A Kiwi SaaS firm places a bet on the post-Google world
Auckland-based brand tracking company Tracksuit has acquired Hall, a Sydney startup that monitors how brands appear in AI chatbot responses. Terms were not disclosed. The move is a wager that visibility inside AI answers will soon matter as much as a top Google ranking once did, and Tracksuit wants to sell brands the tool to measure it.
Hall was founded by Kai Forsyth, a former Atlassian product designer. He and his three staff join Tracksuit, with Forsyth taking on the role of product lead for AI visibility. This is a talent-and-technology acquisition rather than a book of business. None of Hall’s thousands of existing customers transfer, because the product is being rebuilt inside Tracksuit’s platform, with a new AI visibility tool expected later in 2026.
Tracksuit is one of New Zealand’s better-capitalised SaaS exports. Founded in 2021 by CEO Connor Archbold, it has raised over $65 million and operates across 25 markets. Hall, for its part, raised $2 million in pre-seed funding from Blackbird in 2025. Both are Blackbird portfolio companies, so this is partly an intra-portfolio consolidation. Tracksuit has also hired Tom Mansfield, formerly of Visa and Dovetail, as chief marketing officer.
The problem it actually solves
The deal responds to a structural shift in how people find products. Depending on the survey, somewhere between a quarter and half of consumers now ask an AI platform like ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini a question about something they are thinking of buying. That is a growing chunk of consumer discovery sitting entirely outside traditional search analytics.
The scale is not hypothetical. Google’s AI Overview feature has topped 2.5 billion monthly active users, and analytics firm Semrush estimates AI search will overtake traditional web search as the primary driver of internet traffic by 2028. When a chatbot recommends which brand to trust, it draws on training data and cited sources. If your brand is absent, or worse, described inaccurately, you currently have no way to see it and no tool to measure it. That is the gap Tracksuit is moving to fill.
Archbold framed the purpose bluntly. The combined product “will help marketers understand how their brand is perceived across the human brain and the machine brain, if you will,” he said. Mansfield put it in starker terms: “In an AI-enabled world, brand has become one of the last remaining defensible assets for marketers.”
Search is becoming an action layer
Measurement is only half the story. Richard Conway, founder of The Optimisers and a member of the IAB Emerging Technology Council, wrote in June 2026 that the real signal from Google I/O 2026 was Google “trying to move Search from an answer engine to an action engine.” He predicts agentic commerce, where AI agents complete purchases on a user’s behalf, will accelerate from 2027, and argues “agentic readiness is the next critical aspect of search that New Zealand business should be all over.”
The measurement industry is already behind. The same source cites IAB State of Data 2026 findings that up to 75% of buy-side respondents believe leading advanced measurement approaches underperform on rigour, timeliness, trust and efficiency, and that is before anyone accounts for the entirely new AI channel.
The bet worth naming
There is genuine risk here, and it is worth being honest about it. Because Hall’s customers do not transfer and the product is being rebuilt from scratch, Tracksuit is buying expertise and architecture rather than a proven, scaled product. The AI search measurement market is still forming, and the commercial models that will eventually decide what drives brand visibility inside these platforms remain unsettled. Measuring what a chatbot says today may look very different from what matters commercially once agentic commerce arrives.
Still, this is a New Zealand company identifying and moving on an emerging global opportunity ahead of larger incumbents, in a sector growing fast worldwide. For business owners the practical question is immediate and uncomfortable. If your customers are asking AI which product to buy, does your brand come up? Most firms have no idea. Whoever sells them the answer first has a real business, and a Kiwi one just made its move.
Sources
- Tracksuit buys AI visibility tracking start-up Hall as market shifts (2026-07-20)
- As AI eats the web, how do businesses get found? This Kiwi startup has the answer (2026-07-20)
- NZ brand researcher Tracksuit acquires Australian AI-based startup Hall (2026-07-21)
- Tracksuit acquires Hall to help brands understand AI mentions (2026-07-21)
- Tracksuit acquires Hall to scale brand tracking with AI (2026-07-21)
- Search: It’s Becoming an Action Layer (2026-06-04)