AI is deciding what your customers do, with or without you

The AI Undercurrent is SearchTides’ flagship program: a fully customizable, seven-month engagement that makes your brand the one ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI recommend. It costs $18,000 a month and runs in three phases: Baseline, Correction and Expansion.

Price: $18,000/month
Length: 7 months
Phases: Baseline → Correction → Expansion
Who does the work: We do, with your team
Included: Enterprise access to Profound

How the engagement works ↓Investment ↓

AI is Already Reshaping How Buying Works, and most companies are unprepared:

Here’s what is already true:

53%^¹

of B2C consumers are using generative AI for purchases in 2025, up from 39% in 2024 and 28% in 2023

89%^²

of B2B customers are using genAI during the purchasing process, especially for purchases of over $1 million

34%^³

of consumers say they’d let AI make purchases on their behalf, today

400%+^⁴

AI traffic has been converting 4.4x better than every other traffic source

∞^⁵

Generative AI is being adopted at a faster rate than the smartphone

$4.4T+^⁶

Projected AI Influenced consumer spend: $4.4T by 2030

In 2024 alone,

more than 50% of buying decisions were influenced by AI.¹

Yet only 13% of companies have any strategy for AI influenced purchases.⁷

The gap between what is happening, and what most brands are doing, is the largest commercial blind spot of the decade.

The buying journey has changed, too

The old journeyThe AI-driven journey

Start pointGoogle search, word of mouth, adsA prompt to AI: “Best [X] for [Y]”

Trust signalReviews, brand reputation, referralsAI’s own knowledge and confidence

NavigationComparison shopping, clicking aroundOne instant, compressed answer

Final decisionManual evaluation of websites and featuresAI’s suggestion becomes the default choice

Repeat behaviorLoyalty to specific brandsLoyalty to the AI platform

How AI Actually Makes Buying Decisions

Most companies are trying to hack a tool (“wanna show up more in ChatGPT?!?!”), which means they fail to deeply understand how AI actually operates.

At SearchTides, we’ve reverse engineered the architecture AI uses to decide which brands to route demand to.

We call it the AI Undercurrent: the 6 layer, 48 metric system shaping AI influenced purchases in every category.

These are the hidden layers being used to judge your brand:

Layer	The question	What we measure	Metrics
L0 · Access	Can AI find you?	Can AI reach, crawl and read your site? This layer is a gate: fail it and nothing else counts.	4
L1 · Identity	Does AI know you?	Does AI understand your positioning, services, customers and markets?	10
L2 · Language	Your words or theirs?	Does AI echo your messaging, or rewrite you in its own words?	7
L3 · Corroboration	Do sources agree?	Do enough independent, trusted sources back up your claims?	8
L4 · Structure	Can AI extract it?	Is your content built so AI can pull out and quote the facts?	8
L5 · Integrity	Is it accurate?	Are AI’s claims about you accurate, consistent and fair?	11

Want to go deeper? Learn about our full methodology →

How the engagement works

The AI Undercurrent engagement

A fully customizable, seven-month program that positions your brand to become AI’s default choice.

Month 1BaselineDiagnose how AI, the market and you perceive your brand.
Months 2–4CorrectionFix the core gaps blocking AI from recognizing and recommending you.
Months 5–7ExpansionExtend those fixes across the broader ecosystem AI learns from.

How we start

Align on goals, brand and feasibility
Full six-layer assessment
Owned property audit: website, schema, reviews, third-party sites
Brand fingerprint
Fix-First Roadmap of prioritized changes
ICP and language

What we fix

Outreach and Superfeeders
Listicle monitoring
Narrative shaping
Community engagement
Third-party websites and press releases
Customer reviews
Technical and on-site guidance
Monitoring and reporting

How we extend it

Everything in Correction, carried further across the sources AI trusts
Ongoing outreach, listicles and community work
Wikipedia, where your brand is eligible
Ongoing monitoring across every AI platform

Where the work goes

Most of the AI Undercurrent is ongoing, hands-on work by our outreach, PR, community and content teams, not a one-time report. That’s why it’s priced monthly.

01
Outreach and Superfeeders
We earn placements in the articles, roundups and publications AI already cites in your category, and pitch new ones where none exist.
Klass Wagen: 10 insertions into pages AI already cited and 59 new inclusions; the first was cited by AI six days after it went live.
02
Listicle monitoring
We track the “best of” lists and comparison articles AI pulls from, and act when you’re missing, misdescribed or dropped from one.
Branded listicles were at the center of melin’s strategy.
03
Narrative shaping
We set the language you want AI to use about you, then place it across your site, profiles, press, partner listings and review responses so AI repeats it.
melin went from a mid-tier mention to the premium headwear brand LLMs recommend.
04
Community engagement
We run transparent, on-brand participation on Reddit, forums and the community threads AI reads: answering real questions and correcting what’s wrong.
Reddit became melin’s #1 source of LLM citations; Klass Wagen’s sentiment recovery ran on a managed Reddit program.
05
Monitoring and reporting
We track your prompts across seven AI platforms every week and report which sources AI cites, what it says about you, and how that changes. Your team gets its own enterprise access to Profound, the AI visibility platform we use for tracking, for the length of the program.

What your team gets in Baseline

AI Influence Scorecard: Scores across all six AI Undercurrent layers
Brand Fingerprint: How AI describes you today vs how you want to be perceived
Fix-First Roadmap: Exactly what to fix, in what order, and why
Superfeeder Outreach Kit: How to get cited in the places that train the models
Review Language Seeder Guide: Get third parties to describe you in ways AI adopts as truth
Prompt Testing Pack: Monitor how models interpret you over time
AI Drift Defense Checklist: Stay relevant across model updates, search shifts and data volatility

Investment

$18,000/month

Seven-month program in three phases. The activities inside each phase are customized to what the Baseline finds. Includes enterprise access to Profound for your team.

Schedule a Call

A clear, defensible answer to “What’s our AI strategy?”
Hands-on correction, not just a report: we do the off-site work in the sources AI trusts, and give your team clear, prioritized fixes for your site
A smarter allocation of time, team and budget
Protection from relying on a single AI platform
Early ownership of the biggest shift in buyer behavior since mobile

Citations:

¹ https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2025/03/17/adobe-analytics-traffic-to-us-retail-websites-from-generative-ai-sources-jumps-1200-percent

² https://www.forrester.com/blogs/the-future-of-b2b-buying-will-come-slowly-and-then-all-at-once/

³ https://www.omnisend.com/blog/ai-trust-and-data-privacy-ecommerce/

⁴ https://www.semrush.com/blog/ai-search-seo-traffic-study/

⁵ https://www.emarketer.com/content/generative-ai-adoption-climbed-faster-than-smartphones-tablets

⁶ https://www.cognizant.com/us/en/new-minds-new-markets-ai-customer-experience

⁷ https://finance.yahoo.com/news/only-13-organizations-fully-prepared-191016604.html