Future has launched a proprietary AI visibility tool called Future Optic, designed to enhance brand presence in AI search engines, including Google’s AI Overviews and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The tool, which entered its beta phase in November 2025, aims to boost the volume of mentions and citations across various AI platforms. Future claims that Future Optic has already shown success in improving the brand visibility of its owned titles, although specific performance figures were not disclosed.
Future is also packaging this tool as part of branded content offerings for its clients. This provides brands with a unique opportunity to increase their AI summary citations, enhancing their online presence in AI-driven search engines.
This move is part of a broader strategy by Future to diversify its traffic sources and reduce its reliance on Google Search, a shift that other publishers have also undertaken in recent years. The company now enjoys a more balanced mix of referral traffic from sources such as Google Discover, email, social media, and direct traffic, with Google Search now contributing to only 27% of overall sessions—down from over 50% in 2019.
While data from Similarweb shows a year-over-year decline in unique visitors to Future’s key sites like Tom’s Guide and TechRadar, Who What Wear has seen significant growth, increasing by 63% to reach 7.6 million unique visitors in December 2025. Simon Collis, Future’s Senior VP of Content Strategy and Audience Development, acknowledged that while traffic growth has been challenging, the company remains highly influential in the market.
The company’s focus on diversified traffic sources serves as a strategic buffer against the volatility of AI-driven and platform-based traffic. Collis emphasized that only 16% of Future’s total revenue is directly impacted by website sessions, thanks to the significant role of branded content in its business model.
Since the launch of Future Optic, TechRadar has become one of the most cited sources in ChatGPT and Claude AI models, according to research presented by Profound, an AI search optimization company, in October 2025.
Future decided to develop its own AI visibility tool after finding third-party tools inadequate for publishers. Unlike brand-focused tools that track mentions of specific brands and keywords, Future Optic provides deeper insights into which pages and content are feeding into AI models and influencing the generated answers.
The tool tracks 13 subverticals to get a clearer understanding of AI visibility. For example, instead of just tracking general categories like “tech” or “music,” Future monitors more specific subtopics like “music making” and “hi-fi,” providing a less subjective set of keywords for analysis.
Currently, Future’s brands rank as the top publisher in six out of the 13 subverticals it tracks, with five others securing second place. This increased visibility has made Future’s content more likely to appear in AI Overviews generated by related search queries.
Collis has declined to reveal the exact workings of Future Optic, citing its proprietary nature. However, he suggested that the tool incorporates advanced SEO techniques, content structures, and schemas, highlighting that non-traditional SEO methods are playing a significant role in improving AI visibility.
In addition to its core publishing operations, Future is now using Future Optic as part of its branded content strategy, offering the tool to clients in industries like telecommunications, CPG, luxury, and beauty. This effort serves as part of a long-term strategy to monetize AI search visibility for branded content campaigns.
One success story involves a Samsung campaign, which saw a 28% increase in citations from Future sources in just three months. This campaign led to a rise in mentions between 23% and 33%, culminating in 4,754 LLM citations by the end of August 2025.
As Alicia Gehring, Senior Vice President of Media Strategy at White64, noted, the tool helps inform decisions on keyword strategy, content themes, and sponsorship alignment, making it a valuable asset in the evolving AI search landscape. For marketers, a publisher’s AI visibility tool like Future Optic provides much-needed transparency in measuring the effectiveness of AI-driven campaigns.