How Reach made Carro the top 3 most cited brand by AI answers in the ecommerce inventory management category

The Results

The headline is a complete reversal of how Carro was perceived. A year ago, Carro was effectively invisible for the category it had moved into. Today it owns the #1 cited URL in the industry, ranks as the #3 most-cited domain overall, and shows up in nearly 1 in 8 AI answers across the prompts that drive its pipeline. Google followed the same curve.

Google Search Console - Google Performance - Jan 31 to May 10, YoY

• Impressions: 1.34M → 1.9M = 🟢 +41.8% (+560K impressions) - 79% of the top 10 impressions came from pages produced by Reach from scratch

• Average Position: 24.7 → 8 = 🟢 +67.6% improvement (moved up 16.7 positions)

• Clicks: 37% of all clicks across the top 10 came from Reach-produced pages that had zero presence a year ago

• Queries that didn't exist a year ago:

  Query	Monthly impressions
  dropshipping niches	7,769
  eBay alternative	5,434
  best dropshipping niches 2026	5,358
  how to start an online store without inventory	4,847
  dropshipping products with high profit margin	3,391
  ecommerce inventory management software	3,158

Google Search Console - Jan 31 to May 10, 2026

Google Search Console - Jan 31 to May 10, 2026

Google Search Console - Jan 31 to May 10, 2026

Google Analytics - LLM (AI Search) Sessions - Jan 1 to May 31, YoY

• Sessions from AI search engines: 🟢 +26.1%

• Users from AI search engines: 🟢 +27.0%

• Page views driven by AI search: 🟢 +42.7%

Reach AI - LLM (AI Search) Performance - Mar 1 to May 31, 2026

• #1 cited URL in the entire industry: getcarro.com/blog/best-ecommerce-inventory-management-software with 1,614 citations - ranking above Forbes, Shopify, TechRepublic, and every direct competitor

• #3 most cited domain overall: behind only Reddit and YouTube, and above brands like Shopify and Zoho

• #3 most mentioned dropship and marketplace platform by AI models - behind only Printful and Spocket, and ahead of every direct competitor like Mirakl and Rithum.

• Overall AI visibility: 0% → 12.70% - Carro went from being completely absent in AI-generated responses to appearing in nearly 1 in 8 answers across 76 high priority tracked prompts

• Total mentions: 0 → 2,676 out of 21,077 AI responses tracked

• Domain citations: 0 → 8,699 out of 21,077 responses - with 278,935 total citations accumulated

• Citation rate: 0% → 34.58% - Carro's pages are now cited in over a third of all tracked AI responses

• Sentiment: 77.75% positive across all AI-generated mentions.

• Competitor gap:

  Brand	Citation rate
  Carro	34.58%
  Zoho	7.75%
  Spocket	1.60%
  Mirakl	0.42%
  Rithum	0.38%

Reach - Mar 2 to May 31, 2026

Reach - Mar 2 to May 31, 2026

Reach - Mar 2 to May 31, 2026

Reach - Feb 16 to May 18, 2026

Customer Feedback

Customer Feedback - Nov 12, 2025

Customer Feedback - Nov 20, 2025

Visibility Screenshots

The Challenge

We started this engagement at a particularly complex moment for Carro. 

They had just gone through a rebranding that impacted not only their visual identity but also their entire value proposition, moving from a platform for identifying influencers and establishing partnerships with Shopify stores, to a powerful solution for retailers and marketplaces looking to sell products without holding inventory.

Their reviews across the web were focused on influencer marketing. Their top organic pages were blog posts like "Instagram Creator vs Business Account," "PR List and Influencer Marketing," and "What Does an Influencer Marketing Manager Do?". Nothing related to dropshipping, marketplaces, or inventory management. 

Even AI was associating Carro with an influencer marketing platform.

So the goal wasn't simply to increase visibility. It was to change how the brand was perceived - by Google, by AI search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, and by anyone searching for what Carro had actually become.

The Growth Roadmap

Clarify the New Positioning

This was probably one of the most important phases of this whole engagement.

We conducted in-depth interviews, reviewed sales call notes, and also requested some positioning briefs to better understand the principles of the new Carro.

When AI talks about Carro, what attributes do we want it to associate with the brand?

We did several sessions of brand discovery to completely nail our customer knowledge base (we call it internally “Company DNA”).

This serves as the source of truth for our AI agents and human experts, containing everything about USPs, ICPs, tone of voice, and other brand attributes.

Keyword Research & Prompt Mining

This is where the fun started.

Together with Carro's CEO, marketing, and sales team, we dissected the buyer journey and all the problems, needs, and challenges their different target audiences usually face.

Based on that, we came up with a large list of seed keywords - broad terms related to their industry - and ran them through several keyword research tools to generate related terms and start prioritizing which pain points people search for the most.

After this, we applied our own model to transform Google queries into conversational prompts. We call it the "Query-Fusion Model", a framework that allows us to predict how people would search on AI search engines for different use cases, conditions, and pain points.

Deleted Old Content

There is absolutely no value in attracting the wrong traffic.

We were confident enough to say goodbye to old content related to influencer marketing, knowing it would pay off in the long run.

Attracting this traffic was not only misaligned with the new target audiences but also confusing the algorithms about the topical authority of Carro.

And that’s why we agreed with Carro’s marketing team to remove every page related to influencer partnerships.

301 redirects were configured in order to keep the authority that those pages achieved over the last few years.

Content Plan

It was time to start preparing the roadmap of new pages to create.

Our strategy for content was to create enough pages around dropshipping and inventory management to gain topical authority in this new space.

To rank across multiple search engines, both traditional and generative, we followed a methodology we call Prompt Constellations: instead of trying to optimize a single page to rank everywhere, we create strategic groups of pages mapped to the same search intent, but each tailored to the specific way a given engine responds - Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini.

Money Pages

When extracting patterns from top-ranking pages for traditional search, especially in mid-funnel queries, we noticed that most of those pages were landing pages dedicated to the product's features and use cases.

Based on this, we prepared new landing page templates, not only optimized for rankings, but also for conversion.

And as we found that a lot of people searched online for solutions for specific platforms (like Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce), we prepared dedicated landing pages for each. By creating pages specifically tailored for each search intent, we greatly increased the chances of Carro being surfaced by search engines.

Alternative Pages

For AI search, we determined with Carro’s team that pages targeting prompts like “what’s the best Mirakl alternative” or “I’m looking for an alternative to Spocket, which ones do you recommend?” would be the perfect place in the journey to attract warm audiences looking to switch.

We learned with Carro's team what the biggest advantages of switching from competitor tools to Carro were. We also scraped review platforms and Reddit posts to identify the most common pain points with competitor tools.

And most of these queries had low competition, so it was the perfect place to start, in order to influence visibility in the short term.

TOFU Content to Boost Topical Authority

Part of our blog roadmap was to produce high-quality content to show to algorithms that Carro was the new expert on the dropshipping world.

Although these were blog articles, we designed them not just to be read, but to guide visitors further along the buyer journey. That’s why we invested a lot of effort in CTA optimization and contextual conversion banners across the content pieces.

We started this TOFU content on evergreen content pieces around topics like “Dropship on BigCommerce in 2026: The Step-by-Step Guide”, “Best Dropshipping Niches for High Profits” and “How to Increase Average Order Value on Shopify: 20 Strategies That Actually Work in 2026”.

In just a few weeks, some of these pieces reached the top positions among the pages with the highest impressions and clicks on Google.

And one of our biggest achievements was being able to have “collaborative commerce” (and Carro specifically) being recommended for TOFU queries like the ones below:

This was only possible due to a complete guide we produced on how to start an online store without holding inventory. In this article, we compared collaborative commerce (the positioning Carro wanted to own at the time) with other models like Print on Demand and Affiliate Marketing, framed to position collaborative commerce as the superior choice.

This article is the second most cited source in Carro’s domain at the moment, only behind the pillar listicle we produced (we’ll talk about that specifically in a minute).

We also produced content around hot industry topics, driven by market trends and the questions leads were asking most on sales calls.

In just a few days, we made Carro rank first on Google for multiple low-competition queries.

Most SEO agencies rely solely on traditional keyword research tools that pull data from the past 12 months and miss queries that are trending right now. 

At Reach, we went beyond those tools. By deeply understanding our client's industry, we were able to anticipate those queries and produce relevant content before anyone else did.

Listicles

Product roundups were one of the solutions to directly influence the narrative of what algorithms were saying about Carro.

We made sure to enrich these articles with a lot of information regarding features, pros, and who it is for, with AI-friendly modules (like TL;DR sections, tables, and lists), but also with a great subheading structure.

We produced dozens of these articles, targeting different audiences (e.g. retailers, clothing stores) and ecommerce infrastructures (e.g. Shopify, WooCommerce), all with unique content to avoid cannibalization between them.

The strategy behind it was to produce one pillar listicle, a comprehensive comparison piece covering Carro alongside other inventory management solutions. In addition, specific content pieces to rank for super long-tail prompts.

Looking at the data in our platform, we can confirm that listicles are the #1 content type in this industry in terms of citations, and all of Carro's articles picked up by algorithms were produced by Reach from scratch.

It was important not to spam the web with these types of listicles. That was never the goal.

We created these tool roundups, mixed with several other relevant content pieces, in order to avoid Google’s algorithm penalties.

Reddit

As you’ve been able to see so far, our strategy always relies on a solid data-driven approach. 

And on top of our owned content strategy, we identified which external sources were impacting the most, and how AI search engines were recommending brands across our target prompts.

So, with our own platform, we tracked multiple prompts for a minimum of 4 weeks, to get patterns around citations. The reason why we don’t do this in a single run is because these modules are probabilistic - the citations of today, during a minimum of 4 weeks, might not be representative of what usually gets cited during a whole month.

And in all of those runs, we noticed that Reddit was the #1 cited source in this industry.

In order to extract the most value from it, we followed a Reddit SEO approach based on two pillars:

• Reactive: engage in the threads of the most cited Reddit posts, in the most unbiased and authentic way possible. Our goal was never to write love letters to Carro but rather to mention them naturally.

  

• Proactive: this is more a long-term approach. We created our own dropshipping communities and started to create brand new posts on them. This way, we were able to control the whole narrative without community restrictions or moderation by human mods (something that usually happens in existing subreddits).

  

Mitigate the Impact of Website Migration

The rebranding made Carro's marketing team also want to migrate to a new website theme. We supported their team with some technical optimizations along the way, including:

1. Setting a default domain on Webflow

After the migration, both getcarro.com and www.getcarro.com were simultaneously live, meaning every page existed twice in Google's eyes. 

We identified over 40 affected URLs and configured a site-wide 301 redirect by setting getcarro.com as the primary domain in Webflow, enforcing a single authoritative version, avoiding duplicated content and eliminating wasted crawl budget.

2. Fixing canonical tags pointing to the wrong domain

Even after the default domain was set, the canonical tags across the site were still pointing to the non-www version, contradicting the redirect and sending mixed signals to Google. 

We updated all canonicals to consistently point to www.getcarro.com, ensuring ranking signals were fully consolidated on the correct domain.

3. Redirecting broken pages returning 404 errors

Several pages from the previous site structure were removed during the redesign without redirects in place. This meant lost SEO authority, broken internal links, and organic traffic landing on dead pages. 

We worked with Carro's team to map and implement 301 redirects across all affected URLs, preserving the link equity those pages had accumulated over time.

None of this would have moved as fast as it did without Carro's team being an exceptional partner throughout. They gave us full access, trusted our recommendations, and treated this as a shared mission from day one. 

Honestly, that kind of collaboration is what makes the difference. When both teams operate as one, what could take months gets done in weeks.