| TL;DR: Buyers are increasingly asking AI which companies to trust, compare, and consider. However, traditional marketing metrics cannot show how a brand appears in those answers. Brandi AI is built to bring visibility to that blind spot, tracking mentions, citations, sentiment, and competitive share of voice across AI-generated answers. The platform’s approach just earned it a Gold Stevie Award for New Product of the Year. |
Marketing and PR teams have always had ways to track brand visibility and perception. Search rankings, media impressions, website traffic, share of voice: the metrics were imperfect, but at least they existed. Now there is a gap in that picture that none of those metrics can quite fill.
Buyers are increasingly turning to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews to research companies and evaluate vendors. In other words, opinions can be shaped before a buyer ever visits a website or speaks to sales. Traditional metrics have no way to show what those AI-generated answers actually say about a brand.
That is the gap Brandi AI set out to address. And, as it turns out, the approach just earned the company a Gold Stevie Award for New Product of the Year.
The Tools That Existed Were Built for the Wrong Team
The marketing technology stack has never been larger. Yet most of it was built with SEO and advertising teams in mind. Communications leads, brand marketers, and PR professionals were left with tools that were not designed for their jobs.
According to Leah Nurik, CEO and co-founder of Brandi AI, that is not a small distinction.
You see, there were three gaps that shaped what Brandi AI chose to build.
First, traditional sentiment tools tend to return a positive or negative signal without explaining why. They also cannot always be configured around the specific brand themes a company wants to measure. Brandi AI’s patent-pending Sentiment Hub takes a different approach. It lets marketing teams define those themes and measure directly against them.
Second, some tools require heavy configuration that simply does not fit agency workflows. Add to it the fact that without daily data collection, teams can miss the window when earned media starts getting cited. Nurik notes that this window can open within hours of publication.
For Brandi AI, those gaps pointed to a larger problem: marketers needed tools that could show them what AI was saying about their brands and help them act on it quickly.
What AI Says About Your Brand Depends on How You Ask
Here is one of the more counterintuitive things Brandi AI’s platform surfaces: AI models can hold back quite a bit.
Their CEO explains that AI systems will not necessarily take a clear position on brand sentiment unless they are pushed with comparative, direct questions. So, organizations tracking only one dimension may be seeing a fairly non-committal version of what AI actually returns about their brand.
The multi-dimensional view is where things get more interesting. A healthcare brand, for example, might score well for “quality of therapists” nationally but disappear when the same question is asked about a specific regional market. A B2B company might show up strongly in awareness-stage conversations but vanish when a buyer starts comparing vendors.
Buyers, after all, do not all ask the same questions.
Brandi AI lets organizations define their own brand themes and measure whether those themes actually appear in AI-generated answers. In turn, teams can see where the narrative is strong, where it breaks down, and where competitors are showing up instead.
After all, brands relying only on traditional search, traffic, and PR metrics may be making decisions without seeing one increasingly important part of the picture: how AI represents them.
When Traffic Goes Down but Your Brand Is Actually Winning
The conventional reaction to declining website traffic is that something is broken. Nurik argues that assumption is becoming less reliable. She states:
This changes what marketers need to measure.
The AI-specific metrics Brandi focuses on include mention rate, citation rate, sentiment, and share of voice inside AI-generated answers. Traditional marketing dashboards may not capture any of them. In other words, a traffic decline does not necessarily tell the whole story anymore.
The Moment a Skeptical CMO Stops Arguing
Abstract arguments about AI visibility do not tend to move marketing leaders. A specific number does.
Nurik described one client example which shows how this measurement gap can become difficult to ignore. The client’s PR agency had generated 230 earned media pieces in a single month. That sounds like a strong result on paper. Yet Brandi AI measured the client’s AI awareness at 0.0%. Whereas one of their competitor was at 8%.
The team’s reaction, as she recalls, was:
That is the kind of number that changes the conversation. When a CMO sees no AI visibility while a competitor is already winning the AI conversation, the issue becomes difficult to dismiss. It is no longer a theoretical problem that might matter someday. It is a measurable gap happening right now. Moreover, customer examples are pointing in the other direction, too.
Brandi AI customers have reported meaningful results after addressing these gaps. One public sector SaaS organization increased its AI visibility sevenfold in two months, while a public relations agency reached the number one AI visibility position within 60 days.
Editor’s Note: Both figures are customer-reported.
The Competitors Nobody Thought to Track
There is another layer that makes AI visibility particularly interesting: the competitors you do not know you have.
Brandi AI’s Competitive Market Universe can surface companies that marketing teams never thought to track. In some cases, those businesses were not visibly competing with the brand in traditional channels yet.
For instance, a PR agency they worked with spotted two competitors in its client’s citation results that nobody had configured as competitors. They were showing up because AI was pulling their content into relevant conversations.
Traditional monitoring can show how brands appear across search, media, and the web. However, Brandi AI adds another layer by tracking how AI-generated answers represent those brands. And, increasingly, that extra layer may be the one marketers cannot afford to ignore.
What the Recognition Reflects About Where the Industry Is Heading
More than 180 organizations worldwide participated in judging the 2026 Stevie Awards for Technology Excellence. The Gold award is the competition’s highest recognition. It went to Brandi AI in the New Product of the Year category for Advertising, Marketing and Public Relations Technology.
The Stevie is also one of several recognitions Brandi AI has received in 2026. The platform received the Intellyx Digital Innovator Award and earned High Performer status in G2’s Summer 2026 Grid Report for Answer Engine Optimization. Brandi AI says its Summer 2026 G2 results included 100% scores for competitive benchmarking and AI visibility reporting. It also won Gold at the 2026 Bulldog PR Awards in the inaugural Best Answer Engine Optimization Results in a PR Campaign category.
More importantly, the recognitions are pointing to a broader shift. The industry is paying increasing attention to the measurement gap between traditional marketing metrics and AI-generated discovery. And that gap is becoming harder to ignore as buyers use AI to research companies, compare products, and decide which vendors are worth considering.
Perhaps that is what Brandi AI’s story ultimately points to. Marketers have spent years learning how to measure whether a brand is being seen. Now they also need to understand what is being said about that brand in the AI-generated answers where buyers are increasingly forming their first impressions.
