Brian Stempeck on Building for Brand Visibility in the Age of AI Search

About this episode

Brian Stempeck is the CEO and co-founder of Evertune AI, a platform that helps brands and agencies understand and influence how AI models represent them in consumer search. In this episode (00:00:00), he traces the path from employee #8 at The Trade Desk to founder, and breaks down why AI search is a fundamentally different marketing channel...not just the next version of SEO.

Before Brian Stempeck started a company, he spent over a decade learning what it looks like when a startup gets commercial strategy right from the beginning. He came into the ad tech world as a generalist--no sales background, no industry experience--and that turned out to be the point. The conversation with Mike and Ian covers what he absorbed about selling complex technology to buyers who don't fully understand it (00:09:50), why user empathy compounds into product loyalty (00:15:54), and how transparency became a more durable competitive weapon than features. That foundation shows up directly in how he thinks about building Evertune.

The transition out of a decade-long hyper-growth run isn't just a career move, it's an identity reset, and Brian gets candid about how long that actually takes (00:26:57). The founding thesis for Evertune came from watching consumer behavior shift in real time: people were routing commercial queries through ChatGPT and Gemini instead of Google, and brands had no visibility into what those models were saying about them or why (00:32:26). That gap between where consumer attention was going and where brand investment was still pointed was the opening.

Evertune raised a $4M seed in fall 2024, went to market in early 2025, and closed a $15M Series A seven months later (00:43:08). The product helps brands measure how AI models represent them across millions of probabilistic queries, then identifies the content, PR, and paid media levers that can move the needle. Stempeck draws a sharp distinction between this and SEO: AI search is mid-funnel, conversational, deeply personalized, and the underlying models change without notice (00:53:52). ChatGPT cut the number of brands it recommended in a given category by a third in a single update with no announcement, no changelog. That volatility is exactly why the problem requires a dedicated platform, and why Stempeck sees the current moment as the closest parallel to the early days of programmatic: fast-moving, infrastructure-level, and undersold to the buyers who need it most.

Key Takeaways:

• AI search is not SEO 2.0: The mechanics are fundamentally different and the strategies that work in blue-link search don't map cleanly onto LLM visibility.
• Brand exposure in AI is already a boardroom issue and the accountability loop is forming faster than most marketing teams have a plan for it.
• Model volatility is a moat: Because AI models change constantly and unpredictably, brands can't solve this problem with a one-time content fix, which is what makes a monitoring and optimization platform defensible.
• Decompression isn't optional: Brian's advice to anyone leaving a long hyper-growth run is direct: take real time off before starting the next thing, because the mental state you carry out of that environment will shape the decisions you make going in.
• Fundraise to the market, not the model: Evertune went from seed to Series A in seven months not because of a plan, but because customer signal was unambiguous.

Chapters

• 00:00:00 Welcome Brian
• 00:02:17 Early Ad Tech & Generalist Edge
• 00:09:50 Selling Complex Tech to Confused Buyers
• 00:15:54 User Empathy as Product Strategy
• 00:26:57 Leaving & Decompressing
• 00:32:26 Finding Co-Founders & the Evertune Thesis
• 00:43:08 Building Evertune: Product & Fundraise
• 00:53:52 AI Ads & the ChatGPT Question
• 01:02:24 Shipping Speed in the AI Era
• 01:03:46 What They'd Do Differently

The Build with Mike O'Sullivan is a podcast produced by The Current which is owned and operated by The Trade Desk, Inc. Learn more: https://www.thecurrent.com/

Sincera was acquired by The Trade Desk, Inc.