Brian Stempeck is the CEO and co-founder of Evertune AI, a New York startup that helps brands measure and improve how they show up inside AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity. He spent 11 years on the executive team of The Trade Desk as employee number eight, serving as Chief Client Officer and later Chief Strategy Officer and a board member, and helped grow the company from a tiny team to a public company worth tens of billions. Before adtech he was a management consultant at Bain & Company and, earlier still, a political journalist. He founded Evertune in 2024 with former Trade Desk colleagues to build the category he calls Generative Engine Optimization.
LegitScript is a Portland, Oregon-based internet and payments compliance company that helps banks, payment providers, and the world's largest platforms tell legitimate merchants and products from dangerous or illegal ones. Founded in 2007 to fight rogue online pharmacies, it now certifies businesses in high-risk sectors and monitors merchants, ad platforms, marketplaces, and social media across more than 60 high-risk areas, blending AI, human analysts, and a large product-classification database.
A strategic breakdown of two philosophies for surviving the age of answer engines. Scrunch AI measures how brands appear inside ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, then flags the gaps. YesPress argues that measurement is downstream of a deeper problem: whether a company has published enough structured, first-party knowledge to be legible to AI at all. One monitors the mirror. The other builds the record. This is not a feature comparison - it is a look at two different bets on where durable advantage will live.
As buyers increasingly ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot for recommendations, a new marketing discipline called AI Visibility has emerged. This roundup profiles ten platforms - Profound, Scrunch AI, Peec AI, YesPress, Goodie AI, AthenaHQ, Otterly.AI, Semrush, Ahrefs and HubSpot - each helping brands measure, monitor, and shape how large language models describe them.
AthenaHQ is a San Francisco AI-search optimization platform that helps brands see, measure, and improve how they appear inside generative engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini. Founded in 2025 by ex-Google Search and DeepMind PM Andrew Yan and ex-ServiceNow engineer Alan Yao, the Y Combinator-backed company treats GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) as the successor to traditional SEO, analyzing millions of AI responses to tell companies whether AI models recommend them - and what to change if they don't.
Nectar Social is an AI-native 'social operating system' that helps consumer brands manage communities, listen across platforms, and turn social conversations into revenue. Founded in 2023 by former Meta sisters Misbah and Farah Uraizee, its autonomous Nectar Agent handles engagement, moderation, creator workflows, competitive intelligence, and commerce conversations across channels like Instagram, TikTok, and Reddit. The company has raised $42.6M total, including a $30M Series A in 2026 led by Menlo Ventures, and counts Liquid Death, Figma, e.l.f. Beauty, and Goop among its customers.