If your brand appears in AI responses but you're not sure that translates to sales — it probably doesn't. AIVO Optimize runs the full buying conversation and shows you exactly where your brand exits, which competitor wins instead, and why.
They appear in AI responses. Their visibility scores look fine. Their dashboards point up. Then someone runs the full buying conversation — and here's what actually happens.
This sequence — appearing, surviving, then being eliminated before the recommendation — is the most common pattern we observe across 195+ brands. A visibility score of 84/100 is entirely consistent with a buying recommendation win rate of zero. The dashboard doesn't know the difference. AIVO does.
CODA — Conversational Outcome & Decision Analysis — runs your brand through the full AI buying conversation and returns three things no visibility tool can tell you.
This is a representative CODA diagnostic output. Real data, real platform split, verbatim AI elimination language — returned automatically for your brand.
These are decision-stage diagnostics run across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude. Each one shows the gap between AI visibility and the CODA buying recommendation outcome.
Every brand above appears in AI responses. Their SEO dashboards, attribution models, and analytics platforms show nothing wrong. Because the revenue that never arrives doesn't appear anywhere. It just doesn't exist in any report.
The leakage compounds silently. A brand with a CODA score of 0 on ChatGPT is losing every buying recommendation on that platform — permanently, invisibly, and without any signal in conventional analytics. Every month that passes without measuring it is another month of revenue routed to whoever is winning at Step 4. That revenue does not come back when you eventually fix it. It accumulates in a competitor's account.
Every brand above appears in AI responses. Some have high visibility scores. Several have been specifically optimised for AI search. The problem is not visibility. It is extractability at the decision step.
At Step 3 — the criteria evaluation — AI asks: which brand has the clearest, most verifiable, most consistently cited evidence that it satisfies these specific purchase criteria? If the answer is ambiguous or unstructured, the model defaults to the brand that has most effectively reduced its recommendation risk. Not necessarily the best brand. The safest one.
This is the most dangerous finding in 12 months of research. Standard AI optimisation — citations, content coverage, first-answer visibility — improves your performance at Step 1. It does nothing for Step 3. In many cases, it makes Step 3 worse.
Auto-generated content can make this worse. Volume-based GEO content boosts citation frequency at Steps 1 and 2 — but dilutes the specific, verifiable, authoritative signals that Step 3 decisions depend on. You can increase your visibility score and simultaneously decrease your buying recommendation win rate. Your dashboard will show growth. CODA will show the truth.
After 12 months of reading AI's own reasoning at Step 3, we identified eight distinct filter types — each one a specific mechanism of elimination. Your CODA diagnostic identifies which filter is operating in your category.
A real buyer doesn't ask ChatGPT one question and buy. They have a conversation. AIVO runs the full conversation and records exactly what happens to your brand at every step.
The AI's language about your brand is the measure of success. When the remediation works, the dismissal phrases disappear and recommendation language takes their place. AIVO re-runs the identical diagnostic to verify the shift — automatically.
Every module runs from your diagnostic data. CODA is the primary outcome metric. The other five explain why — and where — you are losing.
Profound and Peec charge hundreds per month to tell you where your brand appears. That is the first step of a four-step problem.
| Capability | AIVO Optimize | Profound | Peec AI | Otterly |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| First-prompt brand mentions | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Decision-stage outcome (CODA) | ✓ | — | — | — |
| Citation destination routing | ✓ | partial | basic | basic |
| Competitor displacement by step | ✓ | — | — | — |
| Revenue at risk calculation | ✓ | — | — | — |
| Three-track remediation plan | paid | — | — | — |
| Continuous monitoring | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Starting price | Free | $99/mo | €89/mo | ~$25/mo |
The free diagnostic runs your brand in 60 seconds. Paid tiers add continuous monitoring, the three-track remediation plan, and managed measurement across all five platforms.
Decay baselines, model update impact tracking, and category benchmarks all require time in market. A competitor starting today can replicate the approach. They cannot replicate 12 months of temporal data.
AIVO Optimize was founded on a specific conviction: that the AI recommendation gap was real, measurable, and being missed by every tool in the market. Twelve months of primary research proved it.
Tim co-founded AIVO Optimize following extensive work in competitive intelligence and brand strategy. His research focuses on how multi-turn AI decision mechanics reshape competitive positioning before traditional analytics capture buyer intent.
Paul co-founded AIVO Optimize with a focus on structured decision testing, cross-platform variance analysis, and reproducibility of AI-mediated competitive outcomes. He developed the methodology underpinning AIVO Optimize's four-turn controlled substitution testing framework.
Create your free account and run your first CODA diagnostic in under 60 seconds. You'll see your score, the named competitor taking your buyers at Step 4, and the exact sentence AI uses to eliminate you. Free forever — no credit card required.