Brand monitoring enters the AI era: Tracksuit's acquisition of Hall reveals a new battlefield in marketing technology

When consumers start asking ChatGPT or Google's AI Mode for "the best shampoo" or "recommend an eco-friendly fashion brand," brands' presence in AI assistants is becoming a new source of anxiety for marketers. Sydney-based brand tracking company Tracksuit announced this week the acquisition of AI brand monitoring startup Hall, integrating AI assistant brand visibility measurement capabilities into its existing consumer sentiment survey platform. This acquisition is not just a product feature expansion, but also reveals a deep trend in brand marketing shifting from "search engine optimization" to "AI answer engine optimization."

The Rise of AI as a New Brand Touchpoint

Tracksuit's core business is helping brands, including Unilever and Pfizer, track consumer awareness and purchase intent through surveys, covering nearly 20,000 brands across 25 markets. Its CEO Connor Archbold points out that marketers are increasingly concerned about how their products are described or overlooked in AI assistants, "Brands are particularly concerned about whether they appear authentic in front of both humans and LLMs (large language models)."

Hall was founded by Kai Forsyth in 2023 and developed tools to measure how often and in what ways brands appear in AI assistants. Such so-called "answer engine optimization" startups (such as Profound, Bluefish) are emerging to adapt to the trend of search traffic shifting from traditional search engines to AI assistants. Tracksuit's new product will monitor ChatGPT and Google's AI Mode, which Archbold says currently have the most users.

Measurement Challenges and Path to Scale

However, measuring AI brand visibility currently lacks standardized verification methods. How different LLMs choose which brands to surface for specific queries is not transparent. Various vendors adopt different approaches to quantify AI visibility, resulting in a lack of unified industry benchmarks.

Archbold believes standardization is a matter of scale: "Being able to observe the health of 20,000 brands and then say, 'This is the pattern we see, this is what's happening in the market.'" By combining AI visibility data with traditional consumer survey data, Tracksuit hopes to provide a more comprehensive picture of brand health.

Strategic Significance of the Acquisition

The financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed, but Hall's four employees will join Tracksuit, with founder Forsyth becoming head of product management, leading the direction of AI visibility products. Tracksuit completed a $25 million Series B funding round in 2025 and has no immediate plans for further fundraising. The acquisition allows Tracksuit to quickly enter the emerging field of AI brand monitoring rather than building from scratch.This also reflects a broader trend in the marketing technology field: as the adoption rate of AI search grows, brands must understand and influence their presence in the AI ecosystem. WPP Media predicts that AI search advertising revenue will exceed $100 billion by 2030, and the demand for brand AI visibility tools will only increase.

Industry Impact and Future

Tracksuit plans to launch its AI visibility product to existing customers this year, with a waiting list available for new customers. Although standards are still lacking, early movers may gain a first-mover advantage. However, brands need to be cautious: the recommendation mechanisms of AI assistants may differ from traditional search, involving more reasoning and contextual association. A brand's "reputation" in AI depends not only on keyword optimization but also on the overall brand performance in training data and real-time inference.

This acquisition also signals to the market that the boundaries of brand monitoring are expanding, extending from human surveys to machine responses. In the future, brand health assessments must simultaneously measure performance in two worlds—the human mind and AI models.