About
Why I built SeenByAI
I co-founded Smart Insights with Dr. Dave Chaffey 16 years ago. It's now one of the most-read digital marketing resources online (100,000+ marketers globally every month) with a track record of covering channels before they go mainstream.
In 2021, my wife came to me with an idea for a nail wrap brand. I applied what I knew about digital marketing to help her build it. Hello Nails is now a $500k/year business, growing 50% year on year, run part-time alongside our day jobs. That experience makes me an ecommerce operator, not just a marketing strategist. I understand the pressures merchants face because I face them too.
Built for my own ecommerce brand first
When AI assistants started being used for product research, I did what I'd always done at Smart Insights: I started measuring. I queried ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini systematically across nail and beauty categories, asking the kinds of questions a shopper would ask. What I found was stark.
"AI visibility had almost no correlation with our Google rankings. Some of the best-ranked brands in our category were completely invisible in AI responses. And some brands that barely appeared in organic search were being recommended consistently."
I applied what I knew from 16 years at Smart Insights about content strategy, brand authority, and how editorial coverage spreads across the web, and started testing changes on Hello Nails. The scores moved. The methodology worked.
Then I realized every brand with an online presence had the same problem. There are tools that claim to measure AI visibility, but they're poorly scoped and don't show you the detail. None of them give you a step-by-step plan to actually close the gap. While SeenByAI started in the Shopify ecosystem, AI visibility affects every brand: ecommerce, publishers, SaaS companies, agencies, and services.
Why AI visibility is different from SEO
AI Knowledge models (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) draw on training data, not live search results. That training data comes from the broader web: editorial coverage, product reviews, forums, industry publications. A brand can dominate page one of Google and still be invisible in AI responses if the right kind of content doesn't exist across authoritative sources.
AI Search tools like Perplexity and Google AI Overviews do use live web results, but they weight signals differently from traditional search. Page structure, citation patterns, and how your content reads as a source all matter in ways that standard SEO doesn't account for.
The gap between your AI Search score and your AI Knowledge score tells you which problem you actually have, and which to fix first.
What SeenByAI does
SeenByAI measures your brand's visibility across five real AI systems on every run: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude, and Gemini. It tracks how often you appear, how you compare to competitors, and what the AI models actually say about you.
The Playbook gives you a prioritized action plan with effort ratings and timing estimates. AI Search improvements can show results in days or weeks. AI Knowledge changes take longer, typically 6-12 months as models update their training data. The app is honest about both.
Pro plan subscribers also get step-by-step implementation guides for every Playbook action. For 16 years, Smart Insights has published detailed, actionable guides for every major marketing channel: SEO, paid media, email, content strategy. Not high-level advice, but the kind of structured playbooks you can follow without needing a consultant. SeenByAI brings that same approach to AI visibility. If something is unproven, we say so. The guides are updated as the AI landscape evolves.
The Smart Insights connection
SeenByAI is an independent product, not affiliated with or owned by Smart Insights. Smart Insights covers it editorially because AI visibility is exactly the kind of emerging channel its audience needs to understand. The credibility runs both ways: Smart Insights' track record is why the measurement methodology is rigorous, and SeenByAI's data informs how Smart Insights educates its audience on how AI is reshaping product discovery.
SeenByAI is what I wished existed when I first started trying to understand why Hello Nails was invisible to AI models. I built it because I needed it, and it will continue to evolve as the area does.