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After months of building, testing, and pushing the boundaries of what AI-driven search can actually do, Brainz has been awarded Best Use of AI at this year’s UK Digital Excellence Awards, for the work carried out with our client Hulken.
A bit of context on how this happened
Hulken came to Brainz with a problem that a lot of eCommerce brands recognise: almost everyone finding them online was already looking for them. Branded search was strong. Non-branded visibility was thin. The challenge was to reach the customers who did not yet know the Hulken bag existed but were actively searching for exactly that kind of product.
At the start of the campaign, 92% of Hulken’s organic search impressions were branded. The site had 78 keywords sitting in the top 10, and LLM platforms like ChatGPT were sending a total of 25 sessions per month. Hulken set targets they thought were ambitious: 400 top-10 keywords and 200,000 impressions. The Brainz team treated those as a floor.
880% more keywords in top 10 · 923% LLM revenue growth · 2,950% increase in Google impressions
What the work actually involved
The Brainz AI tool sits at the centre of how the team approached this. It was built in-house specifically because no off-the-shelf platform could track LLM visibility, measure brand sentiment across AI-generated answers, or generate content clusters from real prompts people were running in ChatGPT and Gemini. Rather than work around that gap, the team closed it by building the tool from scratch.
Content strategy ran through three interconnected layers: a content machine for production, custom GPTs for briefing and SERP consensus analysis, and an AIO Re Ranker tool trained on Google’s own patents to improve the chances of content being pulled into AI Overviews. Every article published across the campaign was built for both human readers and AI retrieval systems at the same time, covering use cases, product features, and launch support across a topical cluster structure.
The site itself went through a full redesign, combining technical SEO foundations with UX improvements specifically chosen to lift conversion rates from the traffic that was already arriving. By December 2025, organic revenue from Google had grown 15% month-on-month, and that came on the back of Hulken’s best-ever Black Friday in November. You can read our full case study here.
“Entering this award was about putting on record what becomes possible when an agency stops waiting for the industry to catch up. The Hulken campaign is evidence that AI-driven SEO, done with real rigour, moves revenue, not just rankings. The team at Brainz is proud of what this partnership produced.”
— The Brainz Team
Why this award matters to the team
The people working on this campaign spent a long time building tools that most agencies were not yet thinking about. Tracking LLM traffic in a way that ties back to revenue required real engineering work, and the content methodology around AI-first writing took months of testing to get right. Winning Best Use of AI is a recognition of that investment, and it validates an approach the Brainz team has been committed to long before it became the obvious thing to do.
The Hulken numbers also matter beyond the campaign itself. A 31% non-branded keyword ratio (up from 8%), 765 keywords in the top 10, and $2,179 in attributed LLM revenue from a starting point of $213 are not just a good set of results for one client. They represent a repeatable model for how brands can compete across both traditional search and the LLM layer that is sitting on top of it.
“The campaign demonstrates thoughtful content architecture and disciplined execution, resulting in meaningful improvements in organic visibility and revenue contribution.”
— Judge, UK Digital Excellence Awards
What’s next for Brainz
The Brainz AI platform continues to evolve. Sentiment tracking, prompt research, and LLM citation analysis are all expanding into areas the team will be sharing more about in the coming months. If you want to see what your brand looks like inside ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity right now, get in touch.
