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New Zealand brand-tracking company Tracksuit has acquired Australian startup Hall for an undisclosed sum.Hall measures how brands appear in consumers’ AI...

Tracksuit acquires AI visibility platform Hall as marketers grapple with GEO. July 21, 2026 8:57 Marketers looking for shortcuts in generative engine optimisation (GEO) may be wasting their efforts, according to brand tracking platform Tracksuit, which has just announced the acquisition of Sydney-based AI visibility startup Hall. Founded by former VaynerMedia strategist Kai Forsyth, Hall has spent the past 18 months developing tools designed to measure brand visibility within large language models (LLMs). The acquisition comes alongside a broader expansion of Tracksuit's leadership team, with the NZ-founded company also appointing former Hatch marketing executive Tom Mansfield as chief marketing officer. Speaking to Mumbrella about the acquisition, Mansfield said Tracksuit's analysis suggests that the same activities used to build awareness and perceptions among human audiences appear to influence how large language models represent brands. "One of the things we've realised through this process is that the way that you would ordinarily go about shifting brand awareness and perceptions in the market for a human audience is the same way that you would go about shifting perceptions and awareness in the models," he said. Mansfield said marketers may be overcomplicating GEO by treating it as a discipline separate from traditional brand building. "The brand marketers who are building their brand campaigns and doing all the activities that they would do to traditionally move a market, generally we're seeing those things will have a similar impact in the AI model," he said. He said Tracksuit was yet to find evidence that brands need a separate playbook for improving their visibility in large language models. "From our sense, it's not like a hacky sort of growth SEO play to get your brand moving in different ways in LLMs. It's just doing great brand work," he said. As part of the acquisition, Forsyth and the Hall team will join Tracksuit, with Forsyth taking responsibility for product direction across the company's AI visibility offering. Hall's technology will be integrated into Tracksuit's existing brand-tracking platform, giving customers visibility into how their brands are surfaced by generative AI tools, alongside more traditional measures of brand health. Mansfield said the aim was to give marketers a broader understanding of how their brands are performing across both human and AI-driven discovery channels. "It's intended to give marketers both a human and AI sense of how that story is changing." However, the rapidly evolving nature of generative AI presents challenges for marketers attempting to monitor their visibility, with AI models frequently updated and retrained. Mansfield said a brand's representation within AI platforms could change significantly as new models are released and existing systems are updated. "That continuous monitoring is probably the best way for marketers to keep in touch with what's going on," he said. Zac Nikolovski is a reporter for Mumbrella. He graduated from UTS with a Bachelor of Communications (Journalism/Media Business) in 2025. During his studies, he completed placements at 2SER, UTS' Central News, and the ABC. Have your say. Or comment anonymously Your comment will be marked as unverified