How Sauz Uncovered a Critical AI Visibility Gap and Rebuilt Its Marketing Strategy Around It

Sauz had built strong momentum as a young challenger brand. The content engine was working. The packaging stood out on the shelf. The product lineup had earned a following, and the distribution numbers were growing.

But as AI tools began reshaping how consumers discover products, Amruta Vyas, Director of Marketing, saw a new opportunity. “There's this entire new conversation of ranking on LLMs and how people are actually finding products,” she explains.

“Getting placed in 12 different listicles, with no thought to how the brand was ranking on ChatGPT, just felt like a waste,” she explains. “We didn't know who was actually clicking on these articles.”

The team was already using a social listening tool, but it was only scoped to social media. The cost of scaling the tool to answer questions about how the brand was appearing across the broader web and in LLMs was out of reach for a lean operation.

The team was paying agency fees, covering the cost of shipping a premium product for sampling campaigns, and securing placements in editorial roundups. But none of it came with a clear line to sales, to visibility, or to how consumers were actually finding the brand.

That changed when Sauz's co-founders connected with Tallee.

“We're spending real money on PR and sampling, and there was no way to know if any of it was actually helping us show up where customers were going to find products.”

Tallee ran a full AI visibility audit for Sauz, analyzing 24 high-intent consumer prompts across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, and Copilot. The prompts were grouped into three categories — Quality, Brand, and Flavor — and benchmarked against the category leader.

Tallee's citation and source mapping identified exactly which domains and publications were shaping AI responses to the prompts that mattered most to Sauz.

Some were publications Amruta could never have justified to a PR agency without the data to back them up. “It clearly does make a difference in how we're showing up for a lot of these prompts,” she says.

That data changed how Amruta approaches every PR decision. She now has a clear, evidence-based line between media placements and AI visibility, and a concrete reason to pursue them.

The audit also surfaced a gap in recipe-driven discovery.

Tallee's source mapping showed that recipe content was a clear driver of AI visibility in the category.

For Sauz, that translated into a direct content opportunity: working with creators and food publishers to show up in the conversations where consumers are already searching for products.

“Tallee changed my perspective on traditional media. They helped us identify a lot of the low-hanging fruit that we know we can accomplish. Now there's justification behind the monthly PR spend.”

For a lean team already managing a full plate, Tallee provided a concrete direction and clarity on where to focus next. The audit gave her that: a clear set of priorities across PR and content that her team is already acting on to increase AI visibility.

Amruta came in with a well-formed hypothesis built on market observation. Tallee gave Amruta and her team the data to stop questioning whether their PR spend was working and start making targeted, evidence-based decisions about where to invest.

“Tallee helped us see exactly where we were showing up in LLM searches and gave us a clear starting point to fix it. For a team our size, that changes everything.”

The audit marked the starting line, not the finish. Sauz is now executing against a clear set of priorities, including targeted PR placements and a recipe content push with creators and food publishers.