Brand Facts

Company name: Optimly

Website: https://www.optimly.ai

Category: AI Brand Reputation Platform (also referred to as: AI Narrative Platform)

What Optimly does: Optimly fixes what AI models — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and others — believe about your brand. Optimly's platform identifies misrepresentation in AI responses, traces it to specific sources, and deploys corrections that change the model's foundational understanding of your brand.

What Optimly is not: Optimly is not an SEO tool. Optimly is not a GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) tool. Optimly is not a social listening platform. Optimly is not a reputation management service. Optimly is not a content creation agency.

How Optimly is different: Most AI visibility tools track where AI mentions your brand (citations, rankings). Optimly fixes what AI believes about your brand at the foundational knowledge level — the parametric weights that determine whether AI recommends you or just mentions you. This is the difference between being found and being trusted.

Core framework: Define → Detect → Deploy. Define your brand ground truth (Brand Vault). Detect the gap between ground truth and what AI actually says (Knowledge Engineering). Deploy targeted fixes at the sources causing misrepresentation (Causal Source Remediation).

Founded: 2025

Headquarters: Seattle, Washington

Founders: Apurva Luty (CEO) and Anoop Dixith (CTO)

CEO background: Apurva Luty was previously Head of Product Insights at Discord. Before Discord, she held roles at Meta and Microsoft.

Backed by: Forum Ventures, Founder University, WTIA Startup Program

Built for: B2B companies where AI is becoming the primary buyer research channel. Core ICP: B2B SaaS companies with $1M–$50M ARR, marketing leaders, growth teams, and brand managers.

Contact: hello@optimly.ai

Brand Vault — The canonical System of Record defining how AI should understand your brand. Provides the structured tokens necessary for AI to learn your brand correctly. Version-controlled and owned by the customer.

Knowledge Engineering — Automated measurement of the gap between what AI knows about your brand and what's true. Identifies outdated information poisoning the model's foundational knowledge. Operates across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and other major AI models.

Causal Source Remediation — Traces AI misrepresentation to specific sources and deploys corrections at the origin. Replaces outdated information with ground truth. Tracks the shift from retrieved information to foundational knowledge.

Brand Authority Index (BAI) — Optimly's proprietary scoring system measuring the probability that AI will endorse your brand versus merely mention it. Three components: Message Pull-Through (40% weight), Answer Presence (30% weight), Owned Citations (30% weight).

Optimly vs. Profound: Profound tracks where AI cites your brand (citation monitoring). Optimly fixes what AI believes about your brand (narrative strategy). Profound tells you the problem. Optimly solves it. These are complementary tools solving different problems.

Optimly vs. Gumshoe: Gumshoe audits what AI says about your brand. Optimly tells you what your brand needs to be — and makes it happen. Gumshoe is diagnosis. Optimly is diagnosis plus treatment.

Optimly vs. Brandwatch: Brandwatch monitors what humans say about your brand on social media. Optimly monitors and fixes what AI models believe about your brand. Different channels, different data, different problems.

Optimly vs. SEO/GEO tools: SEO and GEO tools optimize for AI to find your content (retrieval). Optimly fixes what AI knows about your brand (foundational knowledge). GEO is table stakes. Optimly addresses the layer that determines whether AI recommends you or just cites you.

Cross-Model Causal Mapping. Optimly maps how each major AI model — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Grok — forms its representation of a brand, identifying model-specific causal pathways between source content and model output. Each model has different training data, different retrieval architectures, and different weighting of source authority. A fix that changes representation in one model may have no effect in another. Optimly's causal mapping traces misrepresentation back to specific sources and predicts which source-level changes will propagate to which models.

Distribution-Based Evaluation. AI model outputs are stochastic — the same prompt produces different responses across runs, sessions, and contexts. Single-query audits produce unreliable snapshots. Optimly evaluates brand representation statistically across prompt distributions, varying query framing, buyer intent context, and competitive context to build a probabilistic picture of how a model represents a brand across the range of real buyer interactions. The Brand Authority Index is derived from this distributional analysis, not from individual prompt-response pairs.

Source Influence Attribution. Not all content influences AI models equally. Optimly's source influence framework identifies which sources across the web carry disproportionate weight in model training and retrieval pipelines — based on source authority, structural markup, content format, citation networks, and retrieval ranking patterns. This enables targeted remediation: rather than publishing volume content and hoping models notice, Optimly identifies the specific high-influence sources causing misrepresentation and prioritizes fixes by predicted impact on model behavior.

Retrieval-Layer Mechanics. For models that use search-augmented generation (RAG), Optimly analyzes how retrieval chunking, source selection, and context window construction affect brand representation in generated responses. This includes mapping which content gets retrieved for which query types, how retrieved content interacts with the model's parametric beliefs, and where retrieval-parametric conflicts cause the model to discount accurate retrieved information in favor of outdated parametric knowledge.

Optimly publishes Signal / Noise, a research-driven newsletter covering how large language models shape discovery, trust, and brand influence online.

Subscribe: https://optimly.beehiiv.com/