# Announcing Athena's State of AI Search 2026 Report!

## How Grüns achieved

# 6x Share of Voice Lift in 60 Days

## Customer Story

**Connor Dault,** CMO  
[Grüns](https://gruns.co/) partnered with Athena and [Boring Ecom](https://www.boringecom.com/) to transform their AI Search presence with a data-driven content strategy. Over Q3 2025, Grüns executed a prompt-led pillar-and-cluster plan that rapidly improved citations, brand mentions, and Share of Voice across tracked prompts.

## Executive Summary

| Metric             | Before | After | Change |
|--------------------|--------|-------|--------|
| Share of Voice     | 2.0%   | 12.6% | ~6x    |
| Brand Mention Rate  | 4.0%   | 25.0% | +19%   |
| Citation Rate      | 0.3%   | 7.0%  | ~23x   |
| LLM Impressions    | —      | 10,500+ est. | — |
| Content Output     | —      | 15 posts | ~70% citations from Athena content |

## The Sequence We Ran

1. **Identified high monthly search prompts** using AthenaHQ’s Prompt Planner across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews.
2. **Created a pillar page** as the authoritative AI-readable hub.
3. **Published target articles** interlinked to the pillar and optimized for entity clarity and AI extraction.
4. **Citations increased** as structure and entity completeness improved.
5. **Brand mentions increased** as citation velocity compounded authority signals.
6. **Share of Voice increased 6x** (2.0% → 12.6%).

## Timeline

**Month 1**: Shipped a single high-leverage blog and saw immediate movement—early lifts in citations and brand mentions validated topic–entity fit.

**Month 2**: Programmatically shipped targeted content using **[AthenaHQ Content](/content/content-agents/index.html)** and Shopify Integration with human-in-the-loop proofreading along with continuous prompt refinement. **Result: 6x SoV, 23x citation rate, +19% brand mentions.**

## Citation Rate Performance

From Jul 17 → Sep 20, citation rate rose from 0.3% to 7.0% (~23x), with 10,500+ estimated impressions generated from LLM responses. ~70% of citations were attributed to Athena-created content.

## Brand Mention Rate Growth

Overall brand mention rate increased from 4.0% to 25.0% (+19%), with strongest gains in Alternatives, Super Greens, and Gummy vs Powder prompt clusters.

## Why It Worked

Prompt-led planning, pillar-and-cluster architecture, and entity-first writing, aligned with AI extraction, makes Grüns easy to parse, cite, and recommend for AI Search.

## Testimonial

“Athena is our OS for AI Search. Their prompt intelligence and editorial pipeline turn answers into a reliable channel. Month after month, they surface the next best moves and ship content the market and the models trust. It’s why we consider Athena a long-term partner. Growing GEO is a huge focus of ours and the full org is energized by the success we’re seeing in the space with Athena” — Connor Dault, CMO

## Quick Grüns Shoutout

_Grüns reimagines daily greens as convenient, great-tasting snack packs — and the market noticed._ They reached a **$500M valuation** about two years after launch with **ARR > $100M**, sell direct-to-consumer and through Sprouts, Target, and Walmart, and ship roughly **4M gummies per day**. Each gummy includes **60 whole-food–derived ingredients** — essential vitamins, minerals, adaptogens, and prebiotics — and is **sugar-free** while retaining great taste. Grüns holds an average **4.6/5** from 1,000+ Trustpilot reviews.