How Braintrust Built a Marketing Engine for the AI-Native Buyer
With Raman Hundal, Head of Growth Marketing
Braintrust is the platform engineering teams use to evaluate and monitor AI quality. Notion runs evals through Braintrust to deploy frontier models within hours of release. Stripe, Vercel, and Zapier trace their AI features through it to know whether their outputs are working. The company has become a gold standard for observability, used by some of the most demanding engineering organizations in the world.
This creates a unique marketing problem.
Braintrust's buyers are AI engineers, product engineers, and technical PMs. Their target market builds AI products for a living. They're also among the earliest and heaviest adopters of AI. When they evaluate tools, they don't simply Google it and click the top three results. They use LLMs powered by AI search for every buying decision. AI search is already part of how they evaluate and discover tools.
When Braintrust's growth team started measuring their presence across AI answers they cared about, the number was sobering: 2.5%.
"If you think about the type of customers we're selling to, they're definitely going to be AI-forward. We have an AI product. So naturally their adoption of AI search engines will be much higher than the average user. It was pretty intuitive. You need to invest in this"
A lean team covering a lot of ground
Raman Hundal joined Braintrust four months ago to run growth marketing. In practice, this covers paid ads, conversion rate optimization, growth engineering, SEO, AEO, and more. The whole team operates this way. Everyone is deep in the weeds across channels, constantly optimizing and mixing big swings with smaller ones.
The team knew AI search mattered enormously for their buyers. That was intuitive., The harder question was execution - how could they improve their presence? This is where Gauge entered the picture: auditing AI responses, figuring out where competitors were showing up and Braintrust wasn't, then producing the right content to close those gaps. This represented a full-time job on top of everything else.
The gap between product strength and market visibility
Braintrust had built the strongest product in the category. Notion, Stripe, Vercel, Zapier, the customer list speaks for itself. However, product leadership and AI search visibility turned out to be two very different things.
When the team started tracking their visibility with Gauge, the picture was clear. Competitors were showing up in AI answers for queries Braintrust needed to own. The product was best-in-class. AI just didn’t understand that yet.
Braintrust needed to build a content operation that matched their product's position in the market. Not broad SEO plays or generic thought leadership, but content targeted at the exact queries where AI models were recommending competitors instead. Through Gauge's gap analysis and citation tracking, the team could see which queries they were missing, which competitor articles were being cited, and where they had openings to create something stronger.
Gauge's topic grouping lets the team break this down further, identifying visibility gaps across specific areas including evaluation, observability, tracing, and AI agents. The analysis showed not just who was being mentioned, but which specific URLs AI models were pulling from. That changed how they spent their time. Content capacity was limited, so every piece had to count. Instead of guessing which topics to cover next, they prioritized based on where real gaps existed and what AI models were actually referencing
Gauge also helped directly with content creation. The platform's content engine turns gap data into briefs, outlines, and fully written articles, all targeted at the specific queries the team cares about. Without that, Raman would have been writing everything himself. Between the gap identification, content production, and data gathering, the partnership saved him over 24 hours a month, time he could put back into the other five channels he was running.
"Gauge is really good at finding the gaps. Since October, we've tripled our impression share, and a lot of that is from the gaps Gauge is identifying. Maybe we would have identified those gaps ourselves, but I can't guarantee we would have tripled our numbers without Gauge"
Any growth team can brainstorm content ideas. The question is whether those ideas actually move the numbers. Braintrust let the data make that call, and the results followed.
Two kinds of results
As Braintrust's AI search presence grew, Raman started tracking the impact in two ways.
The first was direct. As Braintrust's AI search presence grew, the team traced a clear line from visibility to revenue. More AI answers mentioning Braintrust meant more organic leads entering the funnel, and the team attributed real revenue back to AI search as a standalone channel.
The second was even more impactful. Braintrust started showing up consistently in Google and AI Overviews, the AI-generated summaries that sit above traditional search results. When an engineering leader searches for something related to LLM evaluation or AI observability, Braintrust is now the first name they see.
"We're showing up in more AI Overviews, which I would consider a very high value brand awareness play. Those are very valuable links."
In a market where Braintrust competes with larger platforms and established observability vendors, persistent visibility compounds. Every AI Overview appearance, every ChatGPT mention, every Perplexity citation reinforces Braintrust as the name associated with the category. For an AI-native audience that encounters these answers dozens of times a week, the brand effect is indisputable
Connecting AI search to the rest of the operation
Braintrust's AI search strategy isn't a standalone effort. The team is building out paid, organic, and lifecycle channels at the same time, and they want all of it running from the same foundation.
Raman calls it the "contextual layer," a single system that holds everything the team knows about what's working across channels. When AI search data, ad performance, organic traffic, and company context all live in one place, each channel can inform the others. That's why working with Gauge that's expanded beyond AEO into areas like ad tracking and SEO mattered to the team. It’s evolving at the fast pace required to keep up with Braintrust’s growth. "It's really about unifying the systems. Right now our big focus is building a contextual layer that all our operations can work out of, and part of that will be hooking our AEO strategy into that contextual layer."
Going forward, the team is pushing into more automation. Content that refreshes as AI search dynamics shift, and tighter feedback loops across channels. For a lean team covering this much ground, the goal is a marketing system where every channel makes the others smarter.
Where Braintrust stands today
Braintrust is now cited in over 45% of all queries tracked for their entire space. They hold three of the top five most-cited articles. They're mentioned in over 40% of AI-generated answers across the platforms their buyers use every day: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini.
From 2.5% to category-defining visibility. Built by a lean team that recognized the channel their buyers already lived in, built a data-driven content strategy to meet them there, and executed relentlessly.
"If you think that your customers are using AI search or AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Claude Code, you should be investing there. If you don't do it right now, you'll fall behind everyone."
Key takeaways
Know where your buyer actually searches. Braintrust's audience was already living in AI search. The realization didn't require data. It required paying attention to how their own customers discover and evaluate tools.
Product leadership doesn't guarantee visibility. Braintrust had the best product and the strongest logos in their space, but AI models were citing competitors for queries Braintrust should have owned. Closing that gap required a deliberate content strategy mapped to real data.
AI search visibility compounds in multiple ways. Direct clicks and leads matter. Showing up in Google, AI Overviews and AI answers builds brand awareness that compounds over time.
Build marketing systems, not isolated channels. The best growth teams wire AI search into their broader operation so that signals from one channel inform decisions across all of them.
Thank you to Raman for sharing Braintrust's story.
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