Independent creative agency Thinkerbell has launched a new product designed to help brands stand out to a new kind of audience – artificial intelligence.
Called Hi-Vis, the offering audits how visible, understandable and recommendable brands are across AI models such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews, as marketers grapple with a growing shift towards AI-powered discovery and “zero-click” search experiences.
The agency argues that as consumers increasingly ask AI assistants what to buy, where to go or which brands to trust, those models are becoming an influential gatekeeper between brands and customers, often delivering recommendations without users ever clicking through to a website.
“Marketers have spent a century learning how humans choose brands. Now there’s a second decision-maker in the room, and it’s already read everything,” said Thinkerbell chief CX thinker Dan Monheit.
“The truth is that the machines have a very human taste. They trust brands that are famous, talked about and coherent, and they’re suspicious of brands that make big claims with little to back them up.”
Rather than focusing purely on technical search optimisation, Thinkerbell said Hi-Vis measures brands across three areas: Fuel, which assesses what a brand says about itself across owned channels; Fluency, which measures how easily AI models can find, read and understand a brand; and Fame, which evaluates what third parties say about the brand across media, communities and other external sources.
The three metrics combine to produce a Hi-Vis Score benchmarked against competitors across major AI platforms.
According to the agency, Fame carries the greatest weighting.
Chief Tinker Tom Wenborn said many approaches to AI optimisation incorrectly frame the challenge as a technical SEO exercise.
“This is where most GEO and AI-SEO thinking gets it wrong – it treats AI visibility as a tech problem to be schema’d into better results, but the models are built to weigh third-party evidence over self-promotion,” Wenborn said.
“The brands winning in AI recommendations are the ones with cultural presence – the ones journalists quote, communities discuss, and real people vouch for. Which means the answer to the biggest technical shift in marketing is still the old-fashioned one: be genuinely famous.”
The launch comes as marketers increasingly rethink search and content strategies in response to AI-generated answers replacing traditional search engine results pages, fuelling interest in areas such as generative engine optimisation (GEO) and AI search optimisation.
Hi-Vis combines its audit with a roadmap of recommended actions spanning technical improvements, owned content and earned media strategies. The product sits within Thinkerbell’s Measured Magic philosophy, which combines measurement with creative effectiveness.
Thinkerbell has already run the audit on its own brand, receiving a Hi-Vis Score of 7.1.
