AI Search Reshapes How Australians Discover Brands, iSOFT and Somantra Team Up to Help Enterprises Own Their AI Presence

Partnership brings Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) capability to iSOFT’s enterprise clients across banking, healthcare, government and education.

The way Australians find and evaluate brands is changing faster than most enterprises have accounted for. A growing share of purchase and service decisions do not begin with a Google search, but instead with a question typed into ChatGPT, a Google AI Overview, or Perplexity, which don’t return ten blue links but a single synthesised answer. For the brands that aren’t cited in that answer, the moment of discovery simply doesn’t happen.

This partnership lets us bring Answer Engine Optimisation capability to organisations that can’t afford to get it wrong.”

— Arun Prasad, Founder, Somantra

To help enterprise clients respond to this shift, Technology Consulting & Systems Integrator iSOFT has partnered with Somantra, a Sydney based AI Search Brand Visibility platform, to bring Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) capability into its consulting and delivery practice.

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Somantra tracks how brands are represented inside AI generated answers, measuring performance across three proprietary metrics, Brand Mindshare, Brand Engagement, and Brand Consideration, across major AI platforms including ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Claude, and Perplexity. Where traditional SEO tools measure rankings on a results page, Somantra measures whether and how a brand is mentioned and recommended inside the answer itself.

That distinction matters most in regulated, high-trust sectors, where being cited accurately (or not cited) inside an AI generated answer can shape a customer’s understanding of a financial product, an insurance product, a healthcare service, or a government program before a human ever gets involved.

“AI search doesn’t ask brands to rank, it asks them to be understood,” said Arun Prasad, Founder of Somantra. “The businesses that show up clearly and accurately inside AI answers today are building a form of trust that traditional SEO was never designed to capture. This partnership lets us bring that capability to organisations that can’t afford to get it wrong.”

iSOFT brings deep delivery experience across Banking & Financial Services, Healthcare & Lifesciences, Public Sector, Services & Utilities and Education. These are sectors where compliance, data governance, and accuracy of information carry regulatory weight. iSOFT has consulting at its core, using thought leadership and technology to solve complex business problems for its clients. Through its Applied AI & Agentic Platforms practice and sovereign AI architecture under CoreAxi.ai, iSOFT is positioned to combine Somantra’s AI visibility diagnostics with the strategy, integration, and governance work enterprise clients need to act on them.

“With the increasing reliance on chat interfaces rather than traditional search, our clients are already asking how AI is changing the way their customers find and trust them. Until now, there hasn’t been a clear way to measure or manage that.” said Ankur Chandra, Chief Growth & Strategy Officer at iSOFT. “Partnering with Somantra gives us a robust, purpose built, and industry validated platform to answer that question, helping clients close the gap between where they currently show up in AI search and where they need to be.”

Through the partnership, iSOFT and Somantra will work with joint clients to:
– Audit current brand visibility and accuracy across major AI search and answer platforms
– Benchmark performance against competitors using Somantra’s Brand Mindshare, Engagement, and Consideration metrics
– Identify and close content and structural gaps that limit AI citation and representation
– Embed AI visibility tracking into broader digital transformation and governance programs, with sovereign-grade data handling for regulated sectors

The partnership is effective immediately, with joint engagements already underway across iSOFT’s client base.