 301 not yet propagated). Claude 27% (feeds almost entirely on B2B aggregators). Perplexity 20%.
  • The film query that measured 100% on June 11 returned 0/5 — Perplexity rotated its entire citation pool in 48 hours. Meanwhile bamboo charcoal rose to 80% and began citing the new domain. Volatility is the game, in both directions.
  • Discovery of the issue: Gemini invents our domain in 38% of its answers (yansecosmetics.com et al.). Registering the hallucinated domains, 301 → official site. Full data in Scoreboard #1 →
NEXT ENTRY

Phase 5: marketplace listings go live, LinkedIn page launches, hallucinated domains registered — then Scoreboard #2 (June 18–25) measures what actually moved. No edits, no deletions, whatever the numbers say.