By 2026, each and every corporate will finances for AI visibility, says Brandlight’s Imri Marcus

“By 2026, every company, every large enterprise, will have a line item in their budget that says ‘AI visibility.’ If you can be the CMO who figures this out in 2025, that could put you years ahead of the competition,” he stated.

Founded only a yr in the past, Brandlight has already raised $6m to assist Fortune 1000 manufacturers know the way they seem around the fast-evolving international of AI seek, spanning ChatGPT, Claude, Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot and others. His pitch is unassuming: persons are already the usage of AI to make purchasing selections, however maximum manufacturers don’t know what the ones engines are announcing about them, let by myself how you can affect them.

“Consumers are starting to find brands not in traditional search, but in AI engines – asking ChatGPT what’s the next car they should buy or what CRM they should use,” Marcus defined. “Brands are completely blind to how they’re being perceived across all these different engines. They’ve got no way to increase their visibility, improve sentiment or control their narrative. That’s what we help with.”

The Brandlight platform tracks how AI solutions are generated throughout engines and verticals, revealing the assets that form them. Sometimes it’s Reddit, every so often it’s Wikipedia or YouTube. Crucially, each and every engine behaves another way and so does each and every marketplace.

“There’s massive variation,” he stated. “And not getting it right comes at a high cost.”

So what’s the largest mistake CMOs are making? “The first mistake is waiting it out, taking the ostrich approach, head in the sand, seeing what others do first. But that means lost sales and lost opportunities,” stated Marcus. “You want your CMO to be a wolf, someone who can see the opportunity and move fast enough to capitalize on it.”

The 2d mistake, he stated, is underestimating the complexity. “You need a partner that understands the data, reflects changes and surfaces opportunities specific to your brand and sector. It’s moving too fast to go it alone.”

And it in reality is shifting rapid. Just days ahead of the ANA convention, Google made some of the largest pivots in its historical past, rolling out AI-generated solutions around the majority of its seek visitors. “Even for Google’s traditional platform, you still get an AI answer 60% of the time before you ever see the 10 blue links,” stated Marcus. “That’s happening today.”

He sees this as a seismic second for entrepreneurs. “Google went up on stage and essentially said, ‘AI search is going to take the front seat. It’s not an experiment any more…’ Can you really be a CMO after that announcement and say, ‘Let’s wait it out’? It just basically decided for you.”

For Marcus, this isn’t only a trade in interface. It’s a brand new fact the place acquire selections occur totally throughout the AI surroundings.

“Someone can go to ChatGPT and go through the entire consideration phase, from not knowing what CRM software they need to knowing exactly what they want to buy, without clicking a single thing,” he stated.

That development, zero-click trips, upends the whole thing entrepreneurs idea they knew about funnels and attribution. “You could have your SEO completely collapse, but still see purchases happening. It doesn’t correlate any more,” he stated. “That’s what we’re fixing.”

At the ANA tournament’s AI Ad-athon, Brandlight labored with EY and Plante Moran to assist the buyer groups construct campaigns grounded in AI seek information. The effects shocked even the individuals.

“You’ll see cases where a much larger brand gets outranked by a smaller competitor, probably without even knowing what they did right,” stated Marcus. “AI acts differently than traditional search. A company in the Fortune 20 can lose out to a mid-market firm in certain verticals because they’re not tuned into how the engines work.”

In one instance, Brandlight analyzed EY’s presence within the generation consulting house. “We looked both at its branded journeys, where people ask directly about EY, and unbranded awareness, which is what happens when someone searches for a solution, not a company name,” he defined. “You can have overwhelmingly positive sentiment in one place, but still very low visibility.”

And the results pass additional. The very thought of what a web site is – and who it’s for – is converting.

“Up until now, we built websites for our customers, for the buyers,” Marcus stated. “Brands now need to think about building websites for AI engines as well, because that’s sitting in everyone’s pocket and telling them what to buy.”

In this rising house, it’s conceivable to win with out clicks, simply by being well-sourced by means of AI.

“You can hypothetically have a completely effective website that no one ever visits, but AI just loves and sources it and uses it as a reference and as an ingredient to its answers all the time,” he stated. “That’s a new arena where brands really have to compete.”

It’s additionally a possibility, particularly for those who transfer early. “The brands that enter the arena first get to compete in a blue ocean,” he stated.

Asked whether or not this spells the top for normal search engine optimization, Marcus was once extra nuanced. “SEO definitely won’t disappear tomorrow. It’s still important. But a huge shift is coming.”

Brandlight is having a bet that businesses who act now will achieve long-term aggressive merit. “The velocity of change is exponential. When I used to speak to Fortune 50 CMOs six months ago, I had to create that lightbulb moment. That’s not the case any more. It’s top of mind for everyone now – they just haven’t figured out what to do yet.”