Audacy and Next Net Tackle AI Search to Keep Local Businesses Visible

NEW YORK, NY – January 14, 2026 – As artificial intelligence reshapes how consumers discover information, a new partnership between media giant Audacy and AI technology firm Next Net aims to prevent local and regional businesses from being left behind. The companies today announced the launch of NextNet AI, a service designed to make small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) discoverable within the new landscape of AI assistants, agentic search, and recommendation engines.

The collaboration addresses a growing fear in the digital marketing world: as search evolves from a list of blue links to direct, conversational answers, businesses that fail to adapt risk becoming virtually invisible. While large national brands possess the resources to pivot their strategies, local businesses face significant cost, complexity, and technical hurdles, threatening to silence their digital presence.

The New Search Paradigm: Beyond Links and Keywords

For decades, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been the cornerstone of digital visibility, a game of keywords and backlinks designed to climb the rankings on Google's results page. However, the rise of powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) like those powering ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews is triggering a fundamental shift. This new era is defined by AI discoverability and agentic search.

Agentic search involves AI assistants that do more than just find information; they understand user intent, perform multi-step tasks, and synthesize data from numerous sources to provide a single, comprehensive answer. Instead of a user clicking through multiple websites, the AI does the work, presenting a summary and often making a direct recommendation. This leads to a rise in "zero-click" searches, where the user gets their answer without ever visiting a company's website, threatening the flow of organic traffic that many businesses rely on.

AI discoverability, therefore, is no longer about ranking first in a list. It's about becoming a trusted, citable source that the AI itself relies on to formulate its answers. This requires a deeper, more structural approach to how a business's information is presented online, ensuring it is formatted for native consumption by AI models.

A Lifeline for Main Street: How the Partnership Works

The partnership between Audacy and Next Net is structured to bridge this gap for SMBs. It combines Next Net's specialized AI optimization technology with Audacy’s vast local market footprint, which includes over 550 media and marketing consultants and a connection to approximately 200 million consumers nationwide.

NextNet AI will be bundled into Audacy’s existing digital and media offerings, providing a streamlined path for local advertisers to adopt the technology without needing in-house technical teams. Unlike solutions that simply retrofit old SEO tactics for AI, Next Net's platform is designed to re-architect a business's digital assets at the domain level. It structures, scores, and signs site data, transforming it into a format that LLMs can easily ingest and trust.

“This partnership is about leveling the playing field at a moment of massive transition,” said Mark Mansfield, SVP, Head of Partnerships & Strategic Growth at Next Net. “Audacy brings unmatched local reach and trusted market relationships, while Next Net brings the AI discoverability infrastructure required for the next era of search. Together, we’re protecting local businesses from obscurity and unlocking capabilities that were previously reserved for the largest, best-resourced brands.”

This sentiment is echoed by Audacy, which sees the offering as a way to demystify a complex and rapidly changing field for its clients.

“Local advertisers can be overwhelmed by the pace of change in digital marketing and discovery,” said Jenny Sutton, SVP of Digital at Audacy. “By partnering with Next Net, we’re giving our clients a future-ready solution that integrates AI discoverability directly into the media and marketing strategies they already know and trust, without requiring technical resources or additional burden on the business owner.”

The Technology Under the Hood

Delivering this kind of deep, structural optimization at a scale and price point suitable for the mass market of SMBs presents a significant computational challenge. To solve this, Next Net’s platform is powered by NVIDIA technologies. While NVIDIA is not a direct partner in the Audacy initiative, its role in providing the processing power for Next Net's AI infrastructure is critical.

This technological backbone enables the platform to efficiently analyze and reformat entire websites, a process that would otherwise be cost-prohibitive. It is this efficiency that allows the partnership to offer what it calls "enterprise-grade" capabilities to businesses that have historically been excluded from such advanced tools, effectively democratizing access to the next generation of search optimization.

More Than Media: Audacy's Strategic Pivot

This partnership also signals a significant strategic evolution for Audacy. A legacy broadcast giant, the company is actively transforming its business model to move beyond traditional media distribution. By providing essential AI infrastructure, Audacy is repositioning itself as an indispensable digital partner for its advertisers, offering intelligence and tools in addition to audience reach.

This move is part of a broader pattern of strategic alliances aimed at strengthening Audacy’s digital offerings and expanding its multi-platform footprint. In the past two years, the company has announced major content distribution partnerships with iHeartMedia and TuneIn, broadening its reach across hundreds of digital platforms and devices. It also partnered with MOGL to integrate athlete-influencers into its sports marketing. The launch of NextNet AI is the latest, and perhaps most technologically ambitious, step in this transformation from a media company into a comprehensive marketing and technology solutions provider.

Next Net and Audacy are betting that this deeper, structural approach is what will separate the winners from the losers in the coming years. They argue that many competitors are underestimating the scale of the transition, treating AI as a simple extension of old SEO rules.

“This evolution is exponential,” Mansfield added. “Businesses that bet on short-term fixes risk falling behind quickly. Our approach is built for where discovery is going, not where it’s been.”