Here's a weird thing happening right now. You could have a great product, a solid price and happy customers — and still be invisible, because ChatGPT or Gemini never mentions you when someone asks the right question.
That's the problem Sitecore is chasing with a new tool called MarketingIQ, announced this week at its customer conference at the Walt Disney Swan and Dolphin Resort in Orlando.
I find this stuff fascinating, partly because I've spent years figuring out how to get noticed in places that didn't exist a decade ago. Travel blogging taught me that visibility isn't static — the rules change, and you either adapt or you disappear. Turns out big enterprise software companies are wrestling with the same question now, just with AI chatbots instead of search engines.
Rewind a Year to Understand This Week
Last November, at this same Orlando hotel, Sitecore CEO Eric Stine — five months into the job at the time — told reporters something that stuck: "What question are we the answer to, and what questions do we want to be the answer to?"
That question became a mission. In June, Sitecore bought a company called Scrunch, which tracks how brands show up across AI search platforms like ChatGPT and Google Gemini. Scrunch finds the gaps — a brand left out of an AI answer, outdated pricing, missing context.
This week, Sitecore gave that discovery engine something to do. It's called MarketingIQ.
What MarketingIQ Actually Does
Think of it as the action half of a two-part system. Scrunch spots the problem. MarketingIQ fixes it — or at least drafts the fix.
Say an AI chatbot leaves your brand out of an answer, or quotes a price you changed six months ago. MarketingIQ checks your approved product information and existing content, then drafts a correction. That draft goes into a staging area. Nothing ships until a human approves it.
Sitecore is blunt about this part: "nothing leaves a staging area without human involvement." Marketers set the strategy and make the judgment calls. The AI agents handle the busywork — the handoffs, the coordination, the stuff that usually gets lost between five different tools.
And here's a detail I like: MarketingIQ doesn't require you to rip out your current content management system, your digital asset manager or your CRM. It works across third-party systems. No forced migration, no "switch everything to us or it won't work." That's a refreshing contrast to how software sales usually go.
Once a fix goes live, teams track three things — did visibility improve, did qualified traffic show up, did that traffic convert. Those results feed back into the next recommendation, closing a loop that, honestly, marketing analytics tools have promised for years without quite delivering.
One Customer, One Clear Reason Why
IFS, an enterprise software company, is the only named customer so far. Its CMO, Oliver Pilgerstorfer, put it simply: "It's one thing to understand how we show up in AI-based search results, but it drives little value unless you act upon it."
That's the whole pitch in one sentence. Visibility data without action is just a dashboard nobody checks.
What's Still Unanswered
A year ago, Stine said Sitecore would have "hundreds of agents live by the end of the year." Whether that happened isn't clear yet. He also criticized companies that slap a separate price tag on anything labeled AI — so will MarketingIQ cost extra, or is it baked in? That's still open.
And here's a small irony: last year Stine insisted, "Our CMS platform no longer is a CMS platform. It is a DXP." This week's announcement never uses the term DXP once. Labels shift fast in this business.
Why This Matters Beyond Sitecore
This isn't an isolated move. Adobe bought Semrush and built its own AI visibility tool. Optimizely partnered with Conductor for the same reason. Semrush's own data shows visitors referred by AI chatbots convert 4.4 times better than regular organic search traffic. That number alone explains why every platform vendor is suddenly racing toward the same finish line.
What strikes me most is how fast the ground shifts under any business that depends on being found. I've rebuilt how I reach readers more than once over the years — what worked in 2017 doesn't work the same way now. Companies chasing AI visibility are learning that same lesson, just at enterprise scale and enterprise speed.
The question worth asking isn't whether AI search matters. It's whether you're watching closely enough to notice when the rules change again.
Source: CMSWire
Earlier in this series: Adobe's New AI Can Make a Million Banner Ads. Can It Make One Good One?
