Obsessd.ai launches in Australia to boost AI discoverability

Obsessd.ai has launched in Australia to advise brands and retailers on AI discoverability, with teams in Sydney and Melbourne.

The consultancy was founded by former Yahoo executive Dan Richardson and former Cartology and Coles360 Head of Product Bec Penn. It is positioning itself around a problem many marketing teams face as large language models increasingly shape how consumers research products and brands.

Many brands can track paid search and search engine optimisation in detail but have limited visibility into how tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Copilot and Perplexity describe or recommend them. Obsessd.ai has built its offer around measuring and improving those results.

The firm combines consulting with its own measurement system, the Obsessd Visibility Index, or OVI. The index scores brands on visibility, accuracy and competitive position, aiming to give marketing and commercial teams a single measure for internal reporting and investment discussions.

Richardson said this measurement gap had become clear in conversations with local companies.

"When we sit down with local marketing teams and ask how they are performing in paid search or SEO, they have dashboards ready. But ask what ChatGPT versus Gemini or Claude says about their brand and most have no idea beyond screenshots from ad hoc prompts. That's the gap that we are here to fill," said Dan Richardson, Co-Founder & Director, Obsessd.ai.

Its work also extends to agentic media strategy, AI buying frameworks and media effectiveness. That broader remit reflects a growing push among advertisers and retailers to understand how generative AI systems influence consumer decisions before a purchase.

One of the company's central arguments is that performance can vary sharply between AI platforms. A brand may appear prominently in one model's responses while being absent or inaccurately represented in another, creating uneven exposure across the market.

"A brand that scores well on Claude but poorly on ChatGPT carries undetected revenue risk. Existing tools that sample brand mentions, sentiment or citations in a single platform miss this entirely. It's now essential for all brands to have a strategy that works across all LLMs, not just some," said Richardson.

Audit findings

Obsessd.ai said its analysis of large language model citation patterns suggests that once a competitor becomes the default recommendation in an AI category, replacing that position can cost far more than securing it in the first place. Its audits of prominent Australian brands also found that, on average, 60% of AI discovery queries returned no brand result at all.

Those findings point to a wider issue for companies that have invested heavily in brand awareness through traditional media and digital channels. If AI systems fail to surface a brand in response to common questions, that investment may not translate into discovery within these new interfaces.

Penn said discoverability in AI should be treated as distinct from broader brand awareness.

"Brands have spent years and millions of dollars building awareness, but awareness is not discoverability. The AI layer does not care how much you have spent on the brand. It surfaces what it can read, what it trusts, and what has been structured to answer the question being asked. We built Obsessd.ai because no one else was solving this for Australian brands with the rigour it deserves," said Bec Penn, Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer, Obsessd.ai.

Local focus

The launch comes as much of the market for AI visibility tools is centred in the US and Europe. Obsessd.ai said its local presence is intended to give Australian and wider Asia-Pacific brands advice tailored to regional market conditions, retail structures and consumer behaviour.

Its initial clients include Personalised Favours, a personalised gift retailer, and By Yuliya, a Sydney fragrance brand founded by Yuliya Lozovyk. Their inclusion suggests the consultancy is targeting a mix of established retail businesses and smaller consumer brands that want to understand how they appear in AI-driven search and recommendation tools.

For marketers, the emergence of this category reflects a broader shift in digital discovery. Search rankings once dominated brand findability online, but generative AI responses are beginning to sit between consumers and the open web, turning recommendation logic into a commercial battleground. Obsessd.ai's pitch is that brands need a way to measure that position across several models at once, rather than rely on isolated prompts or anecdotal checks.

The firm said the OVI is designed to provide that benchmark across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Copilot simultaneously, giving brands a comparative view of how they are represented when consumers turn to AI systems for answers.