We built this for the owners nobody else was building for.
Every AI search platform on the market was built by SaaS people for SaaS marketing teams. Nobody was building infrastructure for the dentist, the contractor, the law firm, the pool builder, the family-owned restaurant — the businesses that quietly run America's main streets. We were tired of waiting for someone else to do it.
Who builds VisibleRev?
VisibleRev is built and operated by a small in-house team with deep operating experience in revenue and network infrastructure. We were founded to fill a specific gap: every existing AI search platform was built by SaaS companies for SaaS marketing teams, leaving the local SMB owner-operator without a fit. Our job is to give those businesses the same edge enterprise marketers have been buying for years.
Search broke. Most owners felt it before they could name it.
Some time in 2024, every owner-operator we know started saying some version of the same thing. "Our Google ads cost more, and the calls are down." "Our SEO agency keeps sending the same report and nothing's moving." "My twenty-something niece told me everyone uses ChatGPT now — should I be worried?"
They were right to be worried. The shift wasn't subtle and it wasn't slow. By early 2026, the majority of high-value local search traffic in the United States was being intercepted by an AI answer before the customer ever saw a Google results page. The customer who used to compare ten websites now reads one paragraph and calls one of two businesses the AI named.
What was missing was a service built for the owner who has a business to run, not a marketing department to staff. The enterprise AI tools cost six figures and require a marketing operations team. The DIY tools assume the owner has time to log into a dashboard. The local SEO incumbents are still optimizing for last decade's Google. Nobody had built infrastructure for the way real businesses actually buy.
We didn't want to sell another report. We wanted to install a system that runs.
That's VisibleRev.
Three principles that determine everything we build.
We don't have a 40-page methodology PDF. We have three principles, and every decision we make about your engagement comes back to one of them.
Principle 1 — Infrastructure outlasts campaigns.
Marketing campaigns end. Infrastructure runs. The thing that compounds is the system, not the sprint. A weekly cadence that runs for two years builds a citation moat that no monthly content push can match — and once that moat exists, it gets harder for a competitor to take your spot back.
Principle 2 — Approve once, run forever.
The reason most automated marketing systems fail in this space is that they ask the owner to approve content every week. That's an exhausting, drift-prone, brand-risk-soaked process. Our approach is different: a single, focused workshop in week one produces a deep library of content you've signed off on. From then on, the system can only ever cycle from that approved library. You sleep fine. The system runs hot.
Principle 3 — Citations, not rankings.
"Ranking #3 for plumber Phoenix" used to mean something. It means less every quarter. The metric that matters now is whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini name your business when a real customer asks a real question. That's the metric we report. That's the one that becomes phone calls.
Things we believe that the rest of the AI marketing category isn't saying out loud.
"AI SEO" is not SEO.
A lot of agencies are quietly rebranding their existing SEO retainer as "AI SEO" and changing nothing about the work. We've reviewed the deliverables. They're still optimizing for Google's blue links — the part of the page customers increasingly skip. If your current agency added "AI" to its pitch but your weekly reports look the same as they did a year ago, you're being charged for last decade's work in this decade's wrapper.
The lead-gen platforms are renting you what you should own.
Angi, Thumbtack, HomeAdvisor — they sell you leads at $15, $40, $100 a pop. The leads are real. So is the math: every dollar you spend on a lead is a dollar you could have spent building a citation that brings you the next ten leads for free. We're not against lead-gen platforms. We are against renting traffic forever when you could own the answer instead.
The next two years will look like the early 2010s for Google.
In 2010, the businesses that took Google seriously got cheap, dominant local search traffic for the next decade. The ones that waited paid five times more for half the position by 2018. We think that exact dynamic is happening right now in AI search — and the businesses that build their citation moat in 2026 will be the ones still being recommended in 2030. The window is measured in months, not years.
The right time to plant the tree was twenty years ago. The second-best time is before your competitor does.
Built by operators, not marketers.
The work VisibleRev does — revenue infrastructure inside AI search engines — sits at the intersection of two disciplines: revenue operations and network infrastructure. The founders' careers sit in those two disciplines.
Jim Struna
Co-founder · Revenue & OperationsJim Struna is co-founder of VisibleRev. He spent twenty years in hospitality revenue and operations as a Regional Director of Revenue Management, leading portfolios of four to seven hotels at a time across more than 100 properties in nine countries. Over a decade of that work was inside luxury and lifestyle brands, including two of the world's top-ten luxury hospitality companies. He holds the Certified Revenue Management Executive (CRME) and Certified Hotel Business Acumen (CHBA) designations. Jim founded VisibleRev to bring the same revenue-infrastructure discipline he ran inside top hospitality brands to local and mid-market businesses who have always needed it and could rarely afford the enterprise version. Based in Greater Orlando.
Mitchell Stiefel
Co-founder · Technical PlatformMitchell Stiefel is co-founder of VisibleRev. He spent a decade in network infrastructure — four years as a fiber-splicing contractor deploying networks for national carriers including Lumen and AT&T, then six years as President of Crosspoint Internet, the wireless internet service provider he owned and operated. That career shaped his conviction that the difference between a tool and a system is whether it runs when nobody is logged in — the conviction that drives VisibleRev's network-level architecture, always-on content cycling, and continuous citation measurement. Based in Clermont, Florida.
Our model only works if our clients keep us around — and our clients only keep us around if the citation rate keeps going up. Our incentives are aligned with yours by design.