Published by Sue Johns-Chapman
Published Date 19.03.2026 
There is a version of this story where Brainz waited. Waited for the industry to agree on how to measure LLM traffic. Waited for platforms to build the tracking tools. Waited for someone else to figure out what AI-first search actually looks like in practice. That version does not exist, because Brainz built the tools instead, and the results achieved for rolling tote brand Hulken are the reason this campaign has been nominated for the UK Digital Excellence award.
About Brainz
Brainz is a digital marketing agency, specialising in AI-First SEO and GEO. We are a team working fully remote across the UK and Europe. We have 12 team members, and are expanding fast. The agency combines technical SEO, content strategy, UX design, and proprietary AI technology to help SaaS, B2B and eCommerce brands grow across the full search ecosystem, which now includes traditional Google SERPs, AI Overviews, and large language models such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.
What separates Brainz from most agencies is not the services it offers but the infrastructure behind them. Rather than relying on third-party platforms to do what they cannot yet do, Brainz has invested in building its own tools, including an AI auditing and tracking platform, an AIO Re Ranker Tool, and an internal content machine powered by custom GPTs, all of which were central to the Hulken campaign.
The Client and the Challenge
Hulken is the number one eCommerce brand for rolling tote bags, known colloquially as schlepping bags, and it has built a loyal following among city dwellers and frequent travellers who want a bag that is both functional and stylish. The product itself is distinctive enough that the brand had achieved strong recognition, but that recognition had become something of a ceiling. When Hulken partnered with Brainz, the vast majority of its organic search traffic was coming from people who were already looking for Hulken by name. Non-branded visibility, the kind that attracts customers who are searching for a rolling tote without yet knowing the brand exists, was almost entirely absent. At the outset, 92% of search visibility was branded, the site had 78 keywords in the top 10, 32,200 impressions in Google Search, and just 25 sessions per month arriving from LLM platforms. Hulken set ambitious targets: 400 keywords in the top 10 and 200,000 impressions. What followed went significantly further than that.
The Strategy That Made It Possible
Brainz structured the campaign around four interconnected pillars, each of which was designed to compound on the others rather than operate independently.
- AI-Driven Foundation. The Brainz AI tool was used to audit Hulken’s website for LLM compatibility, track brand mentions across AI platforms, and map content clusters based on the actual prompts users were running in ChatGPT and Gemini. This gave the team a starting point grounded in real search behaviour rather than assumptions.
- Content for the Right Audience. Using the internal content machine alongside a three-step custom GPT workflow, the team produced top-of-funnel content designed to work for both human readers and AI retrieval systems. The content covered use cases, product features, and launch support, all built around high-value search intent rather than high search volume alone.
- Trust-Building Elements. Credibility signals were woven into the site at a structural level. The About Us page was redesigned to tell the brand story more completely, customer reviews were added across key pages, and sentiment tracking through the Brainz AI tool ensured that Hulken’s presence in LLM-generated answers was consistently positive.
- Website Redesign. Traditional SEO foundations, including meta tags, structured data, and topical internal linking, were implemented alongside a broader UX redesign. The old site had been generating traffic that was not converting at the rate it should, so the redesign addressed both discoverability and the user journey that followed from it.
The Results
By December 2025, the campaign had produced results that exceeded every target Hulken had set, and in several areas, it was not particularly close. The numbers tell a story of compounding momentum across both traditional and AI-driven search:
- 880% increase in top-10 keywords, growing from 78 to 765
- 2,950% increase in Google Search impressions, from 32,200 to 985,000
- Non-branded keyword share improved from 8% to 31%, nearly four times better than the starting point
- 923% improvement in LLM revenue, from $213 to $2,179 attributed to ChatGPT and other LLMs
- 860% growth in LLM sessions, from 25 to 240 per month
- 26% increase in sitewide organic traffic, from 136,000 to 172,000 users year on year
- 88% more keywords ranking in positions 1 to 3
- 15% month-on-month revenue increase from organic Google traffic in December, following the brand’s best-ever Black Friday in November
- Blog-attributed revenue growing from $1.5M to over $2M month-on-month, a rise of more than 30%
The blog revenue figure is particularly telling. It points to something the team had been working to prove: that LLMs are actively pulling from well-structured content and routing users toward product pages. The top-of-funnel content was not just attracting traffic; it was feeding a funnel that converted.
What This Nomination Means to Us
Being considered for this award is something the entire Brainz team feels genuinely honoured by. SEO in 2026 looks nothing like it did two years ago, and navigating that shift has taken years of committed work, building tools that did not yet exist and making early bets on an AI-first future before the industry had found its footing. To have that work, and the partnership with Hulken that brought it to life, recognised in this way means more than any metric could capture. The Brainz team has always believed that the future of search would reward those who built rather than waited, so to be nominated is a reminder that the effort was not only worthwhile, but seen, and that is what makes this recognition so meaningful.
