🎤 Full Interview: Barak Ben-Noon, CTO and Co-Founder @ Anvil
"In the new era of AI-driven search, you don’t win with volume—you win with authority, quality, and true expertise that AIs can trust. Our job with Anvil is to make your brand visible when it matters most, at the moment of the answer—because that’s where the real customer journeys now begin."
Redefining Brand Visibility in the LLM Era
Brands face an unprecedented challenge as AI-powered Large Language Models reshuffle the search landscape. Traditional SEO tactics falter as over 80% of searches become “zero-click” interactions driven by AIs like ChatGPT and Gemini, leaving marketers blind to how their products are found—or overlooked. Barak Ben Noon and Daniel Siryakov founded Anvil to solve this visibility blackout through data-driven insights and targeted action, enabling businesses to claim authority and growth in the AI-first discovery era.
Quick Background
Barak and Daniel come from deep AI and infrastructure backgrounds, familiar with both the technology and the marketing struggles around new search paradigms. Observing the rapid shift away from Google-centric search to AI-answered queries, they saw the dire need for a fresh SEO approach that captured the realities of LLM-driven customer journeys.
🧩 The Challenge
Traditional SEO metrics became insufficient as billions of AI queries bypassed website clicks.
Brands had no visibility into how or when they appeared in AI-generated answers.
Without insight, marketers couldn’t optimize content or know where to direct efforts.
Smaller brands struggled disproportionately compared to giant competitors with big marketing budgets.
Existing tools failed to capture the scope of zero-click and AI-driven discovery.
The Solution: Anvil’s LLM-First Visibility Platform
Anvil delivers comprehensive monitoring of brand mentions across LLM search engines, providing:
Real-time visibility into how brands are represented in AI answers.
Competitive benchmarking to identify gaps and opportunities versus rivals.
Content guidance based on deep analytics to craft high-impact, relevant messaging tailored to long-form AI queries.
Community engagement insights, focusing on strategic channels like Reddit and Wikipedia known to influence AI knowledge bases.
Workflow automation to speed implementation and feedback cycles.
Implementation
Using Anvil, early customers:
Identified key AI prompts where they were invisible or underrepresented.
Crafted targeted content answering specific, intent-rich long-form queries.
Engaged actively on Reddit and Wikipedia, establishing authoritative presence.
Monitored shifts in AI citation rates, iterating to amplify impact.
Results
A client increased their LLM mention share from 1% to 10% within weeks.
Small niche businesses successfully competed head-to-head with industry giants due to strategic AI-focused content and community positioning.
Brands transitioned from “flying blind” in AI search to guided, data-backed optimization.
Key Learnings:
Quality and authority trump volume—AI prioritizes expert, credible sources over mere backlinks or bulk content.
Answering long-tail, intent-rich questions is critical as average LLM prompts are significantly longer and more complex than traditional search terms.
Community signals, especially Reddit and Wikipedia, carry outsized influence in LLM content generation.
AI and LLM SEO require a shift from top-of-funnel traffic focus to mid- and bottom-funnel intent-driven engagement.
In this episode, we cover:
00:00 – Intro & Anvil
01:24 – Google → ChatGPT Shift
02:10 – Reddit & Wikipedia Power
04:15 – Small Brands Can Win
06:06 – SEO → AEO Shift
10:00 – Backlinks vs Content Quality
12:20 – 3 Pillars of AI SEO
14:21 – YouTube, Reviews & Community
16:53 – Future of Agencies & Tools
21:19 – Tracking AI Visibility
28:43 – Anvil’s Vision & Growth
42:25 – Founder Journey & Future of SEO
For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email david@thehomabase.ai
Future Outlook
Barak and Daniel envision Anvil as an indispensable marketing stack component, similar to how HubSpot transformed marketing operations. Their vision is a future where AI-first visibility empowers every product team to thrive in increasingly AI-mediated customer journeys, democratizing growth potential across all brand sizes.
Find Case Studies of all other episodes here.
