For more than two decades, the front door to the internet was a search-results page. Companies identified the terms customers entered into Google, created content around those keywords, and competed for a position among the familiar blue links. Deniz Ozcan believes that era is giving way to a fundamentally different model. Consumers are increasingly asking ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and other AI assistants to research products, compare companies, and recommend what to buy. Instead of reviewing a list of websites, they often receive one synthesized answer. As co-founder and CEO of Cognizo, Ozcan is building a platform that helps brands get discovered and recommended by AI assistants, then turn that visibility into traffic and revenue.
“For twenty years, the front door to the internet was a page of ten blue links,” Ozcan said. “Now it’s an AI answer, whether that’s a Google AI Overview, ChatGPT, or Claude. If every customer journey starts with an AI answer, then all digital marketing becomes AI search marketing.”
Founded in New York in January 2025 by Ozcan and technical co-founder Alp Aysan, Cognizo began by helping companies understand how they appeared across AI-generated answers. Its founding thesis, however, extends beyond treating AI search as another channel alongside traditional SEO. When customers begin by asking rather than searching, content, public relations, partnerships, paid media, and other parts of digital marketing increasingly flow through the answers AI systems produce. A company can rank well on Google and still be absent when a prospective customer asks an AI assistant to identify the leading options in its market.
Cognizo addresses that problem through an end-to-end agentic workflow. Its agents identify the questions customers are asking AI, determine where a brand is missing or losing ground, and analyze which sources shape the answers. The system then creates and publishes content designed to close those gaps, measures whether the work improved visibility and revenue, and repeats the process as responses change. Cognizo also tracks citations, sentiment, AI crawler activity, referral traffic, and competitive visibility across major platforms and regions. Measurement is the starting point, but the larger product is the continuous workflow that turns those findings into action.
“Most tools in this space hand you a report card,” Ozcan said. “We built a system that does the work: finds the gap, writes the content, publishes it, and proves it moved revenue. Marketers don’t need another dashboard, they need the loop closed.”
That model is already producing measurable results for customers. Hat Club, an e-commerce headwear retailer, initially appeared in approximately 6 percent of relevant AI-generated answers. After four months of using Cognizo, that figure had risen to more than 50 percent. Hat Club also attributed a 20-fold increase in revenue from AI search to the program. The case illustrates the outcome Cognizo is designed to deliver: not simply more mentions inside AI platforms, but measurable gains in discovery, traffic, and sales.
Cognizo has since raised $1.8 million from investors, including Galata Business Angels, Mana Ventures, Treeo VC, Orange.fund, and several angel investors. The financing will support further product development, stronger data infrastructure, key hires, and international expansion. Aysan’s previous experience working on Microsoft Copilot and agentic-search reliability complements Ozcan’s leadership across company strategy, fundraising, and go-to-market growth.
Measuring AI visibility presents a different challenge from tracking a conventional search ranking. Answers can vary between platforms, regions, users, and repeated versions of the same question. Cognizo responds by running questions repeatedly across different environments, analyzing trend lines instead of treating an individual response as definitive, and connecting those changes with crawler activity, referral traffic, and revenue. “AI answers aren’t stable, and anyone selling you a single ‘ranking’ is oversimplifying,” Ozcan said. “What you can measure is direction: are you recommended more or less this month, on which questions, against whom, and whether that turns into revenue.”
The category itself remains young, with terms including answer engine optimization, generative engine optimization, and AI-search optimization still competing for adoption. Ozcan believes the terminology matters less than the underlying shift in consumer behavior. AI assistants are becoming an interface through which people discover companies, evaluate products, and make purchasing decisions. Cognizo is betting that the platforms capable of managing that complete journey, from identifying a missing recommendation to proving its effect on revenue, will become a foundational part of the modern marketing stack.
“The debate about what to call this will sort itself out,” Ozcan said. “What won’t wait is the customer who asked ChatGPT for a recommendation this morning and either heard your name or didn’t.”
