Pepper gives CMOs a way to prove and improve their brand's standing in AI search

For a growing number of chief marketing officers, AI search has become a boardroom question they cannot yet answer clearly. Buyers increasingly put their questions to assistants such as ChatGPT and Perplexity, which means a CMO is now expected to know how the brand shows up in those answers and to keep improving it, usually without a bigger team. Pepper, the organic growth engine used by more than 250 enterprises, is now helping marketing leaders take on both sides of that problem inside its GEO platform.

The hard part, most CMOs will say, is not knowing what good marketing looks like. It is two things they have not had to manage before. The first is proof. A brand can see that it gets mentioned in AI answers, but a leader has no simple way to tell whether that is a strong position or a weak one against the competitors chasing the same answers. The second is throughput. Even when a team knows exactly which pages to fix, the volume of that work across a whole content library means it rarely gets finished before the next quarter's priorities take over.

Pepper, with its GEO platform, now addresses the first with a daily, side-by-side read of how a brand compares with its rivals across six measures of AI search performance, from whether engines mention the brand to whether they trust it enough to cite its pages. For a CMO, the value is a clean answer in a review: not that AI search is trending up, but where the brand leads, where it trails, and exactly what it will take to close the gap. That comparison can be filtered by engine, competitor, theme or date range and dropped straight into a board deck.


"Your leadership does not want to hear that AI search feels different this quarter. They want the number," said Anirudh Singla, founder and CEO of Pepper. "Where you win, where you are losing, and what it will take to close the gap."

For the second, Pepper lets a team turn a recurring marketing task into something it sets up once and runs on demand, by describing the job in plain language rather than building it by hand. The page audit that used to wait for a spare afternoon, the meta data pass that happened once a year, the refresh that depended on someone remembering; each becomes a job anyone on the team can run, on one page or across the whole library at once. Several tasks can be linked so that a week of manual work runs as a single pass. For a marketing leader, that is the difference between a strategy that looks right on a slide and one that actually ships every week.

Because the work is built by describing it, it stays with the marketers who understand the brand rather than the few who are comfortable with technical tools, so a leader gets more done without handing judgment to the tooling.

"Most of marketing is not strategy. It is repetition," said Singla. "Winning AI search only creates more of it."

Pepper sees the two as one problem viewed from opposite ends. A brand does not become a regular answer in AI search off one strong page or one good quarter. It earns that place slowly, by covering its library consistently and being picked up by sources the engines already trust. A CMO needs both halves to hold that ground- the numbers to show the board that the effort is paying off, and a way to keep the work moving so it does not stall after a strong start. In the company's view, that is where most brands lose organic ground, not to a weak strategy but to execution that runs out of steam.

"Pepper used to tell you what to do," said Singla. "Now it does the work with you."

Full walkthroughs, including the breakdowns of competitor benchmarks and workflows, are available on the Pepper GEO Hub.


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