Reshaping organic search visibility for an iconic probiotics brand.

The challenge

Culturelle is one of the most recognized probiotic brands in the United States, a category leader with deep retail distribution, decades of brand equity, and the kind of household-name recognition that most consumer health brands spend years trying to build.

But strong brand recognition only goes so far in organic search. When prospective customers search for terms like probiotics for women or probiotic gummies or infant probiotics (the high-intent, non-branded queries that drive new customer discovery), brand recognition doesn’t automatically earn page-1 visibility. That requires the SEO work itself.

Across a two-year SEO consulting engagement, the goal was to translate Culturelle’s category authority into real search visibility: rankings, AI search citations, and discovery by prospective customers who didn’t already know the brand.

The approach

Reshaping the rankings landscape

The first stretch of the engagement was about getting the existing commercial pages (homepage, main collections, and high-opportunity product pages) properly mapped to the keywords they should be competing for. That meant comprehensive keyword research focused on non-branded probiotic searches (the terms that bring new customers, not just people already searching for Culturelle), followed by page-by-page on-page optimization: title tags, meta descriptions, H1s, image alt text, and on-page content edits aligned to the keyword strategy.

Underneath the on-page work, a technical audit covered the structural and organizational elements that affect how search engines crawl and understand the site. Standard work, executed thoroughly enough that the ranking gains compounded across the engagement rather than getting bottlenecked behind technical debt.

Building beyond what existed

The existing site, deep as it was, didn’t have pages for several non-branded search categories with real volume: vegan probiotics, dairy-free probiotics, probiotics for women over 50, and others. Standard-playbook answer: write a long-form piece of content for each. But Culturelle’s team was stretched thin, full content production wasn’t feasible, and the engagement didn’t have a development budget either.

So we built simple landing pages instead, collection-style pages the marketing team could spin up directly without engineering involvement, each one cleanly targeted to a specific non-branded search category Culturelle wasn’t ranking for. Six of them, focused on real demand the existing site couldn’t capture.

Nearly every one of those pages ended the engagement at #1 in Google for the term it was built around. A few held that #1 ranking with AI Overview citations on top.

Earning AI search visibility

From the start, the content and on-page work were built with AI search in mind alongside traditional Google rankings. That meant writing for the kinds of questions prospective customers ask AI tools, structuring pages so AI tools could cleanly extract and cite them, and building the small handful of SEO-driven blog posts the engagement could support around question-style queries that AI Overviews surface.

By the engagement’s end, Culturelle pages were appearing as AI Overview citations across dozens of their primary keywords — not just ranking #1 in the traditional results, but being cited directly inside Google’s AI-generated answers and surfacing as references in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and similar tools.

Discovery beyond the brand

A specific goal across the engagement was driving traffic from non-branded search: the prospective customers searching for probiotic solutions but who didn’t already know to type “Culturelle.” Branded searches are valuable but bounded by existing brand awareness. Non-branded searches are how the customer base actually grows.

Across the engagement, non-branded organic traffic grew significantly faster than branded. Translation: the rankings work was earning Culturelle visibility with people who hadn’t heard of them yet, at a rate the brand’s existing search footprint couldn’t have reached on its own.

The results

Across a two-year engagement, the rankings transformation was the headline. Culturelle moved from largely absent or mid-page rankings on most non-branded probiotic terms to #1 positions across dozens of high-value commercial keywords, including some of the highest-volume terms in the category. A few representative trajectories:

• A probiotic-gummies term (4,400 monthly searches): #19 → #1
• An infant-probiotics term (5,400 monthly searches): #49 → #1
• An antibiotic-recovery term: #19 → #1
• …with AI Overview citations on a large share of the same SERPs, and breadth of #1 wins across every major category that matters to the business: women’s probiotics, men’s probiotics, kids and baby probiotics, condition-specific probiotics, and the high-volume non-branded category terms

The traffic story is more nuanced, and worth telling honestly. Across a category where most consumer-health publishers lost 30-50% of organic traffic to AI Overviews and SERP features, Culturelle held its ground. Organic sessions in the final month of the engagement were modestly above where they’d been at the start. In a category-wide decline, holding ground was its own win.

In a category-wide decline, holding ground was its own win.

And a new channel emerged on top. AI Tools traffic (visits from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and similar platforms) grew from a handful of monthly sessions early in the engagement to a meaningful traffic channel by the end. None of that channel existed at the start, and the same content and on-page work that drove the ranking improvements was largely responsible for the AI traffic that followed.

Strong rankings, AI search visibility, and a new traffic channel earned in real time as the search landscape shifted. That’s what modern SEO success actually looks like.