Leah Nurik and Brandi AI: How the Bots are Rewiring Search, Brands, and Trust

The rules of marketing are changing faster than most companies can keep up. Search engines are becoming answer engines. AI is replacing blue links with synthesized recommendations. And brands that spent years optimizing for algorithms now face a new challenge: how do you stay visible when the machines are deciding what gets seen?

The 75th episode of Bald Ambition features Mookie sitting down with Leah Nurik, co-founder and CEO of Brandi AI, to explore the rapidly emerging world of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and AI-driven brand visibility. As AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini increasingly shape how consumers discover products, services, and information, Leah argues that the future belongs not to brands that game the system, but to those that earn trust, build credibility, and tell authentic stories.

The conversation goes far beyond keywords, rankings, and technical optimization. Leah explains why traditional SEO is giving way to a more sophisticated landscape where meaning matters more than matching, where brand purpose matters more than metadata, and where reputation is shaped by thousands of signals spread across the internet. Together, she and Mookie unpack how AI is transforming marketing from a collection of disconnected tactics into an intelligence function that can influence everything from communications and sales to product development and customer experience.

They discuss why mission-driven companies are uniquely positioned to thrive in the AI era, how marketers can use emerging GEO tools to understand sentiment and visibility in real time, and why AI-generated content devoid of the human touch may ultimately undermine the very brands trying to scale it. Leah also shares how Brandi AI helps organizations measure, monitor, and improve how they appear across AI search platforms, while revealing the surprising ways AI can expose misinformation, outdated narratives, and hidden reputation risks.

Along the way, the discussion tackles one of the biggest fears facing modern marketers: loss of control. In a world where anyone can publish, every platform influences perception, and AI synthesizes information from countless sources, how can companies protect their reputations and shape their narratives? Leah argues that transparency, credibility, and consistent storytelling are becoming the ultimate competitive advantages.

If you've been hearing terms like GEO, AI visibility, AI search, brand intelligence, or answer-engine optimization and wondering what they actually mean for your business, this episode offers a practical, jargon-free look at where marketing is heading next. More importantly, it explores why the human element—creativity, empathy, strategy, and authentic storytelling—may become more valuable than ever in an age increasingly dominated by machines.

The bots may be getting smarter, but according to Leah Nurik, the brands that win will still be the ones built by humans for humans. Give them a listen!

The Guest

Leah Nurik is co-founder and CEO of Brandi AI, a Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and AI visibility platform that helps brands measure and improve how they appear across AI-powered search and discovery channels. She launched Brandi after recognizing that generative AI was fundamentally changing how customers find products, services, and information.

A veteran entrepreneur and marketing strategist, Nurik previously founded Gabriel Marketing Group, an award-winning agency that served more than 400 high-growth technology companies. Earlier, she helped grow Motorola's field mobility applications business from $25 million to $250 million in annual revenue, advising hundreds of partners on product marketing and growth strategy.

With more than 25 years of experience in B2B technology, SaaS marketing, public relations, and brand strategy, Nurik has been recognized by PR News, DC Inno, and SmartCEO. Today, she helps organizations adapt to the shift from traditional search to AI-driven discovery, turning brand visibility and reputation into measurable business results.

http://mybrandi.ai/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome to Baldwin. Paul hosts Bookie Spitz, the one with all the ambition today is Leah Eurik. She is CEO and founder of Brandy AI. Welcome aboard, Leah.

SPEAKER_01 0:17

Thanks, Wookiee. Thank you for having me. And thank you for the opportunity to have a great conversation about AI and GEO and all things marketing.

SPEAKER_00 0:27

AI, GEO, and all things marketing is essentially the essence of marketing these days. Gone are the days where you could just meta tag and do SEO and hope for the best with Google. And we've entered an age where more and more people are using their bots to find stuff. And the question becomes for brands, for products, for services, for just about everyone, how can I be visible to the bots in ways where I could get my messaging to the right people in the right way? And Brandy AI is a software company that helps companies do that. Can you give us a little background in terms of what your capabilities are, what clients could expect, and how you're different because the space is getting increasingly crowded because everyone knows where the winds are blowing?

SPEAKER_01 1:21

Yeah, sure. So we are in what we we call like a brand intelligence GEO, AI visibility platform. So what we do is we help companies, our software and technology helps companies measure, monitor, track, and optimize how their brands are returned in AI search results. And those could be across any of the AI models, whether it's ChatGPT or whether it's Perplexity or Claude. But also not to forget that the traditional paradigm of going to Google or going to Bing and performing a search has fundamentally changed as well. That before, when you got a blue link, even if you're still in a Google toolbar, 80% or more of the time you will get a synthesized summary, right? That we call AI overview. So the algorithm that that has uh traditionally returned search results has changed fundamentally. And so that requires a completely new approach. Um and it that's what we do. It's what we help our customers do and then measure the impact on the work that they are doing in order to increase the visibility of their brand.

SPEAKER_00 2:37

You bring up a great point about relevance because a lot of folks will push back, they'll say, well, when you look at the metrics, less than 10% of folks are actually using their bots to find stuff. And people are still going to Google, they're still going to Bing. Old habits are hard to break, but again, to your point, Google, Microsoft, they understand this need and they're trying to get ahead of it. And you've got AI search. And Google just announced last week, week before, that the blue links are eventually going to vanish as well. And they're going to redefine how search is actually going to be experienced by billions of users across the planet. So tell us what exactly is going on with GEO versus SEO. Because now there's a whole new way of looking at content that products and services are letting out into the world. And there's certain things that, let's say, me as a brand or a company should be doing. And there are other opportunities that you provide for making that content more effective, for making it more visible, and for helping me as a client do better at being more visible across these AI-driven search engines.

SPEAKER_01 4:00

Yeah, so the so the algorithms have shifted. So they are more intent-driven. So before it was about keyword matching, and is my keyword, is the keyword matching to this domain, and then it would return a blue link, and the search, the person doing the research would click on it. And that's a much different concept than oh, okay, it's giving me a synthesized response that has all this meat in it. Like there's new, like your audience, they're marketers, right? So, like so many, I my background is 100% marketing, PR, product marketing, um, brand strategy. So all of the nuance and storytelling, all of what is the definition of a market, why is my company, why should my company, and why is my company the default status quo of what is the ultimate ideal of what that market and product should be, all of that now, all of that great conceptual intellectual work that we did as marketers can now be reflected in the answer. And it's so exciting if you've been a brand strategist or career or you're a comms pro or a product marketer. It's extremely exciting to know that the work and the hard problems that you've been working to solve can now actually very easily, if done correctly, be reflected in the answer and directed in a way that the consumer or the B2B buyer will see that and they'll experience it. It's also important, and I can't stress this enough in our view of the world, and I've believe this fundamentally to the core of who I am as a marketer, is that the companies that will win are those that are mission-driven. They're the ones that are focused on actually delivering products and services that truly deliver on the brand promise. This is not trickery. This is not, you know, tricky tricky the AI for a short-term game. This is long-term strategic messaging and brand consistency reflected in all corners of the world, of which AI is one. And so that is a very different approach to digital discovery than most marketers have had for the past decade plus. And um, brandy, you asked me about differentiation, and I don't want to like overly sell brandy. Um, I want to be helpful and to your users, I mean to your listeners. But one of the things that makes us different, and one of the things I think that for me gets me so incredibly excited about living in a marketing, uh, an AI first marketing world is um that uh that kind of approach of understanding the importance of storytelling, mission, and credibility in how you communicate as well as listen to your customers is the future. And so you don't have to um you can actually focus on on doing that for the first time, and you will reap the benefits of revenue growth because of it if it's done correctly.

SPEAKER_00 7:26

Absolutely. The old school way of drawing these connection points between content creators, products, services, companies, and their consumers was fairly chaotic and opaque. And a lot of this was driven in digital, to your point, about keyword matching. So you had the spiders that would go out, and it was kind of a dumb operation. I mean, the Google algorithm is what catapulted the company to the trillion dollar outfit it became, was superior to the others. But it was basically slicing and dicing content and matching it by syntax, essentially. Here's a word, it matches, draw connections, bid on ads, and then you become available. But what you're saying, which is such a profound evolution of that, is thanks to AI, it's semantic. The meaning behind your content is now understood by the engines of delivery like never before. So as a marketer, we'd be like, Well, we need our SEO person. And they're gonna slice and dice, and then they're gonna go through the rulebook, and we're gonna meta tag our sites for visibility. And the new way of doing it is to your exact point: what's our mission? What's our purpose? What is the context for the benefits that we provide? And that's an unprecedented opportunity to be bold, be open, and be unabashed about your purpose, how you're different. And for the first time, the bots and the engines are recognizing that meaning and are able for the first time to connect the dots with the right kind of audience who'd be most interested in who you are, what you do, and not only that, but why you do it.

SPEAKER_01 9:28

That that is a hundred it is so true. And so it's it actually is also going to force, or I think, force organizations that have been focused, that don't aren't necessarily mission-driven. They'll either have to shift to that in order to be authentic and credible in what they're putting out there, not just with content, but not just their own content, because it's we know that over, I think it's over 80% of the citations and the places that are actually feeding the AI are off domain. So they're not your own domain. They can be media coverage, they can be influencers, they can be social networks, they can be all of those things. So you need to have a coherent, consistent message, but it has to be authentic and credible and backed up by third-party validation. So if you've been, you know, trying to do all the tricks and not live in your not living your purpose, guess what, guys? You better now, or you're going to lose. Um, so I I kind of love that. I love that the democratization for brands and for markets that comes from AI search because it means that the best companies, the ones with purpose, the one who have the best products, the one who fulfill what they say they're going to do, that they will be the ones that win. And so you can get, you're getting regulation of mission without regulation. And so um, that is uh it's kind of cool. And it's really great if you're a brand strategist or a communications person, because this is kind of the story that, and probably why you went into the into the work that you're doing anyway. And now it's absolutely not only affecting um search, buyer discovery, and actual growth of um of the company, but it's also bringing um KPIs and measurement ability for the first time to personas within the marketing department that never had them, that they were fuzzy. And you'd go into the CFO's office and they'd be like, get out of here. I don't see the through line to ROI. And now you're like, hey, buddy, here they are. We got brand new KPIs. So you're not cutting my budget on the thing that's actually making the most impact. And so that's really exciting too as a marketer. It's kind of what drives a lot of what we're doing at Brandy.

SPEAKER_00 11:54

Everything's getting smarter from the bottom up. We usually create that pyramid from features to advantages to benefits, right? And we know that especially the consultative brands, the brands that offer more sophisticated mission and value, are benefits driven rather than just a spec sheet of features. And this is analogous in digital marketing, where you can look at the feature-driven nuts and bolts engine of visibility in the past as the meta tagging, as the keywords. And thanks to the intelligence of the bots in doing these search protocols, the entire conversation has been elevated to one of delivering benefits. And they see that. And back in the day, you had Google Panda. Remember, if you lay in your links to cross-reference sources, then you're in a sense going to trick the algorithm into building authority. But now the authority comes organically, in the sense to your point where get out there, not just share your press release and go through the checklist of marketing, but build credibility in a natural way where other people recognize your good work, do podcasts, engage with your clients. The bots now are not only seeing everything, but they're connecting the dots between these authoritative sources to build, in a sense, the profile of your organization in a way that's reflective of all of these essential features, like never before. And it's awesome for a marketer to realize that no effort is wasted, that it doesn't just live on your website as meta tags, but it's a reflection of the full 360 of what value you're providing your customers in the world.

SPEAKER_01 13:46

Yeah, no, yeah, I I agree wholeheartedly. I also think that one of the things that people don't often talk about in this emerging GEO space is the value of the human input into all of this. So, you know, humans are the ones who buy. The AI's not gonna buy, right? But humans also need to be the ones that are creating the content. So all of the like we were talking about panda and we know about the panda update and kind of what that did. If you have, you know, and of so many companies being caught on their heels and like, you know, losing credibility and losing rankings, if you follow this, the production of human-generated content optimized for AI, not written by AI, optimized for AI, written by a human, and you don't try to trick the AI, but you live a credible world, a credible life out there as a brand in all the things you're talking about, then you are not at risk of a model change, of you know, we changed this, and now my brand is completely up a creek without a paddle. Because you have a long history of credible production of content that is real, that it's not uh it's not written by AI because just the nature of AI itself is a synthesis of what already exists. And what makes a brand interesting is what is unique about it and how it connects emotionally with the people who are gonna buy your product. AI can't do that. So, our product at Brandy, what we do is we take you through workflows that make humans more efficient, give you insight into the real pains of what your customers are feeling and where there might be gaps of things that you need to address that you're not addressing, or because there's gaps, where is there misinformation about your brand? And then to make suggestions to you, and then that is human-led and human-driven, and then optimized with AI. So the creative is still, the creative is still doing all the things that make creativity amazing, and and also with an understanding of how do I just structure this so that it's read and found, which is quite different than these tactical type of people that are trying to solve these problems through trickery and like, you know, the lowest common denominator. You know, we all know that brand equity is crucial to growth. It's what sustains companies through hard times and hard economies. Um, so build the brand equity, optimize with AI for AI, but human-generated.

SPEAKER_00 16:32

The antidote to AI slop, ironically enough, and perhaps fittingly enough, is tons of AI slop. If people are just prompting and barfing out content, to your point, they're just pulling from content other people have already pulled from. And then it's like a cat chasing its own tail, and you're just feeding more garbage into the system. So if your goal is different, what do we do as marketers? Positioning, differentiation, and to your point, pulling it back to the values of your organization and that emotional benefit, then a human creating this and putting it together and dovetailing off of these superior tools and technologies to make those enhanced connections is what it's all about. And that and that's a terrific and enlivening point of view because you and I have been doing this for a while, and it's been such a gap between the high-level aspirations of us putting together a brand identity, a brand story, the messaging hierarchy that are reflective of how our companies are unique, our clients are unique. And then there's this enormous chasm between just bots or spiders looking for keywords. And now these two ends are coming together in the algorithms and mechanisms of discovery. And that's huge in terms of opportunity. And it sounds like your software company creates this engine to help make it happen, of which a key component, again, is the human one and it's not the engineered one.

SPEAKER_01 18:14

Yeah, there's, you know, the I think that the core components to understanding brand integrity and value in this world are okay, does anybody even know about me? Am I coming up? And you might have brands that have incredible uh name, like presence in our culture and and and recognition, but they're not necessarily dominating AI search results. And they're not coming up because they haven't made the shifts required in structure. Or, for example, you know, you might be a consumer brand that's very careful about what outlets you talk to because you're very, you know, you want to create a sense of scarcity. But everybody needs to rethink all of that because all of those things come contribute to how you come up. And of course, it's not just about coming up in an AI search. We all know brand is not just about, hey, am I coming back in an AI search as well? No, that's not the purpose of a press release, most press releases. It's not, okay, I'm just gonna put out this press release so that I show up in AI. However, um, it's a consideration of, you know, how am I gonna structure my release? What am I gonna talk about? And in order to have that strategy, as a human strategist, you need to understand where you're lacking, where you're coming up, where you're not. So measurement is core, it's key, it's stable table stakes. In addition to that, though, the ability to see how am I coming up? Is it good? Is it bad? Is it right? Is it wrong? I know that I've defined my brand pillars and thematics by these five core things. How do I actually compare differentiated-wise against those core thematic pillars of my brand to my competitors or to tangential brands? So, which is basically the dent definition of what we would always want the, you know, the holy grail of sentiment to be. Um, and now at Brandy, this is something that we've pioneered. We actually have patent pending solution that we call our sentiment hub. Um, that is really for the first time, the configure, the ability to configure the definition of what your category is according to your view of what the market should be, and then measure it accordingly and identify where is that coming from? Is every is it is it coming from, is my positive sentiment coming from the coverage that my PR firm got me? Is it coming from my blogs that I wrote? Is it coming from an influencer on Instagram or TikTok that has the following of, you know, 100 million people? Where is it coming from? So then where do I double down? And if it's wrong, where do I go to fix it? And that's something we've never been able to do. And then third, all right, what should I put out? How can I listen to what my customers really need? And then what should I put out? And then how do I structure it accordingly? And and should is my is my site right or wrong? Is this blog correct? Is this contributed article that I'm placing going to be searched? Is this press release I'm putting out structured correctly? Am I on the right wire for maximum visibility? All of that from a brand intelligence standpoint are things that you can do with brandy. And that I will then say that we believe are the core, you know, our own thematic configuration of what the GEO and brand intelligence market in the age of AI should be.

SPEAKER_00 21:53

So you've outlined the full service spectrum of needs across what we're calling GEO. Which is generative engine optimization, which obviously plays off the SEO, which was just your traditional search engine optimization. And if I'm hearing you correctly, part one is the measurement component. So I've got presence already, it's legacy. I've been doing this for a while. You're enabling companies and your clients to gain unprecedented visibility as to what's out there through the lens of the new reality. To your point, there's a blogger chirping here, it's Instagram, TikTok. Is someone saying something on Reddit? Uh, other sources of authority, and otherwise, there could be negative sources as well. And I want to talk to you about that in a second, too. But the entire internet is chirping. The Christmas tree lights are flashing, and then your brand is popping up, and you give your clients through your software visibility into that. The next step, if I'm hearing you correctly, is understanding what it means, which is how does this translate into an effective strategy for optimizing how I'm connecting with the world? And then the third part is a game plan, in a sense, which is what can I do now recognizing what's going out there, using the strategy that you recommend to become more visible, to have my word get out with greater fluidity and establish even more touch points and connection opportunities with the digital universe and potentially even offline to reinforce it, to do what I do as a marketer and communicator, which is expand, ultimately expand reach engagement and downstream convert to whatever I'm offering the world. Is that more or less a summary of the landscape?

SPEAKER_01 24:01

Yeah, yeah, it's you know, uh identify, analyze, act, and see the loop, right? Um, but in addition to that, so it's pretty interesting too, is that like you can take all of that data, like all that sentiment data and all that information and competitive information that you're gathering, and that can also be used to inform actions that happen outside of marketing. So, for example, if you're Jeep, we have a demo instance we've been running forever on Jeep, they have terrible sentiment and perception and reliability and dealer services, like horrible, like way lower than any of these other uh car companies that are in like the SUV and off-road market. And so, like if you were Jeep, you might be using that data through very clean, clean and easy integration into like your own, let's say you have your own enterprise LLM, like you use Claude or Copilot internally, where you can just easily plug into all of that brandy data. And then that starts to all of like the understanding of like how unreliable certain parts are in your Jeep, how is that actually going to affect what supply chain does within Jeep? How is that going to affect dealer relations, uh, which is another component, right? So it you can utilize AI search answers and the information that comes out of Brandy almost as um like a touch point of research because it is the perception and it and it and it becomes the this is the reality of how you're perceived. So what you can stand there and say, well, no, my supply chain's great. My my my parts are great. Well, okay, you can stand there screaming in the corner, like, yeah, into the wall, into a pillow, like, no, they're great. Nobody's gonna hear you. So you better know what they're saying and then take action accordingly.

SPEAKER_00 25:58

Um unprecedented market research. I mean, up to this point, you'd hire other companies and vendors specializing, and you know, we're gonna do a social landscape analysis for you. And these were See you in six months. Exactly. I was just gonna say they're elaborate, they're expensive. And you and I have seen the outputs of these social listening landscapes. And, you know, if you can get through 400 slides to an executive summary that's actually actionable, then you're lucky. It's a it's an elaborate process, but you offer a real-time dynamic interface, I'm assuming, with the Christmas tree lights going on in real time, aggregating all of that, seeing it through the lens of this new AI reality, and doing that semantic analysis. So to your point where, you know, hey Jeep folks, you've got these issues. It's transparently coming up. And that's our job is to move the needle in the other direction with recommendations on how to shift that perception into behaviors that's better beneficial for your brand.

SPEAKER_01 27:07

Yeah, I mean, the marketer's job is to maybe um to like uh surface it and show you. Um, and then it's the supply chain's job to fix the problem and then let marketing know that know what they did. And then for marketing to say, let me get the word out there, and then I'm gonna tell you how it's actually changing perception. And then look at that. I'm drawing a through line to increase customer retention and repeated buys of Jeeps. Yeah, I mean, not to throw Jeep under the table because actually my husband has a Jeep and he loves it, but um uh but you know, it it this is the case. There it it there's also like just disinformation. The other thing to remember, and you know this, Mookie, is that if you don't have a good answer, if it doesn't, if you didn't put out a good answer to address these things, the AI is gonna make it up. So a lot of the disinformation that comes back in the sentiment hub is actually just from a lack of information that's available. So it might say like you're pricing, like you're negatively positioned for pricing, like 3.1 out of 10. And the and we've it's actually happened with a customer where they're like, why is it saying that? That's not what it is. It's because they gated their pricing so much. So there's no way for the AI to actually know what the pricing is. And so when that's the case, they made a strategic decision to at least put out some information around their pricing so that it wasn't so negatively positioned and that they weren't, because we know that people are doing research in these, in these, um, in these paradigms, these AI paradigms, so that when they come to make a purchase, they're already so incredibly qualified that your conversion rate, whether it's on, if you're an e-commerce company, it's on site. That's one thing. Or when they go to the dealer, you know, they're looking like maybe they, you know, they've gone to two dealers, so they're pretty well qualified. And you know, that is a complete shift in how we used to talk about deal flow and conversion of where they were in the funnel or where they were in the buyer journey. It's completely up-ended. Um, and it's exciting for the consumer because they're in charge, where before the brand was in charge with the blue link, and then I got, you know, 30 blue links and I had to hunt and peck around and make my own choice and was had all this bias from like, you know, brand content that telling me like what it should be, where now they're they're empowered. So now it's the brand's turn to cater to the customer.

SPEAKER_00 29:25

What's wild is we're shifting gears from this old school idea that marketing and communications were always downstream.

SPEAKER_01 29:37

Oh my gosh, you're talking my language, man.

SPEAKER_00 29:41

You do market research and you you build your brand, and then you do tactics, and then you put together your multi-channel campaign, which became omni-channel.

SPEAKER_01 29:53

I was gonna say you mean omni-channel?

SPEAKER_00 29:56

And then and then downstream, you pick tactics, and then you buy ads and you bid on Google, and all of these were acting pretty much in isolation, and it was pretty much a linear process, too. It was just like a production line. But what's happened, thanks to all the visibility and everything that you've been describing over the past half hour, is that the shift is focused where the marketing and communication function becomes, in a sense, the brain of the organization because it's got real-time intelligence that's coming in, and it's synchronizing, in a sense, a lot of the other capabilities of the organization because it's giving unprecedented transparency to the reality of this ecosystem of customer and creator. And that's a huge shift in thinking. So the interface that you're offering is an intelligence nexus for the organization up to the C-suite to not only see what's going on, but to be able to respond to it pretty much dynamically in real time to monitor this relationship rather than breaking it into pieces, siloing all the capabilities, and really reducing the ability and efficiency of a brand to ultimately connect with its audience.

SPEAKER_01 31:28

Yeah, and I would say real time, but also it's still very important for the human to make the call on the next action. So, you know, there's a lot of companies out there with like, you know, not necessarily in my space, but just in general with AI, where it's like, oh, let's just automate everything. Go ahead, update this, update my website, update this, put this out, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, automate, automate, automate.

SPEAKER_00 31:53

Vivecode your reality.

SPEAKER_01 31:56

But the thing is, is that we highly recommend you do not do that. Um, you know, not to say that the world won't change at some point, but I I believe very strongly in the importance of the authentic authenticity of brand marketing. And so when you can gain insights, but you still need to have that human connection, and that that is crucial in order for future-proofing the brand. So, you know, the promise of AI companies in the marketing sector that are just like, you know, hey, I can press a button and out comes 35 pieces of content that are going to fill the gap in AI. Do not do that. It's so bad. It's not just it's bad because it all you cared about was revenue growth. It's really bad. If you also, if you also cared about how your how your customers perceive you from an empathy and actual trust standpoint, it's really bad too. So I I can't underscore that enough that um that it's really still very important. And and there's so many companies out there that are like platform companies and AI companies that are promising what I is basically snake oil. Like it's not, it doesn't work. You know what to do as a brand marketer. The only thing that's changed is that the personas within the marketing organization are being elevated and structured content, and now you have a way to listen and affect brand storytelling in a way that you've never been before.

SPEAKER_00 33:29

Don't be an AI slop engine, be a strategic partner. And now, more than ever before, you've got the tools to be able to do that, which is what what you're offering. I do want to bring up reputation though, which is at the core of marketing, especially for PR. And one concern that that I've seen that has gotten exacerbated with a lot of these capabilities, frankly, is negative press, negative impact. Because one of the biggest issues that marketers and PR people have been grappling since digital is the loss of control. I was over at Edelman in New York, and I had old, I'm an old school guy, and there were even more old, old school guys. And they go way back to print and broadcast TV. And I used to love to talk to them at the water cooler. You know, how was it? How's it going? And one of the top guys, he used to say, I used to take the Long Island Railroad and I would open up the newspaper and check, make sure that we did our job. I would close it, put it under my arm, and it was a job well done. They had very narrow channels, they had only a handful of key spots they had to be in, and they were in control of their message. That was it. Now, with digital first, and now AI, there's all these opportunities, but I'm in technically even less of control of what people are talking about my brand and company, how people are relating to it, what my competition might be doing and saying. And there's a mountain, there's petabytes of misinformation and chaos out there. So, how do you grapple with some of those fears and what's built into your capability to mitigate some of that concern and give your clients more, not less, control over how their brand is connecting with the world?

SPEAKER_01 35:48

Yeah, okay, so that's I mean, this is this is a really good intellectual conversation, right? So it's so number one is we were just talking about about being mission-driven. You have to do the right thing. Okay, so you have to actually have really good products and services, and then you're gonna have like less negative press. That just seems like fundamental and may might sound oversimplified. But you're always gonna have some negative Nelly out there who's like bringing you down if you're a big company anyway. But I can't, again, underscore the importance of actually true mission-driven companies that are doing that. Number one. Number number two is the ability, like within Brandy, you can actually see where negative sentiment is coming from.

SPEAKER_00 36:31

Okay, that that's what I wanted to get at. And I would want that.

SPEAKER_01 36:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:36

Don't just give me the good news and don't just give me areas of improvement. I want to see the hot spots that are flaring because this is a big issue.

SPEAKER_01 36:46

Correct. Yeah. So it so what we have um in it's in the product, but just like for marketers to be empowered too, is that not only do you want to know where is the negative vibe coming from, which you can do down actually within Brandy, which is this part of the patent patent stuff, is like actually to the link level, to the domain level. Like um, like where, like I got this piece of coverage and it has positive sentiment and it's driving me up after I had a crisis. Fantastic, right? But also, why was I at 3.1? Where is that coming from? And so with Brandy, you can actually identify that. And so what's interesting is once you can identify that, you can kind of see like maybe I can't correct it because it's out of your control, as you're saying. But you can counteract the storytelling to address it. And what we know about how why, like what comes back in AI search is it's what's most authoritative, credible, and recent. So you know that from like the last, like our our stuff shows um all of our data. We have hundreds of millions of data points in our product where you can see that the citations are from our the over 50% of them come from the past 10 months. So even if you're in a hole, it doesn't mean you're gonna be in a hole forever. Um, but you can identify where and why it's happening. Maybe you can fix it if it's wrong. Um, I'll give you an example. And this is about negative sentiment, but not, but it's more about disinformation. So we have a customer who's a very large, like P platform company that had done like 10 acquisitions over the past five or six years. When they set up Brandy, they were like, we went, we spent so much money on this rebrand to put to change the names, and we did all these things. And why are the old brand names still coming up? Like, why are they still out there? Why are they, why is my old brand name beating me in a segment?

unknown 38:44

Right?

SPEAKER_01 38:44

Exactly. Well, with Brandy, you could with Brandy, you could they were able to identify where it was coming from. And it turned out it was coming from their partners who wanted their sentiment, we wanted the comp our customers' sentiment to be really high so they could sell more stuff. But they had never changed the pages. There were old pages that had been forgotten that had the old brand names on them that were being read, that they were in old training data, you know, and they were living out there on the internet. And so they were able to actually go to their partners and say, you need to change this, please change it. Or they were getting like stuff from like um user sites where they had old brands that were out there that were being pulled. So it gives you that ability to do that. And it's the same thing with negative with negative stuff. And so imagine as an agency or as a PR person or a brand, like a CMO who's dealing with like some horrible massive crisis and who has gone and gotten a whole bunch of money for to counteract that crisis, and who can then say, you know what, we spent this money, and our sentiment was like in the toilet, it was in the toilet, and then we went out and we did it. And here are all the actions we took and look at the sentiment, and now look at where the sentiment is. So, I mean, Mookie, it Mookie, it's like the that's a holy grail, a brand marketing and comps. It's here now.

SPEAKER_00 40:03

That's why I brought it up. It's like ground zero. And as we know, the tools that have been our disposal for sentiment analysis have sucked the most.

SPEAKER_01 40:14

You said it, I didn't. There's a reason we we made this product and why there's a patent pending on the product. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 40:23

I mean, that's why I'm getting to the core, the real heart of it, which is if you can be good, you just better at measuring sentiment. That's huge, a huge benefit. You see those little red to green. I've been seeing that for years. And I'm like, are you guys serious? This is this is worse than a wild ass guess. It's uh it's got no foundation. And for the first part, going all the way back to the beginning of our conversation, we're moving from syntax to semantics, from keywords to meaning, from meta tagging to mission. And that's transforming it, which is giving you amazing tools that you never had before to gain this kind of visibility. And it's very, very exciting. And to your point just now, we've been freaked out by negative press. We've been freaked out by feeling disempowered. But the freak out about negativity and that sense of disempowerment has a lot to do with the lack of effective tools at our disposal to gain this level of transparency. So if you open it up and you can see what's going on, and even better plan your strategy around real intelligence, real sentiment analysis, then you could have a prescriptive, effective plan to get your word out there in a way that's even more effective.

SPEAKER_01 41:51

I can see why you're in marketing, Mookie. You're very good at telling the telling the story in a concise way. I love it.

SPEAKER_00 41:59

And it actually excites me because I know we're only as good as the tools are at disposal. And then we could sell in a great strategy, but if it's challenging to execute because you don't have the visibility, then our hands are tied. So bravo to to you to upping everyone's game and making these tools and technologies available. It's it's very, very exciting. And how did you just just as a personal note, how did you come to found it and engineer it? This is a sophisticated effort. How'd you bring it all to the end?

SPEAKER_01 42:41

I ran an agency for 14 years, um, and it was focused on the tech space, and I worked with hundreds of companies that were um trying to define markets. Um, and the agency was mostly focused on go-to-market and PR and brand strategy and product marketing. So uh we knew that it was a problem because, and we knew that, you know, we had kind of had the idea that wow, this is uh the stories that we've been telling, um, they're being reflected in AI search, and how do we maximize that for our clients? Um, I left the agency and I founded Brandy in order to solve that problem and brought together a bunch of great technologists, people that were in ad tech, people who had Martech experience, uh SEO digital people, as well as PR professionals, and we built this product and here we are.

SPEAKER_00 43:34

Homage to you. I've been living the same world and dealing with your exact same problems, only I've been like, oh man, this is a mess. And you're like, well, let's fix it. That is terrific.

SPEAKER_01 43:49

I'm lucky enough. I'm lucky enough to have a very good co-founder who's built uh some pretty amazing companies um very successfully in the software space and holds multiple patents and large data distributed computing. So uh he's pretty uh he's pretty good at building stuff, and and the rest of us, our team, they have the domain expertise. So it's the only platform out there that has that embedded comms brand strategy expertise built into it. And as marketers, we really try to make it not only intuitive, but these micro moments of delight. Like as marketers, we're very positive people. We're in what we're doing, most of us, because we're mission-driven and we want to impact change. So we really try to make the experience of being in brandy very positive and giving you that satisfaction of the work that you do every day, down to the individual contributor who's maybe monitoring and looking at data analytics, as well as the individual contributor, you know, maybe the young professional who's writing blogs all the way up to the CMO in a Fortune 500 uh company. Um, and that's really kind of what we try to do.

SPEAKER_00 45:01

Partnership. You partnered at the top with your techie bro to make it happen with your insights. And you're talking about partnerships every step of the way to keep that synergy in. Human, the human touch, folks. It's about people connecting with people. AI, I gotta say it one more time. AI is just a tool, it's not the thing. And uh, rather than resist it, embrace it to draw better and better human connections. So thank you so much for your time. Like, comment, share. I'll put links in the description of Brandy. And uh, I'm sure people would want to hear from you so they could reach out direct to see what kind of goodies you can offer. Thank you so much for your time, Leah. I wish you the best. And I'd love to circle back up with you six months a year, see how it's going because it's changing so fast. And what you're offering is really, just from my humble bald headed opinion, is so on point.

SPEAKER_01 46:00

Thanks, Mookie. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 46:03

Thank you.