Open Influence built mid-market creator marketing around AI-powered creator discovery — years before AI-driven discovery became the category default. Visual recognition as differentiation.
Sports betting is legal in roughly 38 states. Online casino is legal in seven, with Maine launching as the eighth. The asymmetry creates an AI discovery problem the licensed iGaming category has not fully grasped — and the operators that solve it first will own the next decade of
15 years of TripAdvisor and Booking reviews. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity now synthesize on top — and weight Conde Nast and Skift over review volume.
Cannabis is the most marketing-restricted consumer category in America — and influencer is the most scalable lever brands can still control. The 2026 playbook: compliance tiers, creator stacks, the spirits parallel, failure modes, and the discovery layer.
The question nobody at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or Perplexity has publicly answered — and the gambling industry is about to force the conversation. Why recommending a sportsbook is not analytically equivalent to recommending a restaurant.
Service times. Staff page. Video sermons nobody outside the congregation sees. The Google-era church site doesn't survive synthesis. Transcribe sermons. Entity pages for pastors. Schema.
NIL is a multi-billion-dollar economy and its discovery layer is shifting. Brands are running NIL shortlists through ChatGPT and Perplexity before they call an agent. The under-told story in college sports.
AI discovery is the process by which people find brands, products, and information through AI systems. This new channel behaves unlike traditional search engines or social media, offering recommendations rather than lists. Brands cannot buy placement in AI discovery; they must be found credible, consistent, and relevant by the AI system to be named, consolidating attention on fewer brands.