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.
The Platform
friction AI is one place to see how AI platforms describe your brand, and how that changes week to week.
Latest Insights
Research on how AI assistants recommend brands, choose sources, and build category shortlists.
Original 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.
Original 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.
Original 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.
Answers on AI visibility, recommendation tracking, experiments, and getting started with friction AI.
friction AI is the AI Visibility & Recommendation Platform. It tells you why AI recommends your competitors instead of you, and what to do about it. It tracks recommendations across every major AI platform, reads high-intent shopping queries, shows where you are losing ground, and lets you test changes to see what actually moves. For marketing and growth teams, that adds up to one system for winning AI recommendations on ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
AEO (AI Engine Optimization) is about how your brand shows up in AI-generated answers, not in a list of blue links. SEO chases rankings and backlinks. AEO shapes whether an AI sends a customer your way. Ask ChatGPT for the "best CRM for small business" and there is no page one to climb. The AI either names you or it does not. friction AI tells 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.
We send each platform prompts built around your brand, category, and competitors, then read the answers. You see how often you get recommended, how you stack up against rivals, how positively you are described, and whether AI points buyers toward you at decision time. The data refreshes daily, so the picture stays current.
No. friction AI works off publicly available AI responses. There is no code to write and no API to wire up. Add your brand and tracking starts.
AI discovery is still early, but it is already showing up in buying behavior. Similarweb data reported by Modern Retail found ChatGPT driving one in five Walmart referral clicks in August 2025, more than 20% of Etsy referral traffic, nearly 15% for Target, and 10% for eBay. Bain also found that shopping queries on ChatGPT doubled from January to June 2025, and SE Ranking found AI-referred visitors spending 67.7% more time on sites than organic search visitors. AI referrals have not replaced search. The point is that high-intent buyers are starting to ask AI systems what to buy, and those answers influence which brands make the shortlist.
Define a control set and a variant set of prompts, run both across AI platforms for a set period, and measure how each moves your recommendation rate. friction AI reports the result with statistical significance, so you know whether a change worked or just looked like it did.
Most AI visibility tools count mentions. friction AI tracks recommendations, specifically on purchase-intent queries. The question is not whether AI knows you exist. It is whether AI is sending customers to you. Commerce Intelligence covers your highest-value shopping queries, and the experiment framework proves which changes actually improve your standing.
Yes. Everything is encrypted in transit and at rest, we follow standard security practices, and we never share your insights with anyone. Your prompts, brand data, and metrics stay private.
SEO is about ranking on a search results page. AI visibility is about whether ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and the rest actually recommend you when someone asks a buying question. There is no ranking to game in an AI answer. You are named, or you are not. friction AI measures recommendation rate, sentiment, and competitive position across every major assistant, so you can track it and improve it over time.
Yes. Commerce Intelligence watches high-intent shopping queries, the "best X for Y" and "where to buy Z" questions that lead straight to a purchase. You see how often your products get recommended in those moments and how that compares to your competitors.
See why AI recommends your competitors instead of you. Then fix it.
Track your recommendations across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews