Search has changed the way brands are evaluated, with people increasingly putting questions to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Claude and Google AI Overviews and acting on the answers without opening a website. Pepper tracks more than 10 million prompts across those engines and says its data shows that whether a brand appears in those answers can now determine whether it makes a buyer’s shortlist.
Sangeeta Bavi, Head of Sales for Digital Natives, Startups and Growth at Anthropic, framed the challenge at Index by asking: “Go ask your marketing, product and engineering team: if you search for your product or brand, is it discoverable, and will an agent actually complete the transaction?”
Agent Atlas is designed to address that challenge. It operates as the chat layer of Pepper’s GEO platform, allowing users to ask questions in the same way they would approach a sharp analyst on their team. Atlas works across AI search visibility, rankings, analytics and content in one pass, identifies what is happening, recommends actions based on their expected impact and carries out the approved work.
Pepper said Agent Atlas is not software that clients log into themselves. “You do not log in. Pepper does,” the company said. Every Pepper customer is on Atlas from today, with their Pepper growth team operating it. Self-serve is not part of the release.
“We are not trying to build another tool in the category,” said Anirudh Singla, Co-founder and CEO of Pepper. “We are trying to engineer organic growth for an AI era. Our understanding of organic growth has moved from SEO to Search Everywhere Optimization, and that needs strategy, agents and human subject matter experts working together.”
“Atlas has brought our decision time right down,” Singla said. “An analysis that used to take two weeks now runs through Atlas, so our teams spend their hours on leads and business outcomes instead. If you are a CMO with two minutes before you walk into your CEO’s office, you should not have to wait a week for an agency report. You ask Atlas and you have the answer before you sit down.”
Alongside the launch, Pepper outlined how it will measure the work. The company said it will not sign a contract against a one-shot AI visibility score because the same prompt run repeatedly against the same model can return a different answer each time.
Instead, Pepper’s contractual commitments include a full strategy and a projected number before a client signs, written-in KPIs, weekly reviews against the baseline and an annual term that Pepper will retain only if the number moves.
“Every AI engine is a black box today, and anyone claiming clean attribution is guessing with confidence,” said Rishabh Shekhar, Co-founder and COO of Pepper. “That will change, because advertisers will not spend without reporting and these models will have to open a console. We are making sure our customers are already measuring the right things when it does.”
Pepper said the chain it stands behind runs from Earned Authority, the agreement across third-party sources that buyers and models trust, through citations and mentions, to branded search lift and then to demand.
The Agent Atlas launch came at the third Index, Pepper’s GEO Growth Summit, held in Bengaluru after San Francisco and New York, in front of more than 150 marketing leaders.
Anant Vidur Puri, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, argued for moving now, saying: “Unless AI is front and center of your marketing strategy, I don’t think the business can go fast.”
Ashutosh Wadhwani, Head of Growth at Swiggy, described the shift more directly: “Stop optimizing for clicks. Start optimizing for recommendations and citations.”
Pepper’s argument has remained unchanged for eight years: organic is the channel a brand owns rather than rents. With Agent Atlas, the company says a lean team can own all of it through agents for scale, humans for judgment and one team that owns the number.
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