My dad runs a small business. He's been running it for years. About eighteen months ago, his customers started disappearing — and neither of us could figure out why.
I'm Harri. My co-founder Vito and I have spent the last decade building software — Harri at Facebook, Vito at Google, and a few companies of our own, independently and together, with a couple of acquisitions between us. We know how to build things.
None of that prepared me for the phone call from my dad.
The phone call
Dad's name is Jon. He runs a clay-target shooting business called Cobaw Sporting. It's not a tech company. It's the kind of family-run, locally-loved operation that lives or dies on whether customers can find it when they're planning their next outing.
He called me eighteen months ago. His Google traffic was down. Bookings were down. He hadn't changed anything — same site, same reviews, same shoots — but fewer people were finding him.
His customers hadn't stopped searching. They'd stopped Googling.
We'd been watching this shift play out at scale. Customer discovery is moving — fast — from search engines to AI assistants. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google's new AI Overviews. They give one answer, not ten links. And if your business isn't in that answer, you don't lose a click. You lose the customer entirely.
This is everywhere
Cobaw isn't a special case. Every small business that built its growth on Google traffic — basically every café, restaurant, hotel, gym, tour operator, retailer, and service business in the world — is starting to feel this. Most of them don't yet know why.
Walking through the high street of any town in any country, you're surrounded by businesses that became findable because of Google. Now they're slowly going dark, one ChatGPT query at a time.
What we couldn't find
We went looking for a tool that would give Dad a clear answer to one question: is AI sending customers our way, or to someone else?
Everything we found was built for Fortune 500 marketing teams. Five-figure annual contracts. Dashboards with terms like “share of voice” and “answer engine optimisation” that you'd need a marketing degree to interpret. Nothing for the kind of business Dad runs — or the millions of others like it.
The category leaders are excellent products. They just aren't for the rest of us.
So we built Brand Eagle
Dad was the first customer. He's still our toughest one. Every feature we ship has to pass the “would my dad use this without calling me to explain it” test.
The result: no jargon, no dashboards you have to log into, no marketing degree required. A plain-English email every week telling you what AI is saying about your business and what to do about it. That's it.
We launched publicly this year. The customers using Brand Eagle today are exactly the kind of businesses we built it for — small, local, busy, and worried. Restaurants in regional towns. Boutiques in major cities. Tour operators on three continents. Most of them found us the way Dad would have: word of mouth from another small business owner who realised the rules had changed.
Why this matters
Small businesses are the backbone of every economy we care about. They employ most of the people, they make towns interesting, they keep money local. If they get systematically delisted from the places customers actually look for them — because nobody told them to optimise for ChatGPT — that's not just bad for those owners. It's bad for everyone.
Brand Eagle exists to close that gap. So that when AI is asked who to recommend in your category, your business has a fighting chance.
If your traffic is dropping, you're not imagining it. AI search is becoming the front door for local discovery. We built this so you can see what's behind it.
Thanks for reading,
— Harri & Vito
Co-founders, Brand Eagle
With my dad Jon, who taught me how to build something that lasts — and who, if you ever come through central Victoria, will probably take you shooting.