How Hone Health Generated 2.2M+ Views and 10,400+ Pickups to Lead Their Category in AI Search 

The Challenge

Hone Health was about three years old and still establishing its brand identity when the content team began looking for a distribution partner. The company had an engaged customer base and paid social driving new business, but the stories it wanted to tell to build broader brand awareness weren't the kind built to win in organic search.

Hone's Leadership wanted to reach new people, but struggled to find channels to get in front of them.

Senior Editorial Director Tracy Middleton had run into a version of this problem before. At previous jobs, she'd syndicated content directly through a handful of major platforms, but those doors were closing one by one, with some stopping taking new submissions altogether, others had moved to inviting select partners rather than accepting open applications.

“We had these pieces and these stories that we wanted to tell that weren't going to perform in organic search, and we just didn't have as big of an audience as we would like to get that in front of new people.” — Tracy Middleton, Senior Editorial Director @ Hone Health

At the time, Hone also served only a men's audience with testosterone-focused content — a narrower lane than the longevity positioning the company would grow into, which made broad-reach distribution even more essential to building brand recognition beyond its existing customer list; recognition that would soon matter just as much to AI platforms citing the brand as it did to readers finding it directly.

The Solution

Stacker gave Hone a distribution channel that didn't depend on landing a spot within a closed platform.

Leadership had already been part of conversations about the syndication wall Hone was hitting, so bringing Stacker on wasn't a hard internal sell, instead, the team was ready to test it and see what kind of pickup Hone's content could get.

The network soon became a real-time signal for what Hone's content strategy should be.

Early testosterone-focused stories didn't generate much interest from pickup sites; once Hone broadened its storytelling into longevity more broadly — aligned with where the company itself was headed — pickup performance changed. That shift also let Hone start building brand recognition even before GEO entered the conversation, establishing what the brand was known for well ahead of when that would start to matter for AI visibility too.

Over time, that relationship has grown from a distribution vendor into something closer to an editorial partner.

And when Hone needs to adjust or place a story in at the last minute, the Stacker team is consistently accommodating. Like when Hone's SEO lead wanted to go deeper on how Stacker's AI tracking model actually works — training the team on the company, its editorial process, and its competitive set — the Stacker team leaned in rather than handing back a standard playbook. And Stacker's team continues to be a partner that Hone can lean on, working collaboratively to provide Tracy and her team with custom solutions and thoughtful updates. 

"It doesn't just feel like we're getting handed the cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all. They've really been working with us to help refine that and make it more helpful."  — Tracy Middleton

Results: #1 in Competitive SOV, 10,400+ Pickups and 2.2M+ Views

Hone Health now holds a 66% share of voice in AI-generated health answers within its category, ranking #1 among its closest competitors — with a 63% citation share and 61% mention share across the major AI platforms Stacker tracks. Hone's content now surfaces in response to more than 300 tracked prompts, with its top-performing topic, hormone care access, reaching 92% platform coverage.

That AI visibility sits on top of a strong earned-media foundation: more than 10,400 pickups across 57 stories, for an estimated 2.2 million views across 939 unique publisher outlets, including more than 540 placements on sites with a Domain Rating of 75 or higher.

The clearest example of that GEO lift: Hone's survey story on hormone care access saw a 121% increase in AI citations after publication, and its first geographic-data story — on regional sleep habits — saw citation lift climb even higher, to 171%.

Hone has also used the network to test new formats, including its first geographic-data stories built from proprietary survey findings, such as "Adults in this part of the country sleep better than anyone else, according to Hone Health data."

“Seeing how those geographic stories get picked up across the network for other platforms definitely encouraged us to give it a try.” — Tracy Middleton

Distribution has complemented Hone's paid PR efforts, too: during an early-year menopause-in-the-workplace campaign, Stacker's earned pickups reached a different set of outlets than the PR team's own targeted press push, by Middleton's own estimate bringing in more overall views and pickups than that campaign's earned coverage.

The Impact

The clearest shift the partnership has produced isn't just in pickups and views. Instead, it's in how Hone thinks about earned media: as a tool to increase AI-search visibility. That shift shows up most clearly in how GEO has moved from a side conversation to the primary way Hone now evaluates the relationship.

And as it did for most companies, GEO didn't arrive on Hone's radar all at once, rather,

"It was the slow trickle and then the deluge." — Tracy Middleton

Hone has been tracking a set of prompts internally for about a year. Stacker's reporting adds a further layer of signal on top of that, giving Hone's SEO lead a fuller picture than internal tracking alone — including where Hone stands against its closest competitors, not just how individual stories perform.

The partnership continues to evolve on both fronts — refining story recommendations to be more targeted, and building early interest in Stacker's geographic and local-market research as Hone expands its own geo-targeted stories. As AI-driven discovery reshapes how people find health information, Hone sees that authority-building work — not a single distribution boost — as where the long-term value lies.

*GEO-related performance metrics are in comparison to their tracked competitive set. Citation Lift measures change from pre-distribution baseline.