Stagwell is rolling out a new solution aimed at helping brands perform better in the era of AI search. The company’s latest offering, Stagwell Search+, is built in partnership with Emberos, a startup specializing in AI visibility.
Built by Assembly, Stagwell’s global omnichannel media agency, the platform is designed to propel a brand’s discoverability, visibility, positive sentiment and business outcomes from Ai search experiences, according to Dan Roberts, global svp of search, Assembly.
Search+ has been piloted with a handful of clients over the past year, and Stagwell is now scaling it across its agency network. Among early users, one software brand saw a 57% increase in visibility in AI Overviews, according to Assembly.
The tool has also become part of Assembly’s pitching strategy and has contributed to new business wins, though Roberts declined to share specifics.
How people find information online has shifted over the past year. According to a January survey of 500 consumers by Search Engine Land, 37% now begin their searches with an AI chatbot—such as ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity—rather than a traditional search engine. That shift has helped create a new market focused on how brands appear in AI-generated responses, with startups like Profound and Emberos aiming to influence how brands are represented across large language models.
“Every other solution in the market is really just giving you data and insight, but it’s not particularly actionable and it doesn’t track to an outcome,” Roberts said.
Stagwell Search+ is built around a set of AI agents, each designed for a specific function. Sonar monitors how a brand appears across large language models, while Pilot focuses on predicting outcomes and guiding strategy. Flow coordinates workflows across teams, translating recommendations into actions for social, content, and SEO teams. Merchant focuses on SKU-level and e-commerce activity, and Echo acts as a governance layer to ensure consistency across the system.
