Indexa's Launch Confirms AI Visibility Tracking Is Now Mainstream

A new AI brand visibility platform called Indexa launched this week, tracking how companies are described, recommended and cited across AI systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. Its arrival matters less because of the product itself and more because of what it confirms: measuring your brand's presence inside AI answers has become a mainstream marketing discipline, not a niche experiment. If you're not yet tracking this, competitors already are.

What changed?

Indexa launched its AI brand visibility tools this week, positioning itself as a way for companies to see how they show up inside AI-generated answers rather than traditional search results. According to the launch announcement, the company analyses the questions and prompts in which a brand appears across AI systems, how the brand is described and recommended, which sources are cited or associated with it, and how its visibility compares with competitors.

The framing from the announcement is telling. It cites Boston Consulting Group's description of large language model visibility as "a new and necessary form of digital shelf space" for brands. That's a significant shift in language: shelf space used to mean where your product sat in a supermarket aisle or on page one of Google. Now it means whether an AI system mentions you at all when someone asks for a recommendation.

Indexa's co-founder and CEO, Bunyamin Sarac, said companies are beginning to add a new question to the metrics they already use to understand their digital presence. In plain terms: marketing teams that have spent years watching rankings, impressions and click-through rates are now asking a different question entirely, namely whether AI tools even know their brand exists.

This launch didn't happen in isolation. It arrives during a month where the scale of AI-driven search has become impossible to ignore. Reporting from Winbuzzer notes that Google reported more than 2.5 billion monthly active users for AI Overviews and more than 1 billion for AI Mode in May 2026, while Bing reached 1 billion monthly active users in 2026. These aren't fringe features anymore. They're the front door to search for a huge share of the internet's users.

Why does this matter for your business?

The core problem Indexa and similar tools are built to solve is the one described by marketing analyst Jarred Smith: your website might be perfectly optimised, and AI platforms might still be forming opinions about your brand based almost entirely on what other people say about you elsewhere on the web. That's a fundamentally different challenge from classic SEO, where you had far more direct control over how your own pages ranked.

The stakes for getting this wrong, or simply not knowing where you stand, are real and quantifiable. Research cited by Smith found that brands cited in AI Overviews earn 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks compared with those left out entirely, describing this as a halo effect that spreads across every other marketing channel. If an AI system never mentions your brand when a prospective customer asks a relevant question, you don't just lose that one interaction. You lose the compounding advantage that visibility creates everywhere else.

This is precisely why a wave of new visibility platforms is entering the market. Unlike a Google results page, an AI-generated answer synthesises information from multiple sources into a single, often brief, response. As the Indexa launch piece puts it, an AI-generated answer can synthesise information from multiple sources into a single response, which makes the context in which a company is mentioned, or whether it appears at all, increasingly relevant to brand perception. There is no "page two" to fall back on. Either you're part of the answer, or you're invisible.

The wider industry data backs this up. A study of over 10,000 queries reported by MarketingProfs found that AI search platforms vary significantly in how they cite sources based on user intent, with ChatGPT performing best on informational queries, Google AI Overviews excelling in commercial and transactional contexts, and Claude providing the most balanced results. The same research concluded that visibility in AI-driven search depends on aligning content with intent-specific retrieval patterns, not just traditional SEO factors. In other words, there isn't one algorithm to please. There are several, each with different habits, and brands need to understand how each one treats them.

For founders and marketing leaders, the practical implication is straightforward. If a growing share of your prospective customers are researching suppliers, comparing providers or asking for recommendations through ChatGPT, Gemini or AI Overviews rather than typing keywords into Google, then your visibility inside those answers is now a business metric, not a technical curiosity.

What should you do now?

Start by finding out where you currently stand. You cannot fix a visibility problem you haven't measured, and guessing based on how you rank in traditional search results won't tell you much about how AI systems describe you, or whether they mention you at all.

A sensible first step is to test a set of realistic buyer questions, the kind a customer would genuinely ask an AI assistant, and see what comes back. Are you named? Are you described accurately? Which competitors show up instead of you, and why might that be? This is the same territory tools like Indexa, Scrunch AI and Profound are now built to monitor at scale, but you can get a useful first read without heavy tooling. If you want a quicker way to check where your own brand currently stands across these systems, Sited's free audit at sited.online gives you a starting snapshot without needing to run the tests manually.

Beyond measurement, the fix tends to come back to fundamentals: clear, evidence-backed content that answers real questions directly, structured so that AI crawlers can read and cite it, and reinforced by the kind of third-party mentions, reviews and data that AI systems draw on when forming an opinion of your brand. None of this is exotic. It's closer to good PR and clear writing than to any secret technical trick, but it needs to be done deliberately, with AI answers in mind rather than only search rankings.

Finally, keep watching this space rather than treating it as a one-off project. The platforms shaping these answers, and the tools tracking them, are both moving fast. What earns a citation in ChatGPT or Google AI Mode today may work differently in a few months, so ongoing tracking matters more than a single audit.

Frequently asked questions

What is AI brand visibility?

It refers to how often, and how accurately, a brand is mentioned, described or recommended by AI systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews, rather than how it ranks on a traditional search results page.

Why are new tools like Indexa launching now?

Because a large and growing share of search traffic now flows through AI-generated answers rather than lists of links, and businesses have very little native visibility into how those answers describe them, creating demand for dedicated tracking tools.

Is AI visibility the same as SEO?

Not exactly. Traditional SEO focuses on ranking your own pages, while AI visibility depends heavily on what other sources say about you across the web, since AI systems synthesise multiple sources into a single answer rather than linking to a ranked list.

How can a small business check its AI visibility without expensive tools?

Ask AI assistants the kinds of questions your customers would genuinely ask, and see whether you're mentioned and described accurately. Free audit tools, including Sited's at sited.online, can also give you a quick baseline reading.

Does being cited by AI guarantee more customers?

Not automatically, but data suggests it helps significantly. Brands cited in AI Overviews have been shown to earn substantially more organic and paid clicks than those left out, creating a knock-on benefit across other marketing channels.