Making Real Voices Heard in the New Era of AI-Powered Search

NEW YORK, NY – September 03, 2026 – The way consumers discover products is undergoing a seismic shift. Instead of typing keywords into a search bar, millions are now asking questions to AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. Yet, in this new conversational commerce landscape, a brand's most powerful asset—the authentic voice of its customers captured in video—has been largely silent. A vast library of user-generated content (UGC), from unboxing videos to product reviews, remains effectively invisible to the large language models (LLMs) powering this revolution. Videowise, a video commerce platform known for pioneering shoppable video, is aiming to solve this with its new "AI Visibility" solution, potentially rewriting the rules for brand discovery in 2026.

The 'Invisible UGC' Dilemma

For years, direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands have cultivated a treasure trove of user-generated videos. This content is marketing gold, offering social proof and a level of authenticity that professionally produced ads struggle to match. The problem is that LLMs, at their core, are text-based. While their ability to process images and video is advancing, they primarily understand video content through its associated metadata—titles, descriptions, and manual tags. The rich, nuanced, and often unscripted information within the video frames and audio itself is lost in translation. A customer's genuine delight with a product's texture or a creator's detailed explanation of a feature simply doesn't get indexed.

This creates a significant disconnect. While shoppers increasingly trust and rely on peer reviews, the AI tools they use for product recommendations cannot access this persuasive content. For a DTC brand that has invested heavily in building a community and encouraging UGC, this means their most valuable endorsements are being left on the digital cutting room floor. As AI-driven answer engines become the primary entry point for commerce, this invisibility is not just a missed opportunity; it's an existential threat to brand relevance.

Bridging the Gap with AI Visibility

Videowise's new solution is designed to act as a translator between the visual language of video and the textual world of LLMs. The launch includes two core products, Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and YouTube Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), built on a foundation of sophisticated video analysis.

Using a technique known as vector video search, the platform analyzes user-generated videos frame by frame, extracting and indexing both visual and audio data. This process converts the unstructured content of a video into structured data that an AI can read, cite, and rank. With AEO, Videowise creates a "UGC Wiki" directly on a brand's e-commerce site—an organized knowledge base of questions and answers drawn entirely from real customer and creator videos. This allows a brand to surface authentic answers to shopper questions, powered by the voices of its own community.

Simultaneously, YouTube GEO addresses the fact that Google's Gemini and other LLMs frequently cite YouTube as a source. The tool repurposes clips from a brand’s existing content to create new, hyper-optimized YouTube videos, complete with LLM-friendly metadata. This strategy aims to ensure that when an AI looks for authoritative video content, the brand's own optimized assets are front and center.

"DTC brands are sitting on hundreds, sometimes thousands, of authentic UGC videos that are completely invisible to LLMs," said Claudiu Cioba, founder and CEO of Videowise, in the company's announcement. "All those real voices, and AI can't hear a single one. We built Videowise AI Visibility to change that."

The Battle for Authenticity

This technological advance arrives at a critical juncture in our relationship with digital content. The proliferation of generative AI has also led to a surge in AI-generated fake content, from sponsored posts written by bots to convincing but entirely synthetic video testimonials. This has fostered a growing sense of skepticism among consumers, with recent studies showing that a majority of people are losing trust in online information due to the difficulty of distinguishing real from fake.

In this environment, Videowise is making a strategic bet on what it calls "Authentic Generated Content" (AGC). Rather than using AI to create more synthetic content, its platform is designed to elevate and verify human experiences. By making genuine UGC searchable and citable, the company aims to help brands build trust, not just traffic. This approach aligns with emerging industry standards like content provenance, which seek to create a verifiable history for digital media to combat misinformation. For brands, leveraging authentic voices becomes a powerful differentiator, a way to signal trustworthiness in an increasingly artificial digital world.

From Visibility to Value: The Tangible Impact

The strategic importance of authenticity is matched by a clear financial upside. By making UGC visible at the top of the purchasing funnel—the AI-driven discovery phase—Videowise is extending what it has already proven effective at the point of sale. The company claims its shoppable video tools drive an average conversion uplift between 5% and 35% for its 4,000 brand partners.

These claims are backed by specific, measurable results. Electronics brand Skullcandy, for instance, implemented Videowise's UGC solutions and saw a 7.9% increase in revenue per session and an uplift in conversion rates of up to 5%. Other brands report similar success; cosmetics brand SOSU boosted its average order value by 8%, while luggage maker Travelpro generated over $269,000 in revenue from shoppable videos. By connecting authentic content to commerce, the platform demonstrates a clear path from engagement to revenue.

With AI Visibility, the goal is to capture that same value earlier in the customer journey. By ensuring real customer videos inform AI-powered recommendations, Videowise is positioning brands to win the defining moments of consideration and trust in the next era of e-commerce.