Agency Partner Story How The Navigators made AI brand visibility a pillar of their practice
Dean Harris, Founder of The Navigators, saw consumer behaviour shifting toward AI-mediated discovery before most agencies were paying attention. Here is how he built a GEO practice around Gumshoe and what it has meant for his business and his clients.
17 years
in brand intelligence consulting
Recurring
revenue stream added through GEO services
AU + NZ
markets served across Australia and New Zealand
The Agency
About The Navigators
The Navigators is a brand insights consultancy founded in Sydney, Australia in 2009, with offices in Wellington, New Zealand. For 17 years they have helped brands understand their strengths, weaknesses, and performance in markets across the region. Their work sits at the intersection of brand strategy and measurement, giving clients the intelligence they need to make sharper decisions about how they show up in the market.
The Challenge
Buyers changed. The measurement tools had not.
About 18 months ago, The Navigators commissioned their own research into how Australian and New Zealand consumers were adopting AI tools. What they found was hard to ignore: one of the most common applications was helping with buying decisions. People were turning to ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude not just as productivity tools, but as a replacement for traditional search when evaluating brands and products.
For a consultancy built around measuring brand performance, that created an immediate problem. If consumers were using AI to discover and compare brands, then brand visibility in AI models was a real performance metric. And there was no credible way to measure it.
Dean and his team set out to find a solution that was fit for purpose, not just an SEO tool rebranded for AI. That search led them to Gumshoe.
"GEO and AI search really became a priority for us when we first started to understand consumer behaviour in terms of adoption and use of AI tools to help buying decision-making."
Why Gumshoe
Context is what AI models actually respond to
Dean's assessment of the market was direct: most tools approaching AEO were treating it as an extension of SEO. That framing misses the fundamental difference. AI models do not serve ranked links based on keywords. They assign probability based on context, including who is asking, what they have asked before, and how the model understands user intent. Solving for keywords in that environment is the wrong game entirely.
Gumshoe stood out because it was built around that reality. By using personas and topics to simulate how real buyers interact with AI models, Gumshoe captures something close to what actually happens in the world. That methodological grounding was a prerequisite for Dean. If the measurement was not valid, the insights would not be trustworthy enough to present to clients.
The Gumshoe team's expertise in the GEO space was equally important. The Navigators are brand strategists, not GEO technologists. Having a partner that understood the underlying mechanics of how models work, and could support them in interpreting results for clients, made the agency partnership a natural fit.
"Gumshoe solves for one of the biggest needs in this space and that is to give models context."
How They Use It
A repeatable workflow built around benchmarking and personas
Business development: the trial benchmark
When approaching new clients or prospects, The Navigators run a trial benchmark report scoped to the client's category. It is a fast and concrete way to demonstrate what Gumshoe surfaces, and it consistently creates a conversation worth having. GEO has become a topic that gets meetings.
Harmonising client personas with AI-surfaced audiences
Most clients come in with existing segmentation models and audience assumptions. The first step is to reconcile that mental model with what Gumshoe's AI-generated personas reveal about how models actually see the buying audiences in their category. That alignment exercise alone often surfaces assumptions worth revisiting.
Benchmark, recommend, hand off, measure again
After running the full benchmark, The Navigators translate Gumshoe's results into a prioritised set of content recommendations: which persona gaps to close, which topics to address, which structural issues to fix on the client's website. Those recommendations get handed to the client's content agency. Then, after a quarter of execution, the measurement cycle begins again.
What Clients Discover
Three things that consistently surprise clients
Market leaders with low AI visibility
Several of The Navigators' clients are category leaders by market share. Their AI visibility told a very different story. Seeing that gap between real-world market position and how AI models represent them raises urgent questions about what is missing from their content and digital presence.
Websites built for humans, not models
Many clients have JavaScript-heavy websites with minimal ingestible text content and poor schema markup. They look great to a human visitor and are nearly invisible to an AI model. Gumshoe surfaces that structural gap in a way clients can act on directly.
Blind spots in how models describe the category
In one notable example, a major Australian paint retailer had built their positioning around painting expertise and in-store advice. Gumshoe showed that AI models were describing them primarily through the lens of loyalty and reward programs instead. The brand was winning on an attribute they did not want to own, and losing on the one they had invested in. That single insight reshaped their content strategy.
Business Impact
New clients, deeper relationships, and revenue that recurs
Adding GEO to The Navigators' offering has had a direct impact on their pipeline. GEO is a topic clients and prospects will take a meeting about. It opens conversations that would not have happened otherwise, and a number of those conversations have converted into paying clients.
For existing clients, Gumshoe has created a new pillar of service delivery that deepens the relationship and adds a recurring revenue dimension to what had previously been more project-based work. The quarterly measurement cycle gives clients a reason to stay engaged, and gives The Navigators a structured reason to keep delivering value over time.
"It is not just the incremental revenue, it is the fact that it is recurring and it is built around a need for ongoing measurement and monitoring."
"AEO is really answering the question about how does your brand turn up? How do you appear? How do you show up in AI models in terms of being discovered and how brands are likely to talk about how they fit with the needs of buyers?"
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