Emperor partners with AI search specialist exceptional™

After 10 years of working together, Emperor has taken a minority stake in AI search specialist agency exceptional™.

It’s an exciting next step in our long-standing partnership, bringing exceptional™’s AI search expertise (along with their SEO, content, social, paid media, and analytics capabilities) to our clients at a time when the way organisations are discovered, understood, and recommended is changing rapidly.

Search is no longer confined to traditional search engines

Audiences are increasingly using AI tools to research organisations, understand complex topics, compare options, and inform decisions.

Those tools don’t rely on a single source. They can draw on websites, search results, media coverage, social channels, reports, and other third-party sources to build their answer.

Without the right support, organisations risk having less control over how their story is told. It’s no longer enough for their core message to sit on their website – their wider digital footprint needs to paint the same picture.

The challenge is making sure that picture is accurate, consistent, and aligned with how the organisation wants to be understood. The opportunity is to establish a strong presence early in this new discovery channel. So when audiences turn to AI for answers, our clients are more likely to be understood and recommended.

That’s where exceptional™ comes in

exceptional™ specialises in AI search optimisation: helping organisations understand and improve how they appear across AI search, from the information AI tools find to the way that information shapes their visibility and representation.

Bringing that expertise closer to Emperor means AI search can now sit more naturally alongside our wider work in communications, brand, reporting, digital, and stakeholder engagement.

For clients, that creates a more joined-up approach: shaping a clear corporate story, then making sure it can be found, understood, and represented accurately across both traditional and AI-driven channels. Rather than treating AI search as a separate challenge, it becomes part of the wider communications picture.

What comes next

For our clients and partners, this partnership means greater depth in AI search and digital visibility, without changing their core relationship with Emperor or creating a separate, disconnected workstream.

That includes access to more specialist digital marketing expertise where it’s useful, earlier access to new thinking, tools, and propositions in fast-moving areas such as AI search, and a broader pool of expertise across search, content, social, paid media, and analytics.

Want to explore what that could look like for your organisation? Reach out at [email protected].