Case Studies >> The Better Scalp Company
Becoming an AI Visibility Powerhouse: How The Better Scalp Company is Giving Billion-Dollar Brands a Run for their Money
18.4%
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Percent of AI responses that mention The Better Scalp Company
#3
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Ranking of brands by AI mentions.
5 months
⏐
Using Growth Marshal’s Plus.
“Growth Marshal has a deep understanding of how LLMs work and presented a clear plan to capture traffic from ChatGPT.”
Michele Marchand
Founder, The Better Scalp Company
Introduction
Company Overview
The Better Scalp Company is a Canadian hair-care startup catering to women with extremely sensitive scalps. The brand builds dermatologist-approved, hypoallergenic, fragrance-free formulas that avoid common irritants like essential oils, dyes, sulfates, and phthalates. The core lineup includes a sensitive-scalp shampoo, conditioner, and bundles designed for daily use, color safety, and non-medicated relief of itch, flaking, and irritation.
Company:
Founder:
Market:
Industry:
Dermatologist-approved:
Website:
The Better Scalp Co.
Michele Marchand
Scalp Health
E-commerce
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betterscalpcompany.com
Check out Michele on the Ottawa Entrepreneurs Podcast:
Apple Podcasts ->
The Better Scalp Company needed to breakthrough a crowded, trust-driven hair-care market dominated by established brands with far greater budgets and shelf presence.
Challenge
The Better Scalp Company operates in one of the toughest corners of consumer health: scalp care. It’s a category defined by legacy dominance, heavy advertising, and deep-rooted brand loyalty. Giants like Head & Shoulders and Neutrogena have had decades to establish awareness, trust, and distribution.
For a small, dermatologist-led startup, even with a superior product and cleaner formulations, earning visibility in that landscape is an uphill battle. Paid media is expensive, shelf space is scarce, and most traditional marketing channels reward incumbents, not innovators.
Michele Marchand, The Better Scalp Company’s founder, recognized that she faced a challenge around discovery.
Modern consumers no longer start their buying journey by scrolling through ads or aisles; they start by asking questions. “What’s the best shampoo for a sensitive scalp?” “Which scalp treatments are dermatologist-approved?” These queries now happen upstream, in AI assistants and search interfaces that shape perception long before a purchase. Without a clear, structured presence in that new discovery layer, The Better Scalp Co. risked being overshadowed by the same brands it was built to outperform.
We helped The Better Scalp Company build authority from the ground up by structuring its brand, content, and credibility so that algorithms recognized it as the clear and trustworthy choice for sensitive-scalp care.
Solution
The first step was to shape how the brand appears in the new discovery layer of AI search. We deployed Growth Marshal’s Trust Stack™ to unify every public signal, from schema markup to verified brand data, into a consistent source of truth. Each page was optimized for answerability, meaning it could function as a credible response to common scalp-related queries. This helped product pages read less like marketing and more like guidance, with clear definitions, dermatologist references, and ingredient rationales. The net effect was to make it easier for models to identify The Better Scalp Company as an authoritative resource in contexts where buyers seek medical-grade reassurance rather than promotional hype.
Then we built a content architecture designed to scale authority. Using our Pillar-Cluster Blueprint, we mapped every major topic in scalp and hair health into clear, interlinked clusters. Each pillar served as a central hub such as sensitive-scalp relief or ingredient safety, supported by deeper articles that answered related search and AI queries in detail. This created topical depth and reinforced the brand’s semantic footprint around its core expertise. To ensure coverage was complete and non-redundant, we applied the Saturation Matrix framework, identifying content gaps, balancing informational and transactional intent, and aligning every asset to a specific buyer moment. The result was a systematic publishing model that expanded visibility across all relevant scalp-care conversations while maintaining a unified and authoritative voice.
Data sourced from Amplitude, 7 November 2025
The Better Scalp Company achieved breakout visibility, earning parity with billion-dollar brands in LLM mentions and AI citations.
Results
The results were striking. In just under 5 months, The Better Scalp Company now appears alongside established global brands in AI search responses for sensitive-scalp and dermatologist-approved hair care queries. The brand’s visibility increased across multiple AI platforms, with a measurable rise in branded mentions and improved ranking stability.
What had once been a small, largely invisible startup was now being retrieved and referenced in the same digital spaces as billion-dollar competitors.
More importantly, this visibility translated into real credibility. Consumers recognize The Better Scalp Company as a trustworthy voice in scalp health, and the structured foundation behind its content allowed that credibility to persist. Every optimized cluster reinforced the next, creating a durable ecosystem of authority that continues to grow with each new piece of content.
The data speaks for itself: a small, dermatologically focused brand now competes head-to-head with the giants of personal care, not by spending more, but by being engineered for discoverability and trust.
“Growth Marshal absolutely delivered.”
