Editor's note: A version of this article ran in the March issue of Bicycle Retailer & Industry News.
KETCHUM, Idaho (BRAIN) — Ten years ago, about the time Scott Montgomery was co-founding the CrankTank industry marketing company, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was still all the rage. Brands, e-commerce sites and online publishers researched key words and spread them out over their marketing copy in hopes that Google would rank their site high in its results.
Now, increasingly, and rather quickly, online consumers (and consumers who research online before buying at a brick-and-mortar store) are doing their research via AI chatbots like ChatGPT Shopping, Google AI Mode, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot.
By one measure, about 20% of 2025 holiday shoppers used an AI tool as a first step in their buying research, and that number is likely to grow quickly.
"It's not going to slump down to 18%, I know that!" Montgomery said. "AI is being adopted faster than mobile, faster than Google, faster than the internet," he said.
Now CrankTank is releasing a new patented technology it calls REACH (Retrieval Evaluation and Agentic Commerce Health) that optimizes marketing and sales copy for AI.
Although AI is considerably more complicated than a search engine, optimizing for AI offers more solid insights and less black magic than SEO, said Cole Casperson, CrankTank's Chief Data Officer.
That's because no one was ever sure what was going on inside Google's constantly changing "black box" that ranked search results. But AI platforms publish their methodology.
"REACH is the diagnostic tool that's finally possible because the black box has been opened. We're showing brands exactly why they rank where they do in AI discovery — and exactly how to improve," he said.
Building REACH has been Casperson's project since last March, when, fresh off earning a data science certificate at MIT, he came up with what he called a "moonshot" idea to build the tool. Prior to joining CrankTank in 2022, Casperson was with Club Ride Apparel for nine years, serving as CFO and COO.
Several of CrankTank's existing clients have been testing REACH for months and now it's being rolled out to the rest of the industry. The company said early clients in the outdoor industry report average improvements of 14% in organic sales and a 31% improvement in conversion rate. The tool also improves results from traditional search engines, which increasingly use AI, and on Amazon searches.
REACH helps copywriters use the appropriate semantic phrasing to match the kind of queries that people make to their chosen AI tool.
Whereas SEO might spur a copywriter to repeat a key word over and over, Large Language Models (LLMs) see that as a waste of time, Casperson said. REACH is more likely to suggest phrasing and multiple synonyms that suit a specific kind of query the writer is trying to reach. Identifying the potential customer that best suits the product and what sort of query that customer might make is where the human touch comes in, and is why CrankTank is offering REACH alongside its other agency services, and not as a standalone SAAS (Software as a Service).
Montgomery points out that using the tool results in a better match between the customer and the product, which leads to a happier customer and maybe even a happier industry, as cyclists get the exact product they need. REACH also allows brands to analyze their competitors' performance. He said REACH can allow brands that don't have large budgets for social media ads to improve their sales and conversion rates significantly.
