AwarenessAI Founder Tom Mason Featured in BusinessCloud
AwarenessAI founder Tom Mason has been featured in BusinessCloud in an article exploring the realities of building a startup in the artificial intelligence sector.
The piece, titled Why being an AI founder is more about education than building, focuses on Tom’s experience launching AwarenessAI at 19 while studying at Lancaster University, and the challenges of creating a business in a fast-moving and still-emerging category.
The article highlights one of the key themes behind AwarenessAI’s work: businesses are increasingly being interpreted, summarised and recommended by AI systems before a potential customer ever reaches their website.
As more people use platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity to ask questions about companies, services and industries, AI-generated answers are beginning to shape brand perception at the earliest stage of the discovery journey.
Why AI Visibility Is Becoming a Business Priority
Traditional search engine optimisation has long focused on how a business appears in Google search results. However, the rise of generative AI has introduced a new layer of digital visibility.
Customers are no longer only searching through websites, directories and review platforms. They are asking AI assistants direct questions such as which company they should use, what a business does, whether a provider is trustworthy, or how one organisation compares with another.
This creates a new challenge for businesses. Even if a company has a strong website and an active online presence, it may still be misunderstood, omitted or poorly represented inside AI-generated responses.
AwarenessAI helps organisations understand this new visibility layer by analysing how AI systems interpret their brand, which sources influence those answers, and where opportunities exist to improve representation across AI search and recommendation environments.
Building a New Category Requires Education
In the BusinessCloud article, Tom explains that one of the biggest surprises of building AwarenessAI has been how much time is spent helping organisations understand the problem before presenting the solution.
Many businesses have not yet considered that AI assistants may already be forming summaries and recommendations about them. This means the first stage is often education: showing organisations how AI systems describe their brand, which competitors are being surfaced, and what information is being used to generate those answers.
This is particularly important because generative AI does not always rely solely on a company’s own website. It may draw on third-party sources, online mentions, directories, reviews, media coverage, structured data and broader signals across the web.
For businesses, this means AI visibility is not just a technical issue. It is a brand, reputation, content and discoverability issue.
From SEO to GEO
The feature also reflects a wider shift from traditional SEO to GEO, or Generative Engine Optimisation.
SEO focuses on helping organisations rank in search engines. GEO focuses on helping organisations appear accurately and credibly in AI-generated answers.
As AI assistants become part of everyday research, procurement and decision-making, businesses need to consider how they are represented in conversational search environments. This includes whether they are mentioned for relevant prompts, whether their services are accurately understood, whether competitors are being recommended instead, and whether the sources supporting AI answers are up to date and trustworthy.
For AwarenessAI, this is where the opportunity sits. The goal is not simply to help businesses appear online, but to help them understand how AI systems perceive and explain them.
Why This Matters for UK Businesses
The BusinessCloud feature reinforces the importance of AI visibility for UK businesses at a time when search behaviour is changing quickly.
Potential customers, partners, investors and candidates are increasingly using AI tools to gather information. If those tools produce incomplete, outdated or inaccurate answers, a business may lose opportunities before it even knows a decision has been made.
This is especially relevant for organisations in competitive markets where trust, clarity and credibility are central to the buying process. AI-generated answers can influence first impressions, shortlist decisions and perceptions of authority.
By monitoring how AI systems describe and recommend a business, organisations can identify content gaps, improve their digital footprint, strengthen third-party signals and make their positioning clearer across both search engines and generative AI platforms.
AwarenessAI’s Role in the Future of AI Search
AwarenessAI was created to help organisations understand and improve how they appear across AI systems.
Through AI visibility audits, prompt testing, technical GEO checks and ongoing monitoring, AwarenessAI gives businesses a clearer view of how they are represented across tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity.
The BusinessCloud feature marks another step in raising awareness of this emerging category and the importance of AI visibility for modern businesses.
As Tom explains in the article, building in AI means adapting quickly as models, behaviours and user habits continue to change. For organisations, the same principle applies. The way people search for information is evolving, and businesses that understand their AI visibility early will be better positioned as generative AI becomes a normal part of customer discovery.
Read the BusinessCloud Feature
You can read the full BusinessCloud article via the businesscloud.co.uk website.