How Faire Became the Leading Wholesale Marketplace in AI Answer Engines

The Challenge

In 2025, Faire saw a large portion of their wholesale purchasers turning to LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity for answers. This posed a great risk to their traditional SEO efforts, but it was also an opportunity to snag a leading position in LLMs for years to come. 

Since Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) was essentially in its infancy, there were no proven AEO methodologies or playbooks Faire could leverage to ensure their continued dominance in all related search results. 

Despite all of the unknowns, Faire knew they needed to act in order to stay on top. Faire had internal buy-in to prioritize this effort, but they did not have the staffing resources, time, or budget to run tests on new tools, determine which metrics were critical, or consistently recruit the right publishers to participate. 

Measurement was the hardest strain for Faire. AEO did not offer any clean attribution, and a single tool couldn't isolate the lift from an individual placement. The team needed a way to prove page-level impact. Most critically, Faire needed a way to test if a long-tail outreach approach to partners could drive results on the page level that would become an observable citation across the ecosystem. 

Faire brought the project to Hamster Garage in December 2025. They knew from years of working together on their traditional affiliate channel that HG had the publisher relationships and outreach process to get real content placements live, and then turn each one into a learning that would be invaluable to sustainable, long-term growth.

The Strategy

Faire and HG knew that earning citations in AI answers would fundamentally be an earned-media problem. HG already had the publisher relationships, the outreach engine, and the affiliate expertise to get real content live and learn from it fast. Rather than run a one-off campaign, HG set out to build a repeatable system Faire could scale. The work broke into four components:

1. A repeatable placement procurement engine. HG standardized every deal into the same five steps: prospect, qualify, pitch, incentivize, and execute. Because AEO had no established playbook, a documented process would compound learnings and scale far better than scattered wins. In practice, HG sourced high-visibility pages and domains in Profound and Scrunch, qualified each for topical fit and citation influence, pitched a tailored partnership, and ran the deal through briefing, publishing, and payment.

• Positioned the outreach as distinct from a traditional affiliate deal, which lifted response rates with publishers new to AEO
• Tightened targeting by job title in Apollo to reach the right decision-makers
• Kept a single upfront incentive and a lightweight flow (incentive, draft, revisions, publish, pay) to cut publisher friction

2. Cohort-based targeting that sharpened over time. HG ran outreach in four sequential cohorts so the strategy could start with the fastest wins and narrow as evidence accrued. The four cohorts were split up as follows:

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3. Dual-tool measurement to prove lift placement by placement. Attribution was the hardest part of AEO, so HG refused to rely on one source. They worked with Profound and Scrunch to solve this problem. Profound was the source of truth for page-level lift, tracking each procured URL day over day. Scrunch gave faster reads between Profound's roughly two-and-a-half-week refresh. Comparing the two separated real movement from platform noise. 

HG built automated Profound workflows to watch every procured page. They then ran a controlled before/after test with matched time windows to isolate placement-driven lift. Finally, HG used the methodological difference between the tools to interpret discrepancies rather than be misled by them.

4. An affiliate-led approach to emerging channels. This is where the program really took off. Rather than assume more blogs were the answer, HG analyzed where AI actually pulled citations across YouTube, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

YouTube stood out, driving citation volume equal to roughly 32% of what Faire.com generates, but those citations were fragmented across a long tail of small creators rather than concentrated in a few. That reframed the opportunity: the way to win a fragmented channel was to recruit many creators at once, which was exactly the function of an affiliate influencer program, and it was also one of HG’s strength areas.

HG was able to turn the channel analysis into the blueprint for affiliate-led influencer recruitment. They planned to leverage existing influencer partnerships and the Faire affiliate program to scale content rather than negotiate one placement at a time.

The Results

Over the program's first months, from December 2025 to April 2026, Faire's AEO performance strengthened at every level, from individual placements to its standing across the entire category.

Placement level. Hamster Garage's long-tail placements started earning citations the pages weren't getting before. The pattern repeated across the pages HG procured, though not uniformly:

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