Former Yahoo exec Dan Richardson together with former Cartology and Coles 360 exec Bec Penn have launched a new consultancy, Obsessd.ai.
Obsessd.ai has launched with teams in Sydney and Melbourne and aims to help brands and retailers improve their AI discoverability and stay competitive in a fast shifting digital landscape.
The new business said that the major AI visibility platforms operate out of the US and Europe. Instead, its local presence gives brands a strategy built specifically for the APAC market.
Obsessd.ai’s launch clients include Personalised Favours, one of Australia’s largest personalised gift businesses, and By Yuliya, a Sydney fragrance brand founded by Yuliya Lozovyk, a recipient of the Australian Multicultural Foundation’s Carla Zampatti Scholarship for Young Women.
The business ensures its partners can be found and recommended by large language models consumers now rely on to research and decide, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Co-Pilot and Perplexity. The firm also advises on agentic media strategy, AI buying frameworks and media effectiveness.
Based on Obsessd.ai’s analysis of LLM citation patterns, displacing a competitor that has established default status in an AI category is estimated to cost significantly more than earning that position initially. More concerning still, in audits conducted across prominent Australian brands, it found that on average 60 per cent of AI discovery queries returned no brand result at all.
“When we sit down with local marketing teams and ask how they are performing in paid search or SEO, they have dashboards ready. But ask what ChatGPT versus Gemini or Claude says about their brand and most have no idea beyond screenshots from ad-hoc prompts. That’s the gap that we are here to fill,” said Richardson.
Unlike automated site audit tools that generate a list of what code is missing, Obsessd.ai combines strategic consulting with its proprietary OVI (Obsessd Visibility Index) measurement framework.
The OVI offers marketers a straightforward and standardised metric for brand visibility in AI, scoring businesses across Visibility, Accuracy, and Competitive Position on a single index.
This gives marketing and commercial leaders a defensible number for board and investment conversations, as well as benchmarking data to understand how they are performing versus their competitor set. It also measures performance across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Co-Pilot simultaneously.
“A brand that scores well on Claude but poorly on ChatGPT carries undetected revenue risk. Existing tools that sample brand mentions, sentiment or citations in a single platform miss this entirely. It’s now essential for all brands to have a strategy that works across all LLMs, not just some,” Richardson added.
“Brands have spent years and millions of dollars building awareness, but awareness is not discoverability. The AI layer does not care how much you have spent on the brand. It surfaces what it can read, what it trusts, and what has been structured to answer the question being asked. We built Obsessd.ai because no one else was solving this for Australian brands with the rigour it deserves,” said Penn, who also serves as the business’ chief product officer.
