Your customers used to decide out loud — they Googled, posted, and reviewed, and you could watch all of it. Not anymore. The most important conversation in your category now happens one-on-one between a consumer and an AI. Our new report, The State of AI Conversation Intelligence, maps the three ways brands can finally see who’s talking.
More than 900 million people use ChatGPT every week, and they’re not just drafting emails — they’re asking what to buy, what to avoid, and which brand deserves their money. Every brand now shares the same blind spot: what are my customers asking AI, and what is AI telling them back?
An entire industry has sprung up to sell them an answer, and it’s organized into three approaches. The first is a robot asking a robot, running scripted prompts and counting how often your brand comes up — but run the same prompt twice and you’ll get the same brand list less than once in a hundred tries. The second uses real human chats, siphoned through browser tools people never knowingly agreed to, a practice researchers now call “prompt poaching.” The third starts with real people who opted in and are paid for their data — so you know who’s talking, you can connect what they say to what they do, and you can go back and ask them why.
The conversation about your brand has already started. The only questions are whether you can hear it — and whether what you’re hearing is real.
