Founder Shahbaz Alam says AI is quietly reshaping how customers discover brands and businesses that fail to adapt risk becoming invisible.
When Shahbaz Alam searched for the best biryani near him using an AI assistant instead of a traditional search engine, he wasn’t expecting to discover a business opportunity. The AI confidently recommended several restaurants. But one of Shahbaz’s longtime favourite located just a couple of streets away and well-known among locals was nowhere to be found.
Shahbaz Alam is an engineer and the founder of YouGotRanked, a consultancy-led AI visibility platform for GEO and AEO, backed by proprietary AI benchmarking. It measures how brands are recommended across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Google’s AI Overview, benchmarks them against their competitors, shows what that visibility is worth in revenue terms, and works alongside teams to execute the fixes that improve it.
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“It wasn’t just about biryani,” Shahbaz Alam recalls. “It made me wonder how many great businesses are simply invisible because AI doesn’t know enough about them.”
For most people, it would have ended as a passing observation. For Shahbaz Alam, an engineer with years of experience building software and AI-driven products, it became the starting point of a much bigger question: How are AI assistants deciding which brands deserve to be recommended?
That curiosity eventually led to the launch of YouGotRanked, a consultancy-led AI visibility platform designed to help brands understand and improve how they appear across AI-powered search experiences such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Google’s AI Overview. The timing couldn’t be more relevant.
Consumer behaviour has been changing rapidly as AI assistants increasingly become the first stop for product recommendations, business discovery, and purchase decisions. Instead of browsing pages of search results, users now ask conversational questions like “What’s the best CRM for startups?” or “Which marketing agency should I hire?” and receive just a handful of recommendations.
For businesses, this creates a new challenge.
“If your brand isn’t mentioned in those AI-generated answers, customers may never even know you exist,” Shahbaz explains. “It’s no longer about ranking tenth on a search page. It’s about whether AI chooses to mention your name at all.”
Industry research supports this shift. Studies indicate that AI-generated summaries are already reducing clicks on traditional search results, while analysts expect AI-powered search experiences to continue replacing many conventional searches over the coming years. At the same time, academic research has shown that structured, trustworthy content backed by credible sources significantly improves the likelihood of appearing in AI-generated responses.
Unlike traditional Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which focuses on improving rankings in search engines, a new discipline is emerging Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). These strategies focus on helping brands become part of the answers generated by AI assistants rather than simply appearing in search listings.
While exploring this shift, Shahbaz noticed another major gap.
“There were plenty of SEO tools telling businesses how they ranked on Google,” he says. “But there was nothing showing how AI systems actually viewed those same brands.” To investigate, he began running identical customer questions across multiple AI platforms. The results were surprising. Brands that dominated traditional search results were often missing entirely from AI recommendations. Even more interesting, different AI models frequently produced completely different recommendations for the same question.
“One assistant would strongly recommend a company, while another barely recognized it,” Shahbaz says. “That made it clear AI visibility couldn’t be measured using traditional SEO metrics.”
That realization became the foundation of YouGotRanked. The platform enables brands to benchmark how they are recommended across leading AI assistants, compare their visibility against competitors, identify gaps, and estimate the business impact of improving AI recommendations.
However, Shahbaz emphasizes that measurement is only part of the solution.
“A report doesn’t change anything,” he explains. “Knowing where you stand is valuable, but businesses also need guidance on how to improve. That’s why we’ve built YouGotRanked as a consultancy-led platform, working closely with brands to strengthen the content, credibility, and digital signals that AI models rely on when generating recommendations.”
“We don’t start from a checklist,” Shahbaz says. “We start from the brand’s own data, the exact questions where AI picks someone else and the sources it trusts that the brand is missing from. We fix those, then re-run the scan to prove it moved.”
According to Shahbaz, the current moment resembles the early days of SEO.
“Twenty years ago, businesses that invested in SEO before everyone else gained a long-term competitive advantage. We’re seeing a similar opportunity today with AI visibility. The companies that understand this shift early are likely to benefit for years to come.”
As AI continues transforming online discovery, Shahbaz believes businesses need to rethink how they measure digital presence.
“Marketing has always evolved alongside technology,” he says. “Today, customers are asking AI for recommendations before they visit websites. If brands aren’t part of those conversations, they’re missing opportunities they may never even know existed.”
With yougotranked.com , Shahbaz hopes to give businesses something they have never had before: a way to measure, understand, and improve their presence in the rapidly evolving world of AI-driven search.
“Every business should know one simple thing,” he concludes. “When someone asks AI about your industry today, does your brand make the shortlist? If the answer is no, now is the time to find out why.”
As AI-powered discovery becomes increasingly mainstream, YouGotRanked aims to help businesses ensure they are not just searchable but recommended.
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