Don Julio AI Enhancement & Optimization
The situation:
Diageo's media agency PHD delivered an "AI User Journey" analysis for Don Julio in December 2025. Its core finding: consumers now research spirits inside LLMs rather than through keyword search, and LLMs anchor their answers on brand.com as the canonical source. Where donjulio.com was thin, models were filling gaps with secondary or outdated information, a real exposure on questions like "Does Don Julio use additives?", "Which is better, Don Julio or Patrón?", and "Is 1942 worth the money?"
PHD's analysis produced four search personas (Aspiring Mixologist, Ingredient-Conscious Consumer, Trend-Conscious Host, Impressive Gift Giver), a five-stage LLM journey, a ranked top-10 consumer question list, and a large set of drafted copy. What it didn't produce was a site that could hold any of it. The existing templates couldn't render a founder timeline, nested recipe instructions, FAQ accordions, or a product comparison table and the existing schema was either missing or wrong. Diageo needed the recommendations turned into working pages in seven markets.
How we helped.
Scoped and built the implementation across four pages — Our Story, Our Tequila Journey, the Blanco Margarita recipe, and Gifting in three layers:
Content model: extended Contentful to support nested instruction lists, serving size, prep time, yield, category and cuisine, plus the ability to overwrite the "Made with" text.
Schema: rebuilt Recipe schema around HowToSection/HowToStep for nested steps, corrected Author from a Thing to an Organization, added the new recipe fields, and wired Article schema into the two story pages and CollectionPage schema into Gifting automatically, via code and Contentful, rather than page by page.
Design and components: a timeline component for Our Story, standardized heading fonts to handle longer headlines, restyled Our Tequila Journey onto the Our Story layout, a new comparison table layout for Gifting, reused the existing FAQ accordion pattern on the recipe template, and implemented 19 alt-tag updates.
Results achieved.
Don Julio moved from a brand.com that LLMs had to work around to one built to be quoted: structured, chunked answers to the highest-intent consumer questions, valid and complete schema on every page in scope, and a content model the brand team can keep feeding without engineering involvement each time