Vectis Strategies launches AI visibility audit for brand reputation teams

Vectis Strategies has turned AI visibility into a formal diagnostic for communications and public affairs teams, launching an audit that scores how brands show up when people ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok for recommendations. The El Segundo, California, and Washington, DC firm said the point is not just to count mentions, but to show how an organization is represented and what can be changed to improve that representation.

The audit breaks visibility into four scored areas: AI response, digital presence, source authority and content authority. It also adds competitor benchmarking, a knowledge-currency check for outdated or inaccurate information, hallucination detection, prompt-manipulation detection and a log of what each model said about the organization. Vectis said the scorecard feeds a senior-leadership action plan built to improve discoverability and reputation. The product was developed by Matt Pressberg, Vectis’s partner for AI and digital.

Founder and managing partner David A. Herbst framed the launch as a response to a broader shift in discovery. AI, he said, is changing how people evaluate everything from outside counsel to office space, nonprofits and colleges. That matters because it moves the conversation beyond search rankings and into brand stewardship, where public affairs, PR and reputation teams need to know not only whether they are found, but whether AI systems are surfacing the right story about them.

Vectis is entering a category that is filling up fast. On May 8, 5W and Haute Living introduced the Designer AI Visibility Index for interior designers and architects, measuring how they appear across ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity. On February 17, SOCi made AI visibility a core benchmark in its 2026 Local Visibility Index and SOCi100 ranking, analyzing more than 350,000 business locations and over 2,700 enterprise brands. Earlier entrants such as Profound and Otterly.AI also built products around AI search visibility, with Otterly rebuilding after Google introduced AI Overviews in May 2024 and later passing 1,000 users before exiting stealth in December 2024.

The timing lines up with a sharp change in how discovery works online. Similarweb said AI platforms generated more than 1.1 billion referral visits in June 2025, a 357% increase from a year earlier. As AI answers and AI Overviews absorb more attention before a user ever reaches a website, audits like Vectis’s are becoming a management tool for reputation teams that now have to measure not just media coverage, but how often AI systems select, summarize and cite their organizations.