Built for the shift
no one saw coming
mapou.ai was built to help consumer brands make the move from traditional search to AI-first discovery, before the gap between early movers and everyone else gets too wide to close. Retailers and agencies who serve them are welcome too.
Fifteen years inside the platforms, not the agencies
Arvin Nundloll
Founder, mapou.ai, New York City
- Comcast Advertising
- NBCUniversal
- Amazon
- DIRECTV
- Retail media
- Attribution and measurement
- MBA, William & Mary
Arvin spent his career on the platform side of ad tech and commerce media. Director of Strategy and Business Development at Comcast Advertising, with prior stints at NBCUniversal, Amazon, DIRECTV, and Time Warner Cable. The work was running two-sided economics at scale: balancing advertiser demand against premium TV and commerce supply, and building the vendor frameworks, attribution systems, and retail media partnerships that turned that balance into revenue.
That background is what makes AI search a natural next step. AI search is structurally a marketplace, not a content problem. Buyers ask the assistant. Brands compete to be cited. The platform decides who wins. The shape of that game is exactly what Arvin spent a decade building inside Comcast and NBCU. mapou is what happens when an operator who has run the supply side turns to help the brands trying to win on the new one.
He works with a small number of clients at a time from New York City. Every engagement is led by him from start to finish, not handed off to a junior team after the pitch, and the SEO playbook stays on the shelf where it belongs.
The mapou tree (Pisonia subcordata) is native to Mauritius, where Arvin's family is from. It takes root in difficult terrain and becomes the landmark everything else orients around. That's the position we build for brands in AI search. Read the full story of the name
Why the panel exists
mapou is a Conversational Commerce Intelligence company. It measures how AI assistants alter commercial decisions inside high-intent consumer categories.
Most brands can't see how AI answers treat them, and a one-off check says little on its own. So mapou runs a standing panel. Every month it asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Grok the buying questions a real customer would ask, with Perplexity joining each quarter. Beauty, streaming, and the categories that follow each get their own monthly read of how those engines recommend, frame, and shape buyer outcomes.
The same questions run every month, so when a number moves, something changed. Consulting is what happens after the data: success is measured by your AI share of voice, citation clarity, and the revenue that AI search actually drives.
“The brands that win in AI search won't be the ones with the biggest budgets. They'll be the ones who understood the new rules first.”
What we believe
AI search is not a trend. It's the infrastructure.
ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI-native retail are permanent shifts in how buyers discover brands. The question is not whether to adapt, but how fast.
GEO needs to be earned, not bought.
You can't pay to be cited in ChatGPT. AI systems cite authoritative entities. Our job is to make your brand one of them, through genuine entity architecture and content strategy.
Attribution is the missing piece.
Most brands can't measure the revenue impact of AI search. We build the measurement infrastructure so you can optimise AI-native channels with confidence.
Speed of action compounds.
Brands who establish AI authority early will be harder to displace. Every quarter you delay, competitor citations become more entrenched in AI training data.
Brands win AI commerce on retailer sites.
95% of AI-driven ecommerce sales happen on retailer sites. The brands winning in AI commerce show up inside retail media AI. That is where the transaction happens.
First-party data is the new moat.
As cookies disappear, the brands with clean, rich first-party data will have structural advantage in AI-native personalisation and attribution.
Let's work together
If your brand is navigating the shift from SEO to AI, we'd like to hear about it.
Who we work with
Consumer brands
DTC and wholesale brands whose visibility in AI answers drives purchase consideration. Our primary focus.
Retailers
Multi-category and vertical retailers building presence in AI-native commerce channels.
AI and marketing agencies
Agencies and consultancies who want to offer GEO as a service to their brand clients, powered by our white-label infrastructure and measurement platform.
Media and ad buyers
Teams navigating the shift from traditional search to AI-native media placements and agentic commerce.