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What is SearchIntel and what does it monitor?
SearchIntel is a UK AI search intelligence agency. It measures whether AI assistants such as ChatGPT recommend a brand when buyers ask for recommendations, diagnoses why or why not, and plans the work intended to change the answer. This page explains what the company does in plain terms.
What SearchIntel does
Three things, in order: diagnose, explain, plan.
- Diagnose. SearchIntel runs the buying questions a brand cares about across six AI platforms, repeatedly, and records whether the brand is named, recommended or cited, and who is recommended instead. This is AI visibility monitoring: the same job rank tracking did for Google, rebuilt for AI answers.
- Explain. The monitoring records the signals each platform exposes about how its answer was put together, including the searches the AI systems write for themselves while they research a question. That shows where a brand drops out of the machine's decision, which is a different question from whether it appears.
- Plan. The findings become a plan: content, technical signals, third-party sources and entity work, matched to where the brand is actually losing rather than guessed. Clients implement with their own teams or with SearchIntel.
SearchIntel is not a self-serve dashboard. The monitoring technology is proprietary, and the product is the interpretation: what the data means for a specific brand and what to do about it.
What SearchIntel monitors
Six AI platforms, tracked separately because they rarely agree:
- ChatGPT (OpenAI)
- Claude (Anthropic)
- Gemini (Google)
- Perplexity
- Google AI Overviews
- Google AI Mode
Our June 2026 study of 100 neutral UK buying questions found that only 5.3% of recommended brands were named by all six platforms, so visibility has to be read per platform. The full measurement method, including verification and corrections policy, is on the methodology page.
What SearchIntel measures
- Share of Memory: the percentage of relevant AI answers in which a brand appears.
- Recommendation Rate: whether the brand is actually recommended, rather than just mentioned.
- Citations and sources: which pages and third-party platforms the AI answers are built from, and whether the brand's own pages are among them.
- Competitive position: who wins the questions the brand loses, and on what basis.
The same measurement runs across LLM brand monitoring (the conversational assistants) and Google's AI surfaces, so a brand sees one picture across the places buyers now ask. Findings from this measurement are published regularly on the research page.
Who runs SearchIntel
SearchIntel was founded in 2025 by Paul Byrne, after 20 years in search strategy: agency side at Greenlight and MediaCom (running search on brands including LEGO and Adidas), at Google itself, and client side at TripAdvisor's Viator as VP of marketing. The company is UK based and works with brands in the UK, Ireland, Europe and the US.
Common questions
Is SearchIntel a tool or an agency?
SearchIntel is an AI search intelligence company built on proprietary measurement technology. Clients do not buy software access; they buy the intelligence and the interpretation: the measurement, the judgement on what it means, and the plan that follows. The technology behind the measurement is described on the AI visibility monitoring page.
Is this the same as SEO?
No, but they are related. SEO feeds AI search: the engines retrieve and cite pages, so crawlability, content and authority still matter. What changes is the question being answered. SEO asks whether you rank; SearchIntel asks whether the machine recommends you, and why it chose someone else when it does. Some of the fixes are SEO work, many are positioning, content and third-party evidence work.
Is this what people call AEO or GEO?
The market uses several names for optimising toward AI answers: answer engine optimisation (AEO), generative engine optimisation (GEO), AI search optimisation. SearchIntel does that work, and starts a step earlier, with measurement: you cannot optimise toward an answer you have not measured.
How do I see where my brand stands?
Two routes: the free AI visibility check gives a first reading in minutes, and a full diagnostic measures the questions that matter commercially, with a plan attached. Or book a call and talk it through first.