/ Industries · Supplements and wellness
Your brand is findable. Your category is not.
Creatine, electrolytes, collagen, protein, sleep, skin. Every founder we audit ranks first for their own name and nowhere for the thing the customer actually types. Ask an assistant for the best electrolyte powder in Australia and it names four brands and cites three websites. Most brands are on neither list, and nobody at the brand has run the search. This page is what we look at first in the category.
Where they look
Three surfaces. None of them is a map.
1. Organic results for the category term.
“best creatine australia”, “electrolyte powder without sugar”, “collagen for skin”. Page one is shared between two or three brands with real product pages, a retailer, and a handful of comparison sites. The brand page has to earn its place with content, reviews and structure, not with the label.
2. AI answers.
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overview and Gemini answer buying questions by citing a small set of sources: listicles, comparison pages, a retailer, sometimes a brand page that reads like a reference. The brands named in those answers are the ones the sources already mention. Being absent is invisible to you and decisive for the customer.
3. The product page itself.
Once found, the page has to say what the product is in the customer's words, show the numbers (dose per serve, sodium per sachet, cost per gram) and carry reviews the crawler can read. Most pages say what the product is called.
The demand data
What Australia searches, anchored to “creatine”.
The category is growing at two to four times over five years while pre workout, the one term most brands still build around, is flat. “Best creatine” growing faster than “creatine” is the buying question moving toward research. Rising queries are gummies, women-specific formulations and “creatine chemist warehouse”, which is what it looks like when a category goes mainstream and the retailer starts winning the search.
In the same window the electrolyte category in Australia moved from “hydralyte” to a field of new brands, with imported names spiking and fading inside two years. Being early into a category term is worth more than being loud about the brand.
Source: Foundlab research snapshot dated 12 September 2026. Relative indices are not search volumes, customer counts or revenue forecasts. Growth compares the last 12 months with the first 12 months of the window. The bars use a square-root scale; exact indices and growth multiples are printed alongside them.
What goes wrong
Three findings we make almost every time.
1. The product page describes the label, not the search.
A creatine page with 90 words, a product name, and no dose, cost per gram, certification or comparison. The competitor with a 1,200-word page, 80 reviews and a certification badge outranks it while charging more. The evidence is a signed-out search for the plain term and a side-by-side of the two pages.
2. The store's schema says “My Store”.
Theme defaults never edited: the Organization node still carries the placeholder brand, a broken logo URL and an empty sameAs. Every collection H1 reads “All”. Wholesale tier collections are public and indexed. None of this is visible in the browser, all of it is visible to the crawler and to the assistant deciding whether the brand is a real entity.
3. Reviews that do not exist to Google.
Hundreds of reviews in a widget that renders nothing without JavaScript, or a review app installed and never configured. The stars are on the page for a human and absent from the results for everyone else. We saw a brand with real customers and zero review markup on any product.
Findings are described in general terms. Each is from a dated engagement, and the evidence and fix are in the client's report, not here.
Compliance
The words that rank and the words you can use are not always the same list.
Supplement and wellness marketing in Australia sits under published advertising guidance from the TGA and, for foods and drinks, FSANZ and the ACCC. All three publish that guidance on their own sites. We do not interpret it for you. What we do is check every product page, collection, blog post and profile line against it, mark the claims that look like they would get a second look, and give you the list with the source linked, so you or an adviser can decide in minutes rather than hours. The rest of the work is the useful part: finding the plain language customers actually type about use, dose and comparison, which tends to be both searched and unremarkable to a regulator.
Foundlab is a marketing service, not a legal or regulatory adviser. We check wording against the guidance the relevant regulators publish and flag what we find. Decisions about your advertising are yours.
How we help
The Brand plan, built for the category and the answer.
Most supplement and wellness brands fit the Brand plan: the category demand mapped and refreshed quarterly, the catalogue and product pages rewritten into the theme to the terms customers search, the buying questions tested in the assistants monthly with sources named, outreach to the comparison pages those assistants cite, and two to four bylined pieces a month. From $999 a month, no setup, six months. The target is written down: named in AI answers for an agreed share of your category's buying questions by month four, or months five and six are free.
Brands with one or two products and no store problems sometimes start smaller: a fixed product-page and schema pass, priced as a build. If the theme is the blocker, Builds first.
FAQ
Three questions brands ask.
We run Meta ads and they work. Why does search matter?
Because the ad creates the search. Someone sees the ad, types your category term or “is [brand] any good” into Google or an assistant, and buys whoever the answer names. Paid gets the attention; search decides who gets the order.
Can you get us into ChatGPT's answers?
Nobody can place a brand in an answer. What we can do is get the brand into the sources the answer is built from, make the product pages the kind of page an assistant cites, and measure the result monthly with dated screenshots. The target on the plan is written against that measure.
We are on Shopify. Do you need theme access?
Yes, collaborator access to the theme and the apps. The fixes go into your theme, not a plugin, so they stay when we leave.
Not sure where to start?
Book a fifteen minute call. If it is not the right thing, you hear that on the call, before you pay.