How Do DTC Brands Use PR to Compete With Marketplace Lookalikes?
A few years ago, a client came to us with a problem. His home goods brand took off during the pandemic. He’d invented the product category, and he’d chosen to stay off Amazon to protect his margins and keep a direct relationship with his customers. But shoppers looking for what he made kept landing on cheaper lookalikes on Amazon.
His team wasn’t asleep at the wheel. On the contrary, they were actively working on SEO, and their paid ads were performing very well. The problem was that he couldn’t match Amazon’s ad spend or Amazon’s authority and when people searched the product, they gravitated towards the cheaper products because his didn’t make a compelling case.
At Avaans Media, my and my team have helped DTC brands grow direct sales and defend against marketplace imitators since 2021, and that client shaped the e-commerce framework that has evolved as the shopping experience has, especially with AI. But the core lesson from that first engagement still holds.
The Default Playbook Has a Ceiling
If you run marketing for a DTC brand, you’re probably familiar with this reaction, traffic slips and the first thing you do is look at your SEO. You audit keywords and tighten the product pages. Lately there’s a GEO layer too, where you restructure onsite content so AI models can parse it.
It’s a reasonable response, but if your site is already optimized, and your product is already beloved, if your pages rank and your ads convert and you’re hitting a ceiling, now what? The answer lies in off-page authority and third-party verification that tell shoppers what to expect. These are the same models AI models shoppers now consult to understand product differentiation, which products are built for their specific needs, and whether a brand matches their expectations.
What a Lookalike Can’t Copy
Azoma analyzed ChatGPT shopping citations from Q2 2026. Earned media, meaning editorial coverage and reviews, made up 41% of what ChatGPT cited. Retailer listings made up 37%, user-generated content 19%, and brand websites 3%.
That 3% should worry any marketing executive who expects the brand site to carry this alone. The 37% for retailer listings matters too, because it means the listing gets you in the door. But a lookalike can copy your listing, photos and price point in a matter of weeks. What it can’t copy is a body of editorial coverage that names your brand as the one that created the category. That coverage also decides whether AI surfaces you at all. And I wrote about the search side of the lookalike fight separately.
This traffic is worth fighting for. Adobe analyzed more than 1 trillion visits to US retail sites and found AI-referred traffic grew 393% year over year in Q1 2026. By March 2026, those AI-referred visitors converted 42% better than other traffic. Consumers are using AI to outsource trust.
Why This Was Harder to Prove in 2021
Back in 2021, it was hard to show what PR did for a DTC brand. If an article didn’t surface in search, its influence on the website felt opaque. In my experience, the search results page of that era rarely surfaced product news; product review sites were hit and miss, and reviews on even tier 1 publications would be there one day and gone the next. My read was that Google built the shopping experience around giving consumers choices, and news coverage didn’t fit that model.
AI shopping works differently. AI understands that shoppers want information to help them decide, and it’s very good at helping them compare options using credible sources. That puts third-party coverage inside the comparison itself, and it makes the impact measurable. Today I can track narrative consistency across AI platforms and see which sources AI cites when a shopper asks about a category. The influence that felt opaque in 2021 now shows up in PR data you can report to the C-suite.
What We Did for the Original Creator
My client couldn’t win on spend, so we built his strategy on what the lookalikes could never claim. Every credible source needed to present him as premium quality, the original creator, the brand that defined the category, and manufactured in the USA.
We secured product reviews in target publications and timed them to seasonal buying moments. We built a CEO byline program and a media kit that made in-depth reviews easy for editors to produce. The brand earned coverage in Wired, Forbes, Inc. and Gadgeteer, along with a national award from Inc. Magazine.
The results showed up in the numbers his marketing team already watched. Branded search went up. His paid campaigns were already performing, and they converted even better. His SEO and his ads kept doing their jobs, and the coverage made both of them work harder. You can read the full home goods case study here.
Where the Original Loses Its Edge
Two things decide whether shoppers see you as the original or as one more option.
The first is narrative leakage, a term I coined for the authority a brand loses when its story drifts. It happens when activity replaces strategy and the sources describing your brand stop saying the same thing. In a lookalike fight, leakage has a direction. Say a review calls your product “a solid option” when it should say “the original.” Now AI has no reason to separate you from the copy.
The second is white space in the shopper journey. These are the moments when a shopper looks for outside validation and finds nothing credible about you: a comparison query, a gift guide, a best-of roundup, a review site that AI pulls from. Those gaps rarely show up in your analytics, because the shopper never reached your site.
Run This Test This Week
Open ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Mode. Ask each one for the best product in your category, then ask who created it. Look at four things:
- Does your brand appear by name?
- Does AI describe you as the original, or as one option among several?
- Which sources does it cite?
- Does any of the lookalike’s language show up in the answer about you?
If the cited sources are listings and forums rather than editorial coverage, you’ve found your white space.
Same Tools, Different Questions
My team uses some of the same tools your SEO team uses. We just ask them different questions. SEO asks where your site ranks. PR asks which sources AI trusts in your category and whether those sources tell your story or the lookalike’s. When both teams work from the same data with different jobs, that’s where a DTC brand gets supercharged.
If a lookalike is showing up where your brand should be, start with an assessment of how AI describes your category today. Avaans Media can show you where the story is leaking and which sources will close the gap.
