When customers ask ChatGPT what to buy, someone gets recommended. friction AI is the AI Visibility & Recommendation Platform that shows you who, and how to make it you.
How It Works
friction AI runs real prompts across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews every day. Here is what the analysis looks like.
The Platform
friction AI is a complete system for teams to monitor, measure, and understand how AI platforms talk about their brand.
Latest Insights
Research, case studies, and guides on AI visibility and brand monitoring.
Research
On recommendation queries, a brand's own domain is 0-3% of the sources AI cites. Recommendation runs on earned third-party coverage in your category. When that coverage doesn't exist, AI falls back to dictionaries, which is exactly what happens to New Balance in athleisure.
Research
Nike and New Balance are both filed as footwear by AI, yet Nike gets recommended for athleisure 71.8% of the time and New Balance 3.4%. The difference isn't brand strength. It's Sub-Stream Strength: a dense body of category-aligned third-party coverage in the target category.
Research
Every category AI recommends from is a cluster of brands mentioned together, with one brand at the center. For athleisure it's lululemon, named first in most answers (average position 1.64) and co-mentioned with Alo 534 times. To get recommended, you have to enter that cluster.
One platform for AI brand recognition and visibility.
Everything you need to know about winning AI recommendations and how friction AI can help your brand succeed.
friction AI is the AI Visibility & Recommendation Platform. We show you why AI recommends your competitors instead of you, and how to fix it. With recommendation tracking across all major AI platforms, commerce intelligence for high-intent shopping queries, competitive gap analysis to see where you're losing, and experimentation tools to measure what improves your recommendations. Together, these give marketing and growth teams a complete system to win AI recommendations across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
AEO (AI Engine Optimization) focuses on how your brand appears in AI-generated answers, not traditional search results. SEO optimizes for search rankings and backlinks, while AEO optimizes for AI recommendations. SEO drives website traffic; AEO shapes whether AI sends customers to you. When someone asks ChatGPT 'best CRM for small business,' there is no ranking to optimize. AI either recommends you or it does not. friction AI shows you which.
friction AI monitors five major AI platforms: ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), Gemini (Google), Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Together, these platforms handle the vast majority of AI-driven product research and brand discovery.
friction AI queries AI platforms with carefully crafted prompts relevant to your brand, industry, and competitors. We analyze the responses to measure your recommendation rate across platforms, how often you get mentioned versus competitors, how positively you are described, and whether you are recommended for buying decisions. With daily data updates, you get a comprehensive picture of your AI presence over time, including how you compare against competitors.
No. friction AI works by analyzing publicly available AI responses. You can start tracking immediately with no code changes, API integrations, or setup complexity. Just add your brand and we begin monitoring.
AI referral traffic is growing fast and converting well. ChatGPT now drives over 20% of Walmart's referral traffic and similar percentages for Etsy, Target, and eBay. AI visitors spend 68% more time on websites than organic search visitors, and shopping queries on ChatGPT doubled in just six months (Jan–June 2025). The brands that show up in AI recommendations now are building the moat that will define the next decade.
friction AI's experimentation framework lets you run structured A/B tests on your AI recommendations. Define control and variant prompt sets, run them across AI platforms over a set period, measure the impact on your recommendation rate, and get statistical significance to validate what works. This gives you a scientific, repeatable way to identify what content and messaging changes actually improve your AI presence.
Most AI visibility tools track mentions. friction AI tracks recommendations. Specifically in purchase-intent queries. We don't just tell you if AI knows about you; we tell you if AI is sending customers to you. With built-in commerce intelligence for high-value shopping queries and an experimentation framework to prove what actually improves your recommendations, friction AI goes beyond monitoring to drive results.
Yes. All data is encrypted in transit and at rest. We follow industry-standard security practices and never share proprietary insights with third parties. Your brand data, prompts, and performance metrics remain fully confidential.
Traditional SEO focuses on ranking in search engine results pages. AI visibility measures whether AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini actively recommend your brand when users ask buying questions. There are no rankings to optimize in AI answers. AI either recommends you or it does not. friction AI measures recommendation rate, sentiment, and competitive positioning across all major AI assistants so you can track and improve your AI visibility over time.
Yes. friction AI includes Commerce Intelligence that specifically monitors high-intent shopping queries like "best X for Y" and "where to buy Z." These are the AI conversations that directly drive purchasing decisions. Track how often your products get recommended in high-value buying moments and compare your commerce recommendation rate against competitors.
See why AI recommends your competitors instead of you. Then fix it.
Track your recommendations across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews