From Invisible to a Top Flavored Floss Pick on ChatGPT in 1 Month

About Pearlyfloss

Pearlyfloss is a flavored dental floss brand built on a simple point of difference: PFAS-free, expanding fiber, in flavors people actually want to reach for. The line runs three SKUs, Mint, Strawberry, and Coconut, and sells through retail including Walmart. It is a newer name in oral care, launched onto a shelf long owned by legacy brands and one well-known flavored-floss challenger.

The Opportunity

Shoppers no longer scroll through a list of blue links on Google to choose the best floss. They ask AI. “Best flavored floss brand?”, “What are the best flavored floss brands?”, and “Best textured floss at Walmart?” are live, high-intent questions being answered right now by ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google’s AI Overview.

For a new brand, the move from search engines to AI answers creates both an opening and a problem. AI models haven’t settled on a consistent set of brands to recommend for flavored floss, so there’s still room for a newcomer to earn a spot. The problem: the models had very little information about Pearlyfloss to draw from. At launch the brand was effectively invisible in AI search, while the answers named the household dental giants and the flavored-floss brand that got there first.

The goal was clear: become the brand AI names when someone asks for the best flavored floss, and get there before the category answer hardens around another name.

Challenges & Objectives

Challenges

• Invisible at launch. Pearlyfloss did not surface for flavored-floss prompts on any tracked model when the engagement began.
• Thin brand knowledge. The models held little structured detail about the product, its flavors, or what made it different.
• A late entrant. Pearlyfloss came to the category after the legacy dental brands that dominate general floss answers, and after that the flavored floss category emerged.
• No citation footprint. As a new brand, Pearlyfloss had few of the earned and third-party references that AI models lean on to decide who to recommend.

Objectives

1. Get Pearlyfloss recommended by name when shoppers ask AI for the best flavored floss brands.
2. Build visibility across the major AI models from a standing start: ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overview, and more.
3. Win retail-intent queries tied to the Walmart listing, where the question is already commercial.
4. Put measurement in place to see what actually moved the needle, and double down on it.

The Approach

1. Mapped the questions worth winning. Pearlyfloss and Goodie built a prompt cluster around flavored floss across commercial, discovery, and retail intent, plus adjacent angles the brand could credibly own: PFAS-free, textured, and expanding floss. Goodie’s Prompt Research surfaced which questions carried real search intent and where competitors were being named instead. This sets the target prompt list and the baseline to measure against.
2. Tracked every model from Day 1. Goodie’s Visibility Monitoring watched Pearlyfloss across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Meta AI, and AI Overview from launch, so the team could see which platforms were closest to a breakthrough and prioritize them rather than guess.
3. Gave the models something to cite. Pearlyfloss deployed product schema across all three SKUs, validated and live inside the first ten days. Structured data let the models pull real product-level detail (flavors, PFAS-free information, expanding fiber technology) instead of skipping a brand they could not read.
4. Rewrote the homepage to state the difference plainly. The brand reworked its homepage copy to highlight PFAS-free, expanding fiber, and flavored-floss differentiation in language both people and models could parse. The change went live mid-engagement and lines up with the brand’s visibility inflection in the second half of the window.
5. Built the owned and earned-media path. Pearlyfloss published a direct flavored-floss comparison and, using Goodie’s citation analysis, identified the specific high-authority publishers AI cites most in oral care as the next targets, focusing on influence over volume.

Results

Named among the top flavored-floss picks on ChatGPT. Pearlyfloss moved from absent to averaging #2 for ‘best flavored floss brand,’ even peaking at #1. It also ranked #1 on ChatGPT for ‘PFAS-free floss’, a direct hit on the positioning the brand is building toward. On the questions that matter most for the category, it now sits alongside brands with years of head start.

• AI mentions more than tripled. The share of AI answers naming Pearlyfloss saw a 3.3x jump. Roughly one in ten relevant AI answers now names the brand, up from almost none.
• Share of Voice up 283%, visibility up 177%. Against the same category prompt set, which in turn bumped its average positioning up to 2nd overall.

The growth held across the categories Pearlyfloss set out to own.

Key takeaway

A new brand does not have to wait years to be the answer AI gives. Pearlyfloss entered a category with entrenched dental giants and an established flavored-floss name already in the models’ vocabulary, and within 20 days it became a brand ChatGPT names for the exact question its buyers ask. The move came from engineering what the models could see and cite: the right prompts to target, structured data they could read, clearer on-site signals, and a path to the publishers that AI trusts.

That is the transferable lesson. In categories still being defined, the recommendation is won by the brand that makes itself the most readable and most cited, not the one that has been around longest. Goodie gave Pearlyfloss both the wide view, visibility across every model, and the