Six months of measured channel data across fonio.ai, sierra.ai, fin.ai, ada.cx and myaskai.com. Three findings matter more than the rest: fonio is the only European-demand business in the set, every single player is bidding on competitors' brand names, and Sierra's organic search traffic is literally its founders' names. There is also one place where this data contradicts a source we were given.
| Site | Total visits | Monthly | Unique/mo | MoM | Pages | Duration | Bounce | Mobile | Industry rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| fonio.ai | 1.023M | 170,503 | 79,942 | −23.36% | 3.76 | 3:21 | 46.05% | 52.4% | Programming/Dev #4,429 |
| sierra.ai | 1.732M | 288,731 | 145,699 | +33.73% | 2.76 | 1:45 | 43.50% | 42.5% | AI Chatbots & Tools #50 |
| fin.ai | 3.011M | 501,889 | 283,747 | +2.12% | 1.80 | 1:00 | 52.38% | 61.5% | Computers/Electronics #2,726 |
| ada.cx | 1.518M | 253,026 | 165,655 | −6.61% | 1.78 | 0:33 | 52.26% | 81.2% | Programming/Dev #4,971 |
| myaskai.com | 163,362 | 27,227 | 13,043 | −0.51% | 1.84 | 0:24 | 41.03% | 62.5% | Graphics/Multimedia #8,561 |
fonio is down 23.4% month-on-month in the last month of the window. That sits oddly against $10M ARR announced on 11 Aug and 30%+ MoM revenue growth. Most likely explanations, in order: European July holiday seasonality; a deliberate ad pullback or creative rotation; or a measurement artefact from the domain's Italian-language privacy subpage that SimilarWeb picked up as the site description. Worth one more month of data before drawing any conclusion — do not present this as a decline.
Sierra ranks #50 in "AI Chatbots and Tools" while everyone else ranks in the thousands of a generic developer category. That is a categorisation difference, not a performance one — but it means Sierra is the only one of the five that SimilarWeb files in the category buyers would actually search.
Five groups. Paid = paid search + display + paid social combined. This is the single most useful chart in the research: the five companies have five genuinely different engines.
| Site | Direct | Org. search | Paid search | Display | Paid social | Referrals | Org. social | Gen AI | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| fonio.ai | 49.87 | 14.07 | 12.84 | 5.34 | 5.99 | 3.43 | 5.99 | 1.28 | 1.18 |
| sierra.ai | 41.86 | 31.38 | 6.52 | 0.74 | 0.29 | 6.98 | 10.12 | 1.09 | 1.02 |
| fin.ai | 34.33 | 17.66 | 17.55 | 11.63 | 2.67 | 10.42 | 3.39 | 0.96 | 1.36 |
| ada.cx | 20.02 | 16.23 | 9.72 | 1.25 | 1.96 | 46.63 | 2.01 | 1.01 | 1.07 |
| myaskai.com | 66.85 | 17.95 | <1 | <1 | N/A | 1.54 | 11.62 | 2.04 | — |
5.99% paid social vs Fin 2.67%, Ada 1.96%, Sierra 0.29%, My AskAI nil. Combined with 68% of its social traffic coming from Facebook — where every other company in the set is LinkedIn-dominant — this is the measurable fingerprint of a B2C-style performance-marketing motion aimed at SMB owners. It is the thing that makes fonio's playbook the transferable one.
11.63% display, placed on msn.com, cnn.com, wsj.com, fastcompany.com. That is brand-and-reach buying, not performance. Read alongside the Salesforce acquisition at $3.6B in June 2026, it looks like end-stage category-ownership spend rather than efficient acquisition.
The brief asks specifically about local-market success. The answer is unambiguous and it is the strongest single argument for using fonio as the reference case.
| Site | #1 | #2 | #3 | #4 | #5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| fonio.ai | Germany 42.8% +30% | Austria 10.4% +52% | Brazil 10.0% +66% | France 5.2% +50% | Poland 4.7% +17% |
| sierra.ai | US 35.8% +19% | India 9.1% +53% | UK 6.0% +38% | Canada 3.9% +43% | Singapore 3.4% +77% |
| fin.ai | US 40.3% +15% | India 6.7% +47% | UK 3.7% +13% | South Korea 2.7% +8% | Australia 2.2% +5% |
| ada.cx | US 46.9% +5% | Canada 5.7% +19% | Australia 3.0% +50% | UK 2.9% +6% | Nigeria 2.1% +10% |
| myaskai.com | US 20.2% +8% | Australia 10.0% +10% | UK 8.9% +12% | Canada 8.2% +36% | India 7.6% +9% |
Brazil is fonio's third market at 10.0% and its fastest-growing at +66% — ahead of Austria, its own home country, and more than double France. A DACH-first company found its best non-core market outside Europe entirely. If the GTM-Lead-per-market model is what produced that, it generalises further than "European SME markets", and the Brazil case is the one to interrogate.
Top paid non-branded search terms, July 2026. Read across the five columns: this is not category advertising. It is a conquest war where each company buys its rivals' names — and in fonio's case, something smarter than that.
Buys infrastructure, not competitors
Buys the entire competitive set by name
Buys rivals + voice infrastructure
Concentrated on two names + Japan/Korea localisation
myaskai.com: no paid search terms recorded at all. See what this contradicts.
Ada, Fin and Sierra all buy competitor product names — they are fighting over buyers who have already decided to buy an AI agent and are choosing a vendor. Expensive traffic, and the click is a coin flip.
fonio buys twilio, vapi, retell —
developer infrastructure. Someone searching "twilio" is not comparing AI receptionists; they are
about to build one themselves. fonio intercepts them at the moment the alternative is six
engineer-months, which is a far weaker competing offer than a rival product. placetel
(a German cloud-telephony brand) is the same move against incumbent phone systems.
This is the most directly copyable mechanic in the whole research. Bid on the tool your buyer would use to solve the problem the hard way, not on the competitor who solved it the same way you did.
| Site | What people actually search |
|---|---|
| fonio.ai |
benoetige eine ki software… 7.17% · ai secretary 5.86% (+1,700%) ·
bester ki anrufbeantworter 4.56% · fonio levée de fonds 3.91% ·
ki telefonannahme 3.91%
Four of five are German-language buying intent. "ai secretary" up 1,700% is the category forming in English. The French term is press interest in their funding round.
|
| sierra.ai |
bret taylor 5.41% (+69%) · clay bavor 3.70% (+236%) ·
tau bench 3.60% · takeoff ai 3.40% · シエラ ソフトバンク 2.80%
The top two non-branded organic terms are the founders' names. Third is the benchmark they published. This is founder publicity working as a measurable acquisition channel — not a vanity metric.
|
| fin.ai |
intercom academy 5.71% · ai solution customer supp… 5.08% ·
intercom jobs 3.34% · intercom 2.92% · blueprint intercdom 1.67%
Four of five are the old brand. Fifteen years of Intercom equity is still doing the work three months after renaming the company to Fin — which is exactly the "baggage" the rebrand was meant to shed.
|
| ada.cx |
ada cx jobs 13.27% · ada chat casino 10.20% ·
alucinaciones de la ia ejem… 10.20% · website importer 8.16% ·
how many cs tickets does… 7.14%
None of these is a buyer. Job-seekers, a name collision with online casinos, and a Spanish-language query about AI hallucinations. Ada's organic channel is not producing demand.
|
| myaskai.com |
askai 40.91% (+125%) · task, tool or image reply m… 10.00% ·
my askai contact us 9.09% · zoho desk ai price 8.18% · myaskai instagram 4.55%
41% of non-branded organic is the ambiguous term "askai", contested with askaichat.app, iask.ai and ask-ai.com.
zoho desk ai price is the one genuine buyer query — a rival's pricing search. |
Sierra proves it can be a real channel: 31.4% of its traffic is organic search, and the two largest non-branded terms in it are Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor, both growing fast (+69% and +236%). People search the founder, land on the company.
But note what it requires. Taylor is a former Salesforce
co-CEO and the current chairman of OpenAI's board. That is not a channel you can decide to build; it
is a channel you already have or don't. The replicable version is the artefact, not the
person — tau bench at 3.60% is a benchmark they published and open-sourced, and it pulls
nearly as much traffic as the CEO's name.
Until now every channel finding on this page was a percentage. This is the first creative-level evidence in the research: the actual copy, the actual claims, the actual platform strategy. It also proves the capture approach works — these came out of a manual pass over Fin's ad surfaces, which is exactly what we proposed doing for fonio's creatives.
Two paid short-form video testimonials, identical copy: "Leading AI company Anthropic wanted an AI agent to power exceptional customer service experiences. See why they chose Fin." CTA: "Anthropic chose Fin for AI customer service."
The mechanic: no product claim at all. The entire ad is brand association — if the frontier AI lab picked us, you don't need to evaluate our AI. One cut is cinematic street-view, the other a close-up interview. Same script, two emotional registers.
Organically the LinkedIn showcase page is the opposite — technical, research-led, barely promotional, with the promotional lift coming from partner accounts (Intercom, OpenAI) reposting rather than from Fin itself. An OpenAI repost of the Fin AI Engine diagram pulled 776 reactions and 93 reposts.
40K followers and the last organic post was 23 April 2024. But the paid side is running hard, and the copy is the sharpest in the set:
"Fin AI Agent instantly resolves 51% of your support tickets, emails, and messages on Zendesk. Set it up in less than an hour — no migration required." · "99¢/resolution — no seats and no minimum spend." · "The first human-quality AI agent. Now available with Zendesk."
Three objections killed in two lines: a specific number instead of "up to"; the rival's platform named so there is nothing to migrate; and a price with the two scariest words in SaaS explicitly removed — seats and minimum.
Three structured playlists: hero explainers, the Pioneer summit cut into episodes, and a "Built For You" feature series. Leaders on camera paired with product UI in almost every video.
The tension worth naming: YouTube is 63.8% of Fin's social traffic per SimilarWeb, yet individual videos sit at 150–8,500 views. Small numbers doing real work — this is a sales-enablement and evaluation library, not a reach channel. Event content repurposed into episodic uploads is the cheapest way to keep a mid-funnel alive between launches.
Fin runs its own official subreddit,
r/fin_ai_agent — ~600+ members, weekly posts, engineering-first tone. Content pillars:
event promos, deep technical write-ups (infra migrations, latency), product mechanics, discussion
prompts. Engagement is modest (≈5–12 upvotes) and concentrated on the architecture threads.
Compare Sendbird, which has no owned community and whose Reddit presence is other people's comparison threads — "Sendbird vs Stream/PubNub/Ably" — where the recurring objections are pricing and vendor lock-in, and devs weighing total cost against "roll your own". That last objection is precisely the intent fonio buys on paid search.
Fin runs a different job per platform and never repeats a message. LinkedIn buys trust it hasn't earned yet (Anthropic). Facebook does direct response with a number and a price. YouTube is the evaluation library sales sends after the call. Reddit is technical credibility with a small, self-selecting audience. Nothing is cross-posted.
Set against fonio — Facebook-first, 68% of social, paid and organic in equal halves — the useful contrast is that fonio uses one platform for one job at volume, and Fin uses four platforms for four jobs at low volume. fonio's is the cheaper model to run and the harder one to defend; Fin's is the more expensive and the more durable. Which one is right depends entirely on whether the price point supports a sales motion.
The deck ran 21 buyer-intent queries. Almost none of them contain a brand name and almost all of them are integration questions — which tells you where the demand really sits:
10 of the 21 shown. The other 11 follow the same two shapes: connect-it or build-it.
1. The category's demand is expressed as an integration problem, not a product search. Buyers type "connect AI to my helpdesk", not "best AI support agent". That is why Fin's whole paid message is "on Zendesk, no migration required", why My AskAI's entire GTM is being an add-on inside someone else's helpdesk, and why Ada's "we complement the agent desktop" positioning made sense right up until it made Ada absorbable.
2. Roughly a third of the queries are people intending to build it
themselves — "build an AI chatbot", "chatbot API", "how to train an AI assistant". That is the
same intent pool fonio buys with twilio, vapi and retell, arriving
here through a different door. It confirms the flank is real and sizeable rather than a quirk of one ad
account.
Who shows up on these queries: Fin appeared most often (5 times, frequently ranked #1 in paid), Sendbird twice. Also surfacing: Ada, Zendesk, Front, Cohere, involve.me, Noupe, Fyxer.ai, Moxo — a much wider and messier competitive set than any single vendor's comparison page admits.
The Systemaic teardown we were given describes My AskAI as running a paid programme — "17+ active ads", 9 Google and 8 LinkedIn creatives, a 668-day-lifespan winner, competitor-conquest copy naming Fin, Freshdesk and Gorgias.
SimilarWeb records paid search at <1%, display at <1%, paid social as N/A, and no paid search terms at all.
Both can be true. The creatives exist — the teardown's own body says only ~2 of the 17 are live — but at a spend level too small to register as a traffic channel. The honest reading: My AskAI experiments with competitor-conquest ads at negligible budget. It is not a paid-acquisition business, and the teardown's "paid footprint" framing overstates it. Its real engine is the 66.9% direct traffic coming off two founders' personal audiences.
46.6% referrals sourced from design galleries and its own investor's website, 33 seconds average visit, 1.78 pages, 81% mobile, and organic terms dominated by job-seekers and a casino name collision. Ada reported 108% agentic-AI ARR growth and 146% NRR for the year to Jan 2026 — both plausible, and both consistent with this: Ada's growth is expansion inside ~350 existing accounts, not new demand. The website is not acquiring, and the data says so.
How to treat these numbers. SimilarWeb Pro is panel-and-model-based estimation, not measured analytics. Levels can be materially wrong, especially below ~50k visits/month — which includes My AskAI. Rankings and ratios between sites in the same dataset are far more reliable than absolute values, and channel shares are more reliable than channel volumes. Every conclusion on this page is drawn from a comparison, not from a level.
Social platform split — where fonio breaks the pattern