The next chapter for AirOps: Your partner in turning a buyer shift into a category advantage

The buyer journey used to unfold across touch points you could optimize one by one. Now it's concentrating onto a single surface, where AI compares the options and makes a recommendation for your buyer. Winning that recommendation is now the most urgent challenge facing brands today.

Buyers are increasingly trusting AI to go beyond making recommendations and start comparing choices and taking action on their behalf. This means that the agent isn’t just a gatekeeper to your customer, they’re quickly becoming your brand's second customer, and the marketing programs you spent the last 10 years building aren’t built for them.

What started out as “AEO” is quickly becoming a core part of a brand’s marketing and growth strategy. This strategy shift can’t be managed by shallow prompt tracking dashboards or a standalone execution arm.

After working with hundreds of brands to set and execute their AI search strategy over the last few years, a clear working model emerged that proved most effective in driving results. Today, we’re formalizing that model, with an expansion of our offering to become your primary partner across AI search strategy, channel investment, and execution. This offering combines the AirOps platform with data from 6 billion citations, 47 million actions, and 1.5 billion prompts, and a team of channel experts who run the strategy and execution with you, giving you an end-to-end solution to become the brand that agents trust and buyers choose.

Winning AI discovery requires an evolution in your marketing strategy, not a standalone program

When an agent decides whether to recommend your brand, it weighs your content, the review sites covering your category, the online forum where someone asked for options, posts from relevant creators in your space, and the comparison article on a site you've never contacted. If you map this to the traditional marketing org, each of those inputs belongs to a different marketing program, all with different owners, budgets, and success metrics.

What many brands are treating as a specialist discipline today is actually representative of the new buyer journey that an entire marketing org will need to organize around. The teams that will pull ahead are those that treat AI discovery the way they once had to treat customer data, as a foundational piece of marketing infrastructure that each team in the marketing org builds around.

Marketers need more than a prompt dashboard or an execution arm

The last 18 months produced a lot of dashboards. Prompt tracking, share of voice, citation counts. Marketers love data, which is why it makes sense that so much of the conversation around AI search has been inextricably linked to a visibility score. The issue is that a visibility score often measures a brand’s available prompt list, not the market that they’re competing in. And getting a visibility score that’s focused on the wrong buyers can steer your whole strategy toward the wrong market.

AirOps starts by defining the market around your growth priorities. We’ll help you understand the market you’re actually competing in, size the opportunity to determine which gaps are worth closing, and measure the subsequent movement in visibility, citations, traffic, and business performance to understand the impact of each action. We see data as the foundation of the strategy we build with you, not as the final output of our offering.

Instead of building an outside team to handle execution, AirOps Services works as your partner, setting and executing strategy hand in hand with your team. Our channel experts build a system that keeps working and improving long after the initial setup. Our team will handle the heavy lifting of intelligence, execution, and measurement, and bring your team in to focus on the reviews and make the judgment calls that only you can make.

AirOps now covers every channel that shapes an agent's answer

We started AirOps by building the engines that produce marketing work at quality and velocity, combined with the visibility layer that shows brands where they stand. This next phase connects the two and extends them across every input that shapes an agent's answer:

• Owned content: Build and refresh the pages agents cite when they answer questions in your category
• External content: Earn accurate placements in the third-party sources agents already trust
• AI ads: Turn emerging AI ad surfaces into a growth channel you can actually measure
• Community: Find and shape the conversations feeding an agent's answer
• Social and influencer: Know which voices are shaping how AI describes your category

The same team stays hands-on from strategy through execution and adjusts as results come in. This is the kind of partnership that helped Airbnb Experiences Paris move 7 percentage points for the categories that mattered most to their business, helped Chime 3x its citation rate and turn AI search from a test program into an investable channel, and helped LegalZoom cut $750k a year in production costs while 5x-ing conversion from LLM traffic.

‍

"We set out to change the narrative around Sanity in AI search, not just show up more often. Staying the brand the models name most, and climbing in the categories that matter, is exactly the signal we were after, and we can see it happening week to week. ”

–Richard Lawrence, Principal - Agentic Operations & Growth Marketing, Sanity

‍

You can’t fund what you can't measure

This work doesn't get budget until it can be measured. Our recent study of marketing leaders found that 86.6% are prioritizing AI search while only 23.2% feel confident measuring its impact, which leaves real budget sitting on the sidelines behind a channel most leaders already believe in.

Our team is partnering with experts in the space to define a measurement methodology for these discovery channels that works with the growth frameworks you already run, and we're piloting it now with some of our most sophisticated customers to tie AI discovery activity directly to pipeline and revenue.

Building the brands that get chosen

The next phase of marketing gives good marketers something they haven't had in a while: a real chance to be chosen on the strength of their strategy, not just optimized enough to be seen.

Each company's strategy is different, and the level of support each brand needs will differ too. Our team can meet you where you're at, whether you're starting from square one or already running a sophisticated program, and get you to the same place: being the brand that agents choose, with a number you can defend.

Most brands are still spending to buy their way into the room. Few have learned how to earn their way into an agent's answer. AirOps works as your partner to turn the buyer shift into a lasting category advantage.