Pitch brands let you model how a prospective client shows up in AI-powered search before any contract is signed. It’s ok if you don’t get everything perfect. The goal is to establish a clean, believable baseline that reveals opportunities quickly and holds up in a sales conversation.
Think of pitch brand setup as discovery rather than configuration. You are learning how AI systems currently understand the brand and where that story breaks down.
Create the Pitch Brand
Navigate to Pitch Brands and then click Create Pitch Brand.
Use the brand name that appears most consistently online. Skip legal suffixes unless they are used everywhere. Short, commonly used names are easier for AI systems to recognize and cite.
Enter the brand’s website URL and select the region you will be tracking.
Once submitted, Cognizo builds an initial profile using the website, public sources, and user-generated content. This usually takes about a minute.
Best practice: If the prospect uses different names across regions or products, start with the most visible core brand. You can always expand later.
Review the Brand Overview
When the profile loads, you will see an overview that includes industry classification, focus areas, and early assumptions about how the business is described online.
Read this closely. This is often where gaps surface fastest. If the overview leans too heavily into one product, service, or narrative, that usually reflects what AI systems can find today. Not what the company thinks it does best.
Best practice: Treat this as an early discovery moment. What we generate here can surface real content gaps and opportunities. If the overview leans too heavily into one offering, that is often a signal that your broader story may be underrepresented in existing content online.
Select Competitors
Cognizo will suggest competitors automatically. Check the ones that matter. Skip anything unfamiliar.
Add missing competitors manually. Starting with at least five gives you more useful early comparisons. Many mature setups end up with 15 to 20 over time, but that is not required for a pitch.
You can always revise this later.
Best practice: Prioritize competitors that appear frequently in sales conversations, not just market leaders.
Define Topics Thoughtfully
Topics organize prompts so insights roll up cleanly. A good topic represents a meaningful slice of how customers discover, evaluate, or engage with the business.
There is no single correct structure. The most useful topic setups usually mirror how the business actually operates.
Some common approaches:
Group by core product lines so each offering can be evaluated independently
Group by services or use cases when different problems are being solved
Group by funnel stage to compare early research visibility versus purchase-driven queries
Group by audience or channel, such as enterprise versus SMB
Align topics to seasonal cycles for businesses with predictable peaks
Topics are flexible. You can add, rename, or remove them later.
Best practice: Think in terms of operations and customer behavior, not marketing campaigns. If it feels close enough, continue.
Review Suggested Prompts
Cognizo generates suggested prompts using real questions from forums, reviews, and user-generated content.
Focus on intent, not phrasing. AI systems normalize wording and respond to the underlying question.
Remove anything clearly irrelevant. Expect some prompts to feel technical or unfamiliar, especially in specialized industries. You can remove them or keep them temporarily to see how they perform.
Best practice: Light editing beats heavy pruning. Early signal is more valuable than perfection.
Add High-Value Custom Prompts
This is where agencies can stand out.
If possible, add real questions pulled from the prospect’s:
Sales calls
Contact forms
Support tickets
RFPs or pitch decks
Also consider prompts that reflect:
Differentiators competitors do not offer
End-to-end services
Geographic reach
Credibility signals or legacy positioning
Prompts can always be edited or paused later.
Complete Setup and Let It Run
Finish setup and let Cognizo finalize the brand. This typically takes about an hour. You will get an email when it is ready.
Prompts begin running daily immediately and run for 7 days to establish a baseline that you can share with your prospects.
Once the Pitch Brand is Complete
At the end of the seven days, the pitch brand is marked as complete. From here, agencies typically take one or more of the following steps.
Generate a Report
You can generate and export a report that summarizes how the brand appears across AI-powered search today. This includes where the brand shows up, where competitors are cited instead, and which prompts expose the clearest gaps.
This report is often used as the foundation for a review call. It gives prospects something concrete to react to and helps shift the conversation from abstract AI visibility to specific opportunities.
Generate Content Recommendations
Cognizo can generate content recommendations tied directly to observed gaps.
These recommendations highlight where competitors are being cited and what types of pages or answers are missing or underdeveloped on the prospect’s site. For agencies, this is often where positioning clicks. You are no longer guessing what content might help. You are responding to what AI systems are already pulling from elsewhere.
Generate a Sample Content Brief and Article
To make the opportunity tangible, you can also generate a sample content brief and draft article.
This gives prospects a clear picture of what execution could look like. It is especially useful for showing how AI-friendly content differs from traditional SEO writing and for demonstrating how your agency would approach the work.
Final thought
Seven days is usually all it takes. By the end of a pitch brand run, most teams stop asking “What is AI visibility?” and start asking “Why are they showing up there and we’re not?” And that’s a much better conversation to be in.