How Hyphen Grew AI Referral Traffic by 160% with Kwik GEO

Hyphen is a clean, science-backed skincare brand co-founded by actress and entrepreneur Kriti Sanon, built in partnership with PEP Technologies, the parent company of mCaffeine. Hyphen offers vegan, PETA-certified skincare formulated for Indian skin concerns, and has scaled quickly as a D2C brand since its 2023 launch.

India

Beauty & Personal Care (Skincare)

Founded by Kriti Sanon in 2023, Hyphen set out to simplify skincare with clean, result-driven formulations built specifically for Indian skin. The brand pairs targeted actives like peptides, niacinamide, and vitamin C with a vegan, cruelty-free formulation standard, and has grown into one of the more recognizable names in India's D2C skincare space, backed by mCaffeine's R&D, marketing, and distribution infrastructure.

As shoppers increasingly turn to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews before they ever click through to a website, Hyphen partnered with Kwik GEO to get ahead of a shift most beauty brands haven't started preparing for yet. The results arrived faster than either team expected.

As AI assistants became a bigger part of how shoppers research skincare, Hyphen faced a visibility gap that traditional SEO wasn't built to solve:

Kwik GEO is GoKwik's AI visibility platform, built from the ground up for the shift from search engines to answer engines, at a time when most tools in the market are still retrofitting traditional SEO thinking onto AI search. For Hyphen, the programme covered four connected workstreams:

Within the first month of implementation, the shift was already measurable across every layer of the funnel:

Non-branded AI visibility: from effectively zero to a real, measurable presence. Hyphen is now surfacing to shoppers who weren't already searching for the brand by name, evidence the programme is closing the discovery-stage gap it was built to solve.

Positive sentiment: up more than 4x. The balance of AI-generated mentions shifted decisively away from neutral, non-committal framing toward clearly favorable recommendations.

AI referral traffic: up over 160%. A channel that was previously a rounding error in Hyphen's traffic mix, with ChatGPT referrals nearly tripling on their own.

New content already being cited in live ChatGPT answers. Concrete proof the content strategy is working, not just running, within weeks of publishing.

Hyphen and Kwik GEO continue building on this momentum, with upcoming work on Wikipedia and knowledge graph citations, deeper backlink and anchor text strategy, and ongoing monitoring for AI hallucinations and citation decay to protect and compound the gains made so far.