How Starz Turned AI Search Visibility Into a +25% Organic Revenue Opportunity

CLIENT

Starz

SERVICE

AI Visibility / SEO

INDUSTRY

Subscription-Based

+25% revenue opportunity from organic sources

+182 net new AI citations across high-intent prompts

2,605 sitemap errors identified for cleanup

5 weeks from audit to prioritized roadmap

BACKGROUND

Starz is a premium streaming platform, competing for subscribers in a crowded, subscription-fatigued market. How audiences decide what to watch is changing. Viewers increasingly ask Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity “where can I watch” and “shows like X” and informational giants like IMDb, Wikipedia, and Reddit were capturing demand for Starz titles that Starz itself should own. Starz needed a partner to assess whether its site was ready for both traditional search and AI-driven discovery, and to chart a path to capture that high-intent demand.

Challenge

Outranked on Its Own IP — and Invisible Where AI Answers Are Assembled

Starz was being outranked on searches for its own original programming, with informational giants like IMDb, Wikipedia, and Reddit capturing demand for Starz titles. In Google’s “Watch options” carousel — the surface viewers see when they search “where can I watch” a show — Netflix, Hulu, and Apple TV+ dominated placements for titles in Starz’s own catalog, because Starz pages lacked the machine-readable streaming metadata (TVSeries, TVEpisode, WatchAction schema) those placements require. The same gap made Starz unlikely to be cited by Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, or Perplexity for series and movie queries. Additionally, technical foundations compounded the problem with effective search crawls.

Solution

A Unified SEO + AEO/GEO Audit Built for Both Traditional and AI-Driven Discovery

Cro Metrics delivered a comprehensive actionable plan and prioritized roadmap spanning technical SEO, structured data readiness for AI systems, UX and discovery experience, and keyword and competitive positioning across entertainment search demand. Rather than treating SEO and AI visibility as separate problems, the engagement evaluated Starz’s discovery footprint holistically, from crawl health to schema to how titles surface in answer engines. This gave Starz a clear, sequenced foundation to rank for high-intent “where to watch” queries, appear in AI-generated recommendations, and win back demand currently captured by IMDb, Wikipedia, and Reddit.

Results

A Sized Opportunity, a Clear Roadmap, and an Activated Internal Team

Starz now has a quantified view of its organic opportunity and a prioritized, sequenced plan to capture it, and has moved from findings to action, standing up an internal SEO project kickoff to begin implementation.

+25% increase in revenue opportunity from organic sources: significant organic and AI-discovery revenue opportunity, elevating SEO/AEO/GEO to an executive priority.
Indexation fixes identified: 2,605 incorrect sitemap URLs flagged for cleanup, accelerating indexing of new releases during launch windows.
Entity and duplication strategy: a unification plan for competing duplicate pages so Starz can own high-value cast and title queries with single authoritative pages.
AI-readiness roadmap: structured data recommendations (WatchAction, TVSeries, and more) positioning Starz titles for rich results and citation in AI-generated answers.
Internal activation: Starz stood up an internal SEO project kickoff and is defining genre pages for SEO based on the roadmap.

Initial Success

+182 net new AI citations/mentions across four FAQ-matched prompts — “How much does Starz cost?” (+40), “Is Starz free to try?” (+88), “Does Starz have ads?” (+25), and “Where can I watch Starz?” (+29) — with gains across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, and Google AI Mode.
13.7% AI share of voice among streaming brands — the top spot, ahead of Amazon (7.3%), Hulu (6.3%), and Netflix (4.2%).