Back
How Lake.com 5x’ed Branded Traffic by Tapping Into AI Search Behavior
Omnilux is a world leader in medical-grade LED skincare technology. When AI-driven discovery started sending real, converting traffic to its Shopify store, the team moved quickly to understand it, measure it, and optimize for it.
“We've noticed a huge uptick in LLM-related traffic. It grows month over month and has taken up about 3% of our total revenue now. Being able to understand why — and any gaps in our coverage — is incredibly valuable.”
Overview
Omnilux is a world leader in medical-grade LED skincare technology. Born out of dermatology offices in the early 2000s, the brand is backed by over 40 peer-reviewed clinical studies and nearly two decades of continuous R&D. Its hero products, including flexible LED masks for anti-aging, acne, and skin rejuvenation, have become a direct-to-consumer phenomenon, earning features in Vogue, endorsements from board-certified dermatologists, and a fiercely loyal customer base of women (and increasingly men) aged 30+.
When AI-driven discovery started sending real, converting traffic to its Shopify store, the team moved quickly to understand it, measure it, and optimize for it.
Why Profound
Caleb evaluated the emerging landscape of AI search tools and found a lot of vendors scrambling to set up dashboards. What set Profound apart wasn't just the platform. It was the people.
“The people at Profound were what ultimately led us to go with them. Having experts there to guide the process and help us understand the incredibly rapidly changing world of LLM discovery has been crucial.”
The challenge: a Shopify blind spot
As AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini reshape how consumers discover and evaluate products, brands like Omnilux need server-level visibility into how AI crawlers interact with their sites. Profound's Agent Analytics product delivers exactly that, parsing bot traffic and citations page by page to show brands where they're being mentioned, what's being cited, and where gaps exist.
There was just one problem: Shopify wouldn't let anyone in.
Shopify doesn't expose server logs or Cloudflare configurations to its merchants. That means tools like Profound, which rely on CDN-level log data to identify AI crawler activity, simply couldn't serve the thousands of brands built natively on Shopify. It was a massive blind spot for the fastest-growing segment of ecommerce.
The unlock: Nostra as the bridge
Nostra is an enterprise-grade infrastructure-as-a-service platform purpose-built for ecommerce. Nostra deploys a reverse proxy powered by Cloudflare in front of Shopify stores, giving brands access to edge-level capabilities that Shopify alone can't provide: proprietary HTML caching for dramatically faster page loads, bot protection, first-party cookie rewriting for iOS attribution, and - critically - server log access.
Because Nostra already integrates with Cloudflare and Profound already integrates with Cloudflare, the technical path was straightforward. Nostra's reverse proxy gives Shopify merchants the server-level infrastructure that Profound needs to capture and analyze AI bot traffic. No custom engineering. No headaches. Just a seamless connection at the edge.
“We spent a couple weeks going back and forth with our dev team and Cloudflare trying to figure out how to set it up. Then with Profound and Nostra we realized we could just turn it on. We timed it - 98 seconds.”
No code changes. No developer tickets. No downtime. Omnilux's team didn't have to lift a finger. The entire integration happened behind the scenes, unlocking a new layer of AI visibility data without any operational disruption.
The impact: AI as a growth channel
Since partnering with Profound and connecting through Nostra, Omnilux has moved from flying blind on AI traffic to actively using visibility and citation data to drive strategy across multiple functions:
PR & Media Strategy: Omnilux now identifies which publications and articles surface them in AI responses and where competitors are showing up instead. This directly informs outreach and pitching priorities.
Content Strategy: The team is using Profound's prompt-level insights to understand what prospective customers are actually asking AI chatbots about red light therapy, clinical efficacy, and product comparisons. They're building owned content to fill the gaps.
Competitive Intelligence: Profound's visibility rankings let Omnilux benchmark itself against competitors across every major LLM, including ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and more in a fiercely competitive category.
Agentic Commerce Readiness: With Shopify rolling out agentic shopping capabilities, Omnilux is positioning itself to capture the next wave of AI-driven product discovery and purchasing.
