Triple Whale Acquires Anteater, Bets Big on AI Engine Optimization

COLUMBUS, OH – January 20, 2026 – E-commerce intelligence platform Triple Whale today announced its first-ever acquisition, purchasing Anteater, a specialized platform designed to analyze brand visibility within AI-powered chat and search. The move signals a major strategic push into the nascent and rapidly growing field of AI Engine Optimization (AEO), aiming to give more than 50,000 brands a new level of insight into a previously opaque corner of the digital marketplace.

With the integration of Anteater's technology, Triple Whale becomes the first major platform to directly link a brand's presence in large language model (LLM) responses—like those from ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude—to concrete business metrics, including revenue. The acquisition addresses a mounting anxiety among marketers: as consumers increasingly turn to AI for product research, the traditional playbook for search engine optimization is becoming insufficient.

The Dawn of a New Marketing Frontier

The fundamental nature of online discovery is changing. Instead of sifting through pages of blue links, consumers are asking conversational questions and receiving direct, synthesized answers. This shift is giving rise to AI Engine Optimization (AEO), a new discipline focused on ensuring brands and their products are favorably mentioned, cited, and recommended by AI systems. Unlike traditional SEO, which prioritizes ranking and clicks, AEO targets inclusion and positive sentiment within the AI's generated response itself.

The urgency for brands to adapt is underscored by Triple Whale's own internal data. In the fourth quarter of 2025 alone, merchants using its platform attributed over 424,000 orders to referrals from LLMs. This figure represents a nearly 60-fold increase from the roughly 7,000 orders recorded across all of 2024, illustrating an explosive growth trajectory that few e-commerce operators can afford to ignore. Industry analysts predict this trend will only accelerate, with Gartner forecasting a 25% decline in traffic from traditional search engines by 2026 as AI-driven answer engines capture market share.

"AI visibility is still early, but its growth is accelerating rapidly, putting it on a clear path to becoming a critical layer of the ecommerce funnel in 2026," said Maxx Blank, co-founder of Triple Whale, in the official announcement. The acquisition is a direct response to this paradigm shift, moving to quantify what has been a significant blind spot for brands.

From Blind Spot to Business Intelligence

Until now, understanding how a brand appears within the 'black box' of an LLM has been a matter of guesswork. The integration of Anteater's technology into the Triple Whale platform is designed to replace that uncertainty with data. The system works by analyzing thousands of consumer-style prompts across leading AI models to determine how often a brand is mentioned, which third-party sources and product pages are cited, and how it stacks up against competitors.

This provides brands with a clear, actionable roadmap. By identifying the specific articles, reviews, community discussions, and product listings that AI models rely on, marketers can focus their efforts on the content that truly influences AI-generated recommendations. All these insights will flow into Triple Whale’s Moby AI system, which promises to deliver proactive, step-by-step recommendations for improving LLM visibility. With daily tracking of mentions, source citations, and sentiment, brands can measure the impact of their AEO strategies in near real-time, a stark contrast to the months-long feedback loop of traditional SEO.

"By integrating the capabilities of the Anteater platform, we're giving operators real visibility into how AI models surface products and recommendations, and, more importantly, the ability to connect that visibility directly to outcomes like revenue," Blank added.

Navigating the AI-Driven Consumer Journey

The move is being welcomed by brands already navigating the complexities of modern e-commerce. The promise of connecting AI discovery to tangible growth is a compelling proposition for marketing leaders tasked with proving ROI in an increasingly fragmented digital landscape.

"LLMs are fundamentally changing commerce, ushering in a new era of agentic shopping and discovery where intent, context, and relevance matter more than ever," said Alejandra Tenorio, Vice President of Digital Marketing and eCommerce at RMS Beauty. "Triple Whale has been a trusted partner as we've navigated many chapters of our DTC growth, and this is a natural next step in what we can build together as we lean into their AEO solutions."

However, the transition is not without friction. While user adoption of LLMs has been historic, consumer trust remains a hurdle. Recent Gartner research found that while most consumers have noticed AI-generated summaries in their search results, more than half remain wary of them, with 61% wishing they could disable the feature. This suggests that for the foreseeable future, brands must pursue a dual strategy, maintaining robust traditional SEO practices while simultaneously building out their AEO capabilities.

A Strategic Play with Inherent Challenges

As Triple Whale's first corporate acquisition, this move is a significant strategic statement. It positions the company not just as an analytics provider but as a forward-looking intelligence platform actively shaping the future of e-commerce marketing. By integrating AEO into its core offering, Triple Whale creates a powerful differentiator against competitors in the e-commerce intelligence space, which have largely focused on attribution and performance metrics tied to established channels.

Yet, the path of AEO is fraught with challenges. The very nature of LLMs—which are probabilistic, constantly updated, and often opaque in their reasoning—makes optimization a moving target. The rise of "zero-click" answers, where users get information without visiting a brand's website, creates significant attribution hurdles that even advanced platforms will struggle to solve completely.

Furthermore, the field is shadowed by ethical and legal risks. As brands and agencies become more adept at influencing AI, concerns about algorithmic manipulation, bias, and the spread of misinformation will grow. Forrester predicts that a Fortune 500 company will sue a B2B provider over AI-generated misrepresentation in 2026, highlighting the high stakes involved. This dual challenge of harnessing a powerful new channel while navigating its inherent complexities will define the next chapter for brands in the evolving, AI-powered marketplace.