Monica Tomasso

I came into AI visibility in a way I never expected.

It started with my son.

At the end of third grade, he was a strong reader. He could sit down with a book, read the words fluently, pronounce them correctly, and move through the pages with confidence.

But I started noticing something.

When I asked him what he had just read, he often couldn't tell me.

He could read it.

He just wasn't always retaining it.

As a parent, that bothered me. Because I realized there was an important difference between being able to read the words on a page and truly understanding what those words meant.

So I started thinking about whether AI could help.

I built a reading experience for him where he could read aloud to an AI agent. When he finished, the agent would talk with him about what he had just read.

What happened?

Why did a character make that choice?

What was important?

What do you think happens next?

The goal wasn't to test whether he could pronounce the words. It was to help him slow down, make connections, recall what he had read, and actually understand it.

And somewhere in the middle of building that experience, I realized I was looking at the exact same problem in my professional world.

Businesses were talking about AI crawlers.

Could ChatGPT access the site? Could Google crawl it? Was the robots.txt file configured correctly? Was the content machine readable?

All important questions.

But I kept coming back to my son.

Because being able to read something doesn't mean you understand it.

AI could crawl a company's entire website and still not really understand the business.

It might know the company exists without understanding what makes it different.

It might read twenty pages without being able to explain who the company is best for.

It might see years of expertise without recognizing that expertise when someone asks a question.

And if AI doesn't understand your business, how can we expect it to remember you when a buyer asks who to trust?

That changed the way I thought about AI visibility.

The challenge wasn't simply making businesses readable to machines.

It was helping machines understand them.

Their expertise. Their point of view. Their proof. The questions they answer. The customers they're right for. The connections between all of those things.

That's the work I've been building around ever since.

Because in an AI-driven world, being found is no longer enough.

You need to be understood well enough to be recalled.

Recalled well enough to be retrieved.

Retrieved with enough confidence to be cited.

And ultimately, trusted enough to be recommended.

Funny enough, it took a third grader to help me see it.