AEO for Korean brands selling in the US
Loved in Korea.
Invisible in US AI answers.
A K-beauty serum, a baby carrier, a rice cooker: years of Korean reviews and press behind it, on domains the English answer a US buyer gets is not built from.
ChatGPT
best sunscreen for oily skin
For oily skin, look for oil-free, non-comedogenic formulas:
- EltaMD UV Clear SPF 46
- La Roche-Posay Anthelios
- Supergoop Unseen Sunscreen
Want these compared on finish?
Ask anything
Your brand should come up here.
The questions you lose, who wins them, and why. Report first — the call is optional.
Where your reputation goes
You already earned it.
No engine can read it.
Olive Young ratings, Naver reviews, Korean press — in your language, on your domains. An English answer is assembled from none of them.
Your record
Not in the corpus an English answer is built from
What the answer reads
- ChatGPT
- Perplexity
- Gemini
- Claude
- AI Overviews
Assembled from English-language sources. Yours are not among them.
Solutions
We build the US record
you never had.
Four jobs, all of them ours, measured as one number: how many of twenty buyer questions name you — “best Korean sunscreen for oily skin”, and the nineteen like it in your category. SEO competes for a place on a page of ten blue links; we compete for a place inside a single answer.
01
Bridge the region and the language
Your record exists. It is in the wrong language, on the wrong domains, for the answer a US buyer gets.
Your existing authority
02
Run the US-first content and social
Written for an American reader from the first draft, not translated into one afterwards.
Your owned channels
03
Work the US creators that engines read
The reviewers, the round-up writers and the subreddits an assistant actually quotes — approached and briefed by us.
Third-party surfaces
04
Report the number, and move it
Twenty questions free to start, then the same agreed panel every month, with the cause behind each miss named.
The named rate
Operational issues we resolve
The specific errors that keep Korean brands out of AI answers.
Missing mentions are rarely a mystery. They trace to specific conflicts between what AI engines read and what your brand actually sells in the US.
Retail & Store Availability
Sold at Target, Ulta, or Amazon US, but AI answers claim your brand is “not available in the US” or cite discontinued product lines.
Packaging & US Regulations
AI confuses Korean packaging with US FDA labeling compliance, misquotes SPF/ingredients, or says orders ship from Korea instead of US fulfillment.
Reviews & Media Evidence
Thousands of Hwahae reviews, Naver virality, and Korean awards exist, but US AI assistants cite competitor listicles and claim zero US track record.
Pre-Launch & Category Entry
Preparing to launch a Korean sunscreen, cushion foundation, or haircare brand in the US next quarter and needing baseline visibility before retail entry.
Competitor Category Dominance
Competitors dominate every prompt for sunscreens, serums, or sheet masks while your authentic product is bypassed in English answers.
Entity & Distributor Attribution
Former US distributors or same-name entities take credit for your products, or AI answers fail to connect the Korean founder to the US brand.
Expectations
Movement by day 60,
or billing stops.
Nobody can guarantee a citation. What we can put a date on is below, and the day-60 test at the end of it is the one that costs us.
Hours
Free report
Your named rate across five engines, who was named instead, and the sources those answers were built from.
Day 3–5
Audit
The cause behind every miss. The number starts tracking — from here it moves or it does not, in public.
Week 1
First action shipped
Not a plan. The first correction is live.
Week 3–4
First movement
An answer that named someone else names you.
Week 6–8
Target met
The named rate agreed at kickoff, set from your measured baseline rather than by us.
Ongoing
Retainer
Hold it, widen it to more questions, raise it.
An AEO report you can act on
Every question, the answer verbatim, who was named, the page each answer came from — and what an engine got wrong about you.
Named and cited by AI agents
Your brand in the shortlist, and your own page as the source the assistant quotes for it.
A credible US reputation
Round-ups, threads and review profiles written by Americans — the corroboration an assistant looks for.
No cause with a source page behind it, no audit invoice. No movement past your noise floor by day 60, no more retainer.
The work
We do the work.
You approve it.
One answer is assembled from six places, so there are six strands. We run all of them, weighted to whatever your panel says is costing you most.
Three of the six need nothing from you at all.
01
Your own pages
Make the passages liftable
Merge the patch
02
Home-market press
Restate it on US domains
Nothing from you
03
The missing answer
Write it and publish it
Sign off the copy
04
Reddit & forums
Show up where engines read
Nothing from you
05
“Best X” round-ups
Get you into the lists
Nothing from you
06
Directories & ratings
Correct the public record
Confirm the facts
Who is doing this
Our other product sold
644 US companies.
The same team, the same market, the same job — getting a Korean product taken seriously by an American buyer.
- What it is
- Runbear — an AI product sold to US companies, built by this team.
- Who runs it
- The same person who runs your panel, not an account layer.
- Why it counts
- Getting a Korean product taken seriously by an American buyer is the whole job here too.
Companies our team has worked with
runbear.io · Runbear customers worldwide, as published September 2026
Why not the agencies you already pay
Two of them do part of it.
Neither owns your named rate.
| Who you pay | What they optimise | Owns the named rate | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Performance agency | Paid placement, ROAS | not theirs | A place in an answer is not for sale. |
| SEO agency | Blue-link rank | partly | Rank rewards depth. Citation rewards a liftable passage. |
| Creator / UGC shop | Post volume | partly | Makes pages engines read. Checks none of them. |
| Translation vendor | Copy that reads in-market | not theirs | Correct English on a page no model opens. |
| SearchD | Whether five engines name you | owns it | One number, reported whichever way it moves. |
Why now
One answer.
Three names in it.
A buyer asking which Korean serum to try used to get ten links to sort through. Now they get one paragraph somebody else wrote. You are in it or you are not discussed.
900Mpeople a week
ask ChatGPT something. One written answer comes back — not ten links to choose from.
8%still click a link
when an AI summary is on the page, against 15% when it is not. The answer is the destination now.
What the published evidence supports, and what it refutes.
Before you ask us
The three questions we get every time.
Can we not just run these prompts ourselves?
You can, and you should — open ChatGPT and ask what a buyer in your category would ask. Running that monthly across five engines is a script your team could write. The work you are buying is the second half: deciding which cause produced a miss, writing the passages, getting into the round-ups, claiming the review profile that contradicts your own store.
What if an AI states something wrong about our product?
It states the wrong number with the same confidence as a right one, and a writer repeating it is how a wrong figure ends up in print. The report lists each error and the source page that caused it, then we correct the source and re-test the same question. Regulated claims are rewritten by your compliance owner, at their pace.
How long until the number moves?
The schedule above is the answer: the report lands in hours, the first correction ships inside a week, and the target is six to eight weeks out. On-site work moves at your sprint. Off-site corroboration waits on other people to publish or correct something, so it is the part of the curve that keeps compounding after the target is met.
Latest writing
How does AI decide which brands to name?
Every post carries its numbers, its dates and its sources. The four most recent are below.
2026 Technical SEO & AEO Audit Checklist with Jev
Is your site ready for AI search? Follow this 18-point AEO and SEO audit checklist, then run a free SearchD technical audit with Jev when available.
Why does AI say our Korean brand isn't sold in the US?
A where-to-buy answer is assembled from records held by different parties: the retailer's store inventory, the seller named in a product feed, and the shipping details on a product page. A table of which record carries each fact and which of them the brand controls. Sources checked 23 September 2026.
Korean SPF and US sunscreen labels: what should AI answers say?
A table mapping five Korean sunscreen label claims to what each one does not establish about the product sold in the US, and what a US claim needs instead. Then four questions on SPF, Broad Spectrum, FDA approval and correcting an inaccurate AI answer. Sources checked 21 September 2026.
Which beauty brands are Korean?
A sourced table of twelve brands US shoppers ask about, separated into the signals that can disagree: where a company is based and who owns it. Every cell links the record supporting it, checked 16 September 2026.
11 posts in all, written to be useful whether or not you hire us.
Find out what AI says about your brand.
Send us your URL. We run 20 buyer questions across five engines by hand and send you the transcript back within 48 hours.