Thinkerbell has launched Hi-Vis, a new offering that audits and improves how brands are seen, understood and recommended by AI models.
The agency rolled out the technology to address what it refers to as ‘the zero-click era’, where people ask AI directly what to buy, where to go, or who to trust. It settles on a shortlist before a human ever sees a brand name.
Dan Monheit, Chief CX Thinker at Thinkerbell, said: “Marketers have spent a century learning how humans choose brands. Now there’s a second decision-maker in the room, and it’s already read everything.
“The truth is that the machines have very human taste. They trust brands that are famous, talked about and coherent, and they’re suspicious of brands that make big claims with little to back them up.”
Hi-Vis assesses brands across three pillars:
It then produces a single Hi-Vis Score, benchmarked against competitors across the AI platforms customers use.
Chief Tinker, Tom Wenborn, said: “This is where most GEO and AI-SEO thinking gets it wrong, it treats AI visibility as a tech problem to be schema’d into better results, but the models are built to weigh third-party evidence over self-promotion.
“The brands winning in AI recommendations are the ones with cultural presence, the ones journos quote, communities discuss, and real people vouch for. Which means the answer to the biggest technical shift in marketing is still the old-fashioned one… be genuinely famous.”