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Think about how you find new products.
Maybe you asked an AI assistant for a recommendation last week. Maybe you went down a rabbit hole on Reddit. Maybe you saw a comment under an Instagram post that mentioned a brand you'd never heard of, and 20 minutes later, you were on their site.
Consumer discovery has fractured across more surfaces than ever before — LLMs, organic search, paid search, social conversations on Reddit and X — and the way people evaluate brands in these spaces looks nothing like the traditional marketing funnel.
There's no neat, linear path from awareness to consideration to purchase. People gather opinions from AI, validate them through social proof, and cross-reference with search results, all in the same sitting.
In 2026, brand discovery is the sum total of how and where your brand shows up when potential customers are in exploration mode — before intent has fully formed, before they've decided to buy anything, and often before they even know your brand exists.
The ecommerce industry has spent the last decade obsessing over what happens after someone enters the funnel: attribution, ROAS, conversion rates, retention curves. But now, the ground has shifted underneath the entire discovery layer and the majority of companies are scrambling to catch up.
If you run an ecommerce brand, you probably have a solid handle on your acquisition metrics. You know your CAC, your ROAS, your channel mix. You can tell higher-ups which Meta campaign drove the most revenue last Thursday. The mechanics of converting demand into customers? Sorted (probably because you’re using Triple Whale 😉).
Discovery sits upstream of all of that.
It's the moment someone develops an impression of your brand, positive or negative, based on:
The distinction is important because the levers of influencing these channels are completely different. You can't buy your way into an AI model's recommendation the same way you bid on a keyword. You can't run a retargeting campaign against someone who’s read a negative comment about your brand in a subreddit.
These points of discovery require different strategies — third-party content, community engagement, SEO fundamentals, understanding how LLMs synthesize information about your category — and those strategies require different data inputs.
But that’s where problems start to arise: the data, or lack thereof.
Now, some tools have started to nibble around the edges of this problem. You can find an AI visibility tracker here, a social listening tool there, an SEO platform somewhere else. But stitching together three or four different dashboards from three or four different vendors creates its own set of complications.
For one, the data doesn't talk to each other.
You might notice your AI visibility dropped for a key prompt, but you'd have to manually cross-reference that with what people are saying about you on social to understand why. Each tool gives you a slice, but the whole picture — the relationship between these discovery channels — stays out of reach.
The market is starting to recognize this. You're seeing platforms merge LLM tracking with SEO dashboards, which tells you something about where customer expectations are heading. Brands don't want three separate platforms to answer one question: How are people finding us, and how can we influence what they think when they do?
This is exactly why we launched Discovery — a unified workspace inside Triple Whale that brings together three purpose-built dashboards covering the full spectrum of brand discovery.
Each one addresses a distinct channel where your brand is being evaluated, and together, they give you something that hasn't existed until now: a complete view of your top-of-funnel presence across LLMs, search, and social.
Let's walk through them.
Large language models (LLMs) are reshaping how consumers research products. When someone asks ChatGPT or Gemini to recommend a product in your category, does your brand come up? How often? In what context? And what are the models saying about you compared to your competitors?
Triple Whale’s AI Visibility tracks your brand's presence across major LLMs, showing you where you're being recommended, where you're being overlooked, and how your share of voice compares to the competition.
This is a discovery channel that barely existed two years ago and is already influencing purchase decisions at scale.
In Q4 2025, Triple Whale merchants had 424,262 orders from LLM referrals. In all of 2024, that number was 7,152. That's 59x growth in one year. The real number is even higher. Our post-purchase survey data suggests 2.5-3x more orders were LLM-influenced but didn't come through trackable links.
The brands that understand their AI visibility today will have a meaningful advantage as LLM-driven search continues to eat into traditional discovery channels.
Search remains one of the highest-intent discovery channels in ecommerce. But the keyword landscape shifts constantly, and most brands are either overspending on terms they already own or missing opportunities by underinvesting on certain platforms.
Triple Whale’s Keyword Intelligence gives you a consolidated view of your paid keyword data across Google Ads, Amazon Ads, and Bing Ads — surfacing revenue trends, opportunities, and conversion gaps. Follow the customer journey from search query to the paid keyword it triggered. Then evaluate performance — impressions, clicks, spend, conversions, revenue, and ROAS — all in one view.
The goal here is to turn keyword data into decisions; a strategic view of where you’re showing up in search, how spend & revenue correlate to match types, and what it'll take to make improvements.
Some of the most influential brand discovery today happens in places that look nothing like traditional marketing channels — the comment sections across social platforms.
These are the spaces where real people share unfiltered opinions about products, and where prospective customers go to validate (or invalidate) a brand before purchasing.
Social Monitoring tracks what people are saying about your brand across Meta (ads and organic) post comments in real time. You can see sentiment shifts, emerging high-risk themes, competitive mentions, and the specific language real customers use to describe their experience with your products/services.
This is qualitative intelligence that no amount of click data can give you, and it often explains the why behind trends you see in your other metrics.
Discovery is a major step, but if you know Triple Whale, you know we don't build products in isolation.
Discovery gives you intelligence on how your brand is being found. But what happens next — when those people click through, land on your site, convert, and (hopefully) come back — that's where the rest of the Triple Whale platform picks up.
From marketing acquisition and attribution to web conversion analytics to retention and lifetime value, Triple Whale is the complete intelligence layer for ecommerce. The goal isn't to be the best tool for one piece of the puzzle. The goal is to be the platform where you understand your entire business, from the first time someone encounters your brand in an LLM response to the fifth time they reorder.
Discovery is now live. If you've been wondering how your brand shows up in the places where modern consumers actually explore and evaluate products, now you can find out.
Think about how you find new products.
Maybe you asked an AI assistant for a recommendation last week. Maybe you went down a rabbit hole on Reddit. Maybe you saw a comment under an Instagram post that mentioned a brand you'd never heard of, and 20 minutes later, you were on their site.
Consumer discovery has fractured across more surfaces than ever before — LLMs, organic search, paid search, social conversations on Reddit and X — and the way people evaluate brands in these spaces looks nothing like the traditional marketing funnel.
There's no neat, linear path from awareness to consideration to purchase. People gather opinions from AI, validate them through social proof, and cross-reference with search results, all in the same sitting.
In 2026, brand discovery is the sum total of how and where your brand shows up when potential customers are in exploration mode — before intent has fully formed, before they've decided to buy anything, and often before they even know your brand exists.
The ecommerce industry has spent the last decade obsessing over what happens after someone enters the funnel: attribution, ROAS, conversion rates, retention curves. But now, the ground has shifted underneath the entire discovery layer and the majority of companies are scrambling to catch up.
If you run an ecommerce brand, you probably have a solid handle on your acquisition metrics. You know your CAC, your ROAS, your channel mix. You can tell higher-ups which Meta campaign drove the most revenue last Thursday. The mechanics of converting demand into customers? Sorted (probably because you’re using Triple Whale 😉).
Discovery sits upstream of all of that.
It's the moment someone develops an impression of your brand, positive or negative, based on:
The distinction is important because the levers of influencing these channels are completely different. You can't buy your way into an AI model's recommendation the same way you bid on a keyword. You can't run a retargeting campaign against someone who’s read a negative comment about your brand in a subreddit.
These points of discovery require different strategies — third-party content, community engagement, SEO fundamentals, understanding how LLMs synthesize information about your category — and those strategies require different data inputs.
But that’s where problems start to arise: the data, or lack thereof.
Now, some tools have started to nibble around the edges of this problem. You can find an AI visibility tracker here, a social listening tool there, an SEO platform somewhere else. But stitching together three or four different dashboards from three or four different vendors creates its own set of complications.
For one, the data doesn't talk to each other.
You might notice your AI visibility dropped for a key prompt, but you'd have to manually cross-reference that with what people are saying about you on social to understand why. Each tool gives you a slice, but the whole picture — the relationship between these discovery channels — stays out of reach.
The market is starting to recognize this. You're seeing platforms merge LLM tracking with SEO dashboards, which tells you something about where customer expectations are heading. Brands don't want three separate platforms to answer one question: How are people finding us, and how can we influence what they think when they do?
This is exactly why we launched Discovery — a unified workspace inside Triple Whale that brings together three purpose-built dashboards covering the full spectrum of brand discovery.
Each one addresses a distinct channel where your brand is being evaluated, and together, they give you something that hasn't existed until now: a complete view of your top-of-funnel presence across LLMs, search, and social.
Let's walk through them.
Large language models (LLMs) are reshaping how consumers research products. When someone asks ChatGPT or Gemini to recommend a product in your category, does your brand come up? How often? In what context? And what are the models saying about you compared to your competitors?
Triple Whale’s AI Visibility tracks your brand's presence across major LLMs, showing you where you're being recommended, where you're being overlooked, and how your share of voice compares to the competition.
This is a discovery channel that barely existed two years ago and is already influencing purchase decisions at scale.
In Q4 2025, Triple Whale merchants had 424,262 orders from LLM referrals. In all of 2024, that number was 7,152. That's 59x growth in one year. The real number is even higher. Our post-purchase survey data suggests 2.5-3x more orders were LLM-influenced but didn't come through trackable links.
The brands that understand their AI visibility today will have a meaningful advantage as LLM-driven search continues to eat into traditional discovery channels.
Search remains one of the highest-intent discovery channels in ecommerce. But the keyword landscape shifts constantly, and most brands are either overspending on terms they already own or missing opportunities by underinvesting on certain platforms.
Triple Whale’s Keyword Intelligence gives you a consolidated view of your paid keyword data across Google Ads, Amazon Ads, and Bing Ads — surfacing revenue trends, opportunities, and conversion gaps. Follow the customer journey from search query to the paid keyword it triggered. Then evaluate performance — impressions, clicks, spend, conversions, revenue, and ROAS — all in one view.
The goal here is to turn keyword data into decisions; a strategic view of where you’re showing up in search, how spend & revenue correlate to match types, and what it'll take to make improvements.
Some of the most influential brand discovery today happens in places that look nothing like traditional marketing channels — the comment sections across social platforms.
These are the spaces where real people share unfiltered opinions about products, and where prospective customers go to validate (or invalidate) a brand before purchasing.
Social Monitoring tracks what people are saying about your brand across Meta (ads and organic) post comments in real time. You can see sentiment shifts, emerging high-risk themes, competitive mentions, and the specific language real customers use to describe their experience with your products/services.
This is qualitative intelligence that no amount of click data can give you, and it often explains the why behind trends you see in your other metrics.
Discovery is a major step, but if you know Triple Whale, you know we don't build products in isolation.
Discovery gives you intelligence on how your brand is being found. But what happens next — when those people click through, land on your site, convert, and (hopefully) come back — that's where the rest of the Triple Whale platform picks up.
From marketing acquisition and attribution to web conversion analytics to retention and lifetime value, Triple Whale is the complete intelligence layer for ecommerce. The goal isn't to be the best tool for one piece of the puzzle. The goal is to be the platform where you understand your entire business, from the first time someone encounters your brand in an LLM response to the fifth time they reorder.
Discovery is now live. If you've been wondering how your brand shows up in the places where modern consumers actually explore and evaluate products, now you can find out.
Body Copy: The following benchmarks compare advertising metrics from April 1-17 to the previous period. Considering President Trump first unveiled his tariffs on April 2, the timing corresponds with potential changes in advertising behavior among ecommerce brands (though it isn’t necessarily correlated).
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