Viral Nation, a social-first agency and technology company, has launched AI Discovery, a new offering built to help brands shape how AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews describe, trust and recommend them to consumers.

The offering falls under Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), a discipline aimed at influencing AI-generated answers rather than search engine rankings. In a press release, Viral Nation framed the shift as structural: when a buyer asks an AI platform which brand or provider to consider, the answer itself becomes the shortlist, and a brand that is absent or miscategorized in that answer loses consideration before a human enters the funnel.

Viral Nation structured AI Discovery around five modules: 

• Diagnostic establishes a brand’s current AI visibility through prompt mapping, citation audits, and competitive benchmarking. 
• Foundation covers technical optimization and “answer-ready” content. 
• Signal addresses creator, community, earned media and cultural strategy, the inputs Viral Nation says AI systems learn from beyond a brand’s own website. 
• Measurement tracks prompt visibility, mention share of voice, and AI referral traffic against business outcomes. 
• Integration connects the offering to a brand’s broader digital and social strategy on an ongoing basis.

“We are helping brands shape how AI understands them,” said Joe Gagliese, co-founder of Viral Nation. “AI learns from signals, and those signals are increasingly shaped by content, creators, communities, authority, culture and conversation.”

Before bringing the offering to market, Viral Nation said it tested the methodology on itself over the past year and a half, reporting 84% prompt visibility, 52% share of voice in mentions, 256% growth in AI referral traffic and an additional $17 million in directly attributed pipeline.

That internal testing lines up with third-party data. A May 2026 AI Search Visibility Index, produced by Net Influencer in partnership with AEO/SEO agency Grow and Convert, ranked Viral Nation first among Influencer Marketing agencies for AI search visibility, at 66% across a standardized set of buyer-style prompts run on five major AI platforms. That put Viral Nation 17 percentage points ahead of second-place Obviously and made it the only agency in that ranking to clear the study’s “default recommendation” threshold of 60%.

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