Tracksuit buys Sydney startup Hall to track how AI talks about brands

Tracksuit has made its first acquisition, buying Sydney-based startup Hall, which measures how brands appear inside AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. The deal was announced on Monday US time via PR Newswire. Commercial terms were not disclosed.

Hall's full team joins Tracksuit, with founder Kai Forsyth taking the role of principal product manager, leading product direction for AI visibility. Forsyth, a former VaynerMedia strategist, spent around 18 months building Hall's tools for measuring brand visibility within large language models.

Forsyth said building Hall showed that short-term tactics could spike a brand's AI visibility, but the thing that actually moved the needle was brand-building work that made people already know and trust the brand. "Doing that inside a platform that already has human data on tens of thousands of brands gives marketers a more accurate read on where their brand actually stands and where it's headed," he said.

Tracksuit CEO and co-founder Connor Archbold framed the logic simply: "Brand has always lived in people's minds. Increasingly, it also lives inside AI." The company says AI visibility will begin rolling out to customers later this year, with a waitlist already open. Alongside the acquisition, Tracksuit confirmed a completed executive team, including Tom Mansfield as CMO, Dan Fleming as COO, Anne Dröge as chief product officer, Cara Fonseca-Ensor as CTO, Hamish Mathieson as chief revenue officer and Samantha Gadd as chief people officer.

Why it matters for Australian marketers: this is a trans-Tasman company acquiring a Sydney startup to solve a problem most local CMOs are only starting to name. As more product discovery shifts to AI assistants, brands have little visibility into whether they are recommended, misrepresented or left out entirely. Generative engine optimisation (GEO) tooling has so far been dominated by offshore point solutions, so a brand tracker with deep AU and NZ roots bundling AI visibility into an existing dashboard puts the capability in front of mainstream Australian marketing teams, not just early adopters.

The deal also signals where measurement budgets may head next. Tracksuit's pitch is that AI visibility is a lagging indicator of brand strength rather than a hack, which, if it holds, pushes the answer back towards long-term brand investment rather than prompt-gaming tactics.

Sources: prweb.com (Tracksuit announcement), adnews.com.au