The rise of AI-powered search is creating a blind spot most businesses don’t even know they have. A new category of analytics is emerging to fix it — and the race to own it is already a billion-dollar bet.
Right now, someone is asking ChatGPT about your industry. Maybe they’re looking for the best project management tool. The best accounting firm in Dallas. The best alternative to your product.
AI doesn’t just answer. It recommends. It compares. It ranks. And in many cases, it gets things wrong — citing outdated pricing, misattributing features, or positioning a competitor as the category leader while your brand doesn’t appear at all.
This is happening at scale. ChatGPT alone now serves over 800 million users every week. Google AI Overviews have rolled out across 40% of search queries, often delivering a synthesized answer before users ever see a traditional result. According to recent research, 58% of consumers have used AI chatbots for product research in the past year.
The shift isn’t coming. It’s here. And most businesses are flying blind.
A New Blind Spot for Every Brand
Traditional analytics stacks were built for a world where Google sent you a click, and you measured what happened next. Google Analytics tracks website visitors. SEMrush and Ahrefs track keyword rankings. CRM systems track leads and conversions.
But none of them answer a question that’s becoming increasingly urgent: What is AI actually saying about your brand?
It’s a deceptively simple question with complicated implications. AI chatbots don’t just retrieve information — they synthesize it. They form opinions. They make recommendations. And unlike a Google search result that shows ten blue links, an AI response gives one answer. If your brand isn’t in that answer, or worse, if it’s in there with the wrong information, you may never know.
That gap is why a new analytics category is forming around what’s being called AI visibility — the ability to track how brands are mentioned, cited, recommended, and perceived across AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google’s AI Overviews.
$176 Million and Counting
Investors have noticed. The AI visibility space has attracted serious capital in a remarkably short time.
Profound, a New York-based platform founded in 2024, reached unicorn status in February 2026 after raising a $96 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation. Its backers include Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Total funding: $155 million. The company now serves over 700 enterprise customers, including 10% of the Fortune 500.
Berlin-based Peec AI raised a $21 million Series A in late 2025, led by Singular, with a valuation exceeding $100 million. The company grew its annual recurring revenue to more than $4 million in its first ten months and counts brands like Axel Springer, Chanel, and TUI among its clients.
Semrush and Ahrefs, the dominant players in traditional SEO analytics, have added AI visibility features as premium add-ons — at $99 to $199 per month on top of existing subscriptions.
The message from the market is clear: this category is real, it’s growing, and it’s drawing the kind of capital typically reserved for infrastructure plays.
The Monitor-Only Problem
But funding doesn’t always translate into accessibility. Most of the well-funded AI visibility platforms were built for enterprise buyers — Fortune 500 marketing teams with five- and six-figure annual analytics budgets.
For the vast majority of businesses — the agencies, the mid-market SaaS companies, the e commerce brands, the local service providers — the current landscape presents two problems.
First, price. Enterprise-grade AI visibility platforms start at $99 per month and scale quickly into custom pricing. Semrush and Ahrefs require an existing subscription plus the AI add on. For a 10-person digital agency managing a dozen clients, the math doesn’t work.
Second, and more fundamentally: most of these tools only monitor. They show you where you appear, how often you’re mentioned, and what sentiment AI assigns to your brand. But they stop there. Knowing that ChatGPT misrepresents your pricing or that Perplexity recommends a competitor over you is only useful if you can do something about it.
This is the gap that bootstrapped entrants are positioning themselves to fill.
Monitor and Optimize
Among the companies taking a different approach is Ayzeo, a Berlin and New York-based platform that launched in 2025 and has grown to over 300 paying customers with zero marketing spend.
Ayzeo’s thesis is straightforward: visibility data without optimization tools is only half a product. The platform tracks brand mentions, citations, sentiment, and competitive positioning across five AI engines — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. But it pairs that monitoring layer with an actionable toolkit: LLMs.txt file generation (the emerging standard for howAI crawlers read your site), JSON-LD
structured data, AI-optimized content templates, and a WordPress plugin that implements changes directly.
The model starts at $39 per month, with a $149 agency tier that includes multi-project management and white-label reporting — features that allow agencies to resell AI visibility as a service to their own clients.
“We looked at the landscape and saw a pattern,” says Aykut Çevik, Ayzeo’s founder. “Every tool was building dashboards. Nobody was building the toolkit that sits behind the dashboard. Showing a marketing team that their brand has a 12% AI visibility score is interesting. Giving them the tools to push it to 47% in two weeks is useful.”
That claim isn’t hypothetical. Jacco Stolker, CEO of Netherlands-based recruitment platform Talentizer, reported a jump from 12% to 47% AI visibility within two weeks of implementing Ayzeo’s optimization recommendations. Nathan Cassar, a Sydney-based entertainer, went from being invisible to AI chatbots to being recommended as a top performer in his market within a month.
WhyAgencies May Be the Kingmakers
The AI visibility category is still in its earliest innings, and it’s not yet clear which business model will win. But one dynamic is worth watching: the agency channel.
Digital marketing agencies are in a unique position. They manage brand strategy for multiple clients simultaneously. When one agency account signs up for an AI visibility platform, it doesn’t represent one brand — it represents ten, twenty, sometimes fifty. Agency accounts are the highest-leverage customers in the category, offering built-in expansion revenue with minimal incremental acquisition cost.
This is partly whyAyzeo’s traction stands out relative to its resources. With 94% weekly active usage and an NPS of 8.3 across its customer base, the platform’s retention suggests it’s solving a real workflow problem for the people actually doing the work — the account managers and strategists at agencies who need to show clients howAI is representing their brand and what’s being done about it.
Profound’s enterprise approach and Peec AI’s venture-backed scale will serve the top of the market. But for the hundreds of thousands of agencies and mid-market brands that will need AI visibility tools in the next two years, the winner may not be the company with the most funding. It may be the one that makes the category most accessible.
What This Means for Your Business
Whether you use Ayzeo, Profound, Peec AI, or any of the emerging tools in this space, the underlying imperative is the same: AI is no longer a channel you can afford to ignore.
Gartner projected that traditional search traffic would decline by 25% by 2026 as AI alternatives absorb more queries. Research shows that AI-referred traffic converts at 14.2% — compared to 2.8% for traditional Google search. And yet, an estimated 78% of businesses are not tracking theirAI visibility at all.
That gap won’t persist. Just as every business eventually needed a Google Analytics account and an SEO strategy, every business will need an AI visibility strategy. The question isn’t whether — it’s when, and whether you’re shaping the narrative or letting AI shape it for you.
Ayzeo is an AI VisibilityAnalytics platform that helps brands and agencies monitor and optimize how they appear across AI-powered search engines. Learn more at ayzeo.com.
Read More From Techbullion
