Thinkerbell has launched Hi-Vis, a new offering that audits and improves how brands are seen, understood and recommended by ai models, the fastest-growing gatekeeper between brands and buyers.
We’ve entered the zero-click era. When people ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Google’s ai Overviews what to buy, where to go, or who to trust, the answer arrives fully formed. No search results page. No 10 blue links. No click. The model has already done the considering, behaving like a motivated human with too much time and the ability to ask dozens of follow-up questions on the customer’s behalf. It settles on a shortlist before a human ever sees a brand name.
“Marketers have spent a century learning how humans choose brands. Now there’s a second decision-maker in the room, and it’s already read everything,” said Dan Monheit, Chief CX Thinker at Thinkerbell. “The truth is that the machines have a very human taste. They trust brands that are famous, talked about and coherent, and they’re suspicious of brands that make big claims with little to back them up.”
Hi-Vis assesses brands across three pillars: Fuel (what you say about yourself on channels you control), Fluency (how easily ai can find, read and understand you), and Fame (what others say about you in places you don’t control), producing a single Hi-Vis Score benchmarked against competitors across the ai platforms customers actually use.
Deliberately, Fame carries the most weight. Tom Wenborn, Chief Tinker at Thinkerbell, said: “This is where most GEO and ai-SEO thinking gets it wrong – it treats ai visibility as a tech problem to be schema’d into better results, but the models are built to weigh third-party evidence over self-promotion.”
“The brands winning in ai recommendations are the ones with cultural presence – the ones journos quote, communities discuss, and real people vouch for. Which means the answer to the biggest technical shift in marketing is still the old-fashioned one: be genuinely famous.”
Historically, Fame has led in System 1 and System 2. The same is now true in System 3. (Thinkerbell’s approach to System 3 thinking here)
Hi-Vis pairs a diagnostic audit with a prioritised roadmap including technical fixes, owned content improvements, and earned fame strategies.
The product sits naturally within the agency’s Measured Magic philosophy, marrying deep measurement with the magic the machines want to reward: ideas people actually talk about.
Hi-Vis is available to clients now, with Thinkerbell running the audit on its own brand first. The agency scored 7.1.
