Jeremy Liddle
Executive Chair, Third Hemisphere
A note from Jeremy
To the CMOs, CEOs, and leaders who look after brands,
When ChatGPT came out, I knew I was looking at the future of marketing. It felt like the internet, only bigger. It felt like the iPhone, only far more consequential.
It was clear straight away that AI engines would stand between people and almost every decision they make. Which bank to trust, which software to buy, which agency to hire: more and more, the first answer a buyer hears now comes from an engine, not from a search page, a sales call, or a friend. In time, the engines will not just shape those decisions. They will make them on people's behalf.
That changes what marketing is for. A brand's job is no longer only to be seen. It is to be understood, trusted, and recommended by the systems that now do the shortlisting. Most brands have no idea what those systems say about them.
That is why we built CRISP, and why we publish the AI Authority Index as a public good: free to read, completely objective, and measured the same way for every company, our clients included.
My ask is simple. Find out where you stand. Run the free AI Authority Check, read the Index for your market, and see what the engines say when your buyers ask.
The engines index facts, sources, and reputations. They also understand that authentic leadership is still human.
Jeremy Liddle
Executive Chair, Third Hemisphere
About the author: Jeremy Liddle
Jeremy Liddle is the Executive Chair of Third Hemisphere and the author of the AI Authority Index. He designed CRISP, the proprietary technology and methodology behind the Index, and leads its development.
The moment it became obvious
Jeremy has spent 25 years building companies. That work spanned technology, finance, climate, and capital markets, and as an investor he has backed more than 25 startups and several venture funds. Across that time he has watched each shift in how brands reach people: print and broadcast giving way to search, search giving way to social, and social to mobile. Each one rewarded the brands that understood it early and punished those that waited.
When ChatGPT launched, he saw a larger shift than any of them. Earlier channels sent people to information. AI engines answer for them. A buyer who asks an engine which lender to trust or which supplier to shortlist gets an answer, and that answer shapes the decision before the buyer has visited a single website. Jeremy's view was that the engines would soon intermediate nearly every commercial decision, and eventually make some of those decisions on people's behalf.
What was missing
As the question of AI visibility took hold, a wave of tools appeared to answer it. Almost all of them measured one thing: how often an engine mentions a brand. Jeremy saw that presence alone tells a brand very little. A company can be named often and still be warned against. It can be recommended warmly by the few answers that find it and invisible everywhere else. And a mention can be backed by trusted independent sources, or by nothing at all.
At the same time, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, other global representative bodies, and academic researchers began publishing serious work on how generative engines choose what to say. The theory was arriving faster than anyone was applying it. What the world lacked was a technology that could put that research to work on real markets and turn it into advice a brand could act on.
How CRISP took shape
The insight that shaped CRISP was that AI authority is neither search engine optimisation nor public relations on its own. It is both at once. Engines read a company's own website, as search engines always have, and they weigh what independent sources say about it, as journalists and analysts always have. A method that measured only one side would miss half of what decides an answer.
That led to five factors, each scored out of 100 and combined into one composite:
- Consensus: when one engine names a company, whether the others do too.
- Reputation: whether the engines speak in a company's favour more often than they caution against it.
- Influence: whether independent sources stand behind what the engines say.
- Source: whether the company's own content stands up as the record of what is true about it, and whether an engine can reach and read it.
- Presence: whether the engines name the company when a buyer describes a need without naming anyone.
Measuring them well meant going far deeper than a list of generic prompts. Every market in CRISP is defined by the words its buyers actually use: its products, its buyer segments, the benefits that win business, the harms buyers want to avoid, the regulators and complaint bodies that set the rules, and the brands competing for attention. From those, CRISP builds unbranded buyer questions for each stage of a decision, then asks them of the AI engines people use.
Built to stand up
Jeremy set a high bar from the start. If the Index was going to say something about a company, it had to be statistically significant and able to withstand academic scrutiny. AI engines are probabilistic by nature: ask the same question twice and the answer can change. CRISP is designed to use the power of AI to read thousands of answers, while moving the results it publishes as far as possible from chance and towards repeatable, testable findings.
That discipline shows in what the Index refuses to do. It publishes the number of answers behind every reading and the range it could fall in. It does not rank companies its sample cannot separate, so companies are grouped on the Star Chart rather than numbered. A company named too rarely for a reliable reading is listed Under the Radar with no score, rather than given a guess. Every method change is registered and tested before it is used.
Why an index, and why in public
Jeremy believes this kind of intelligence should be a public good. Every company deserves to know how the engines describe it, and every buyer deserves to know the engines are being watched. So the Index is free to read, measured the same way for every company, and published with Third Hemisphere's own clients scored on the same instrument as their competitors.
The first edition covers Australia's personal lending market. Financial services is where Third Hemisphere has worked for more than a decade, since MONEYME became its first client in 2014, and it is where AI answers already carry real weight: in a 2026 WPP Media study of 2,500 Australians, 87 percent of those buying financial services used AI search to help decide, the highest of the 12 categories it measured. The findings showed why measurement matters. Smaller challenger lenders matched the largest bank's Reputation while being named a fraction as often, and the gap between being named and being recommended was the story in nearly every part of the market.
CRISP, Contrlr, and Tony Surtees AM
CRISP grew out of a long conversation about the future of search, marketing, and media. Jeremy first came to Tony Surtees AM by asking a number of people who the best venture capitalist in Australia was, and many of them named Tony. Tony joined Yahoo! in 1998, helped build Yahoo! Finance, and became executive vice president and general manager of Global e-Commerce at Yahoo!'s Santa Clara headquarters, where the commerce group spanned 14 business units and more than USD 2.5 billion in gross sales. Back in Australia, he chaired the investment committee for the federal Department of Industry's Entrepreneurs' Programme, which put more money into startups than any venture capital firm in Australia. He reviewed more than 650 grants for businesses expanding and commercialising, and the programme is credited with more than AUD 19.5 billion in additional turnover, AUD 7.5 billion in export growth, and 20,000 new jobs. He was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in the 2025 King's Birthday Honours for significant service to the support and advocacy of technological and charitable entrepreneurialism. He also chaired the investment committee for CapitalPitch.
The two reconnected in mid 2025 and began discussing what search marketing and media would become once AI engines answered for people. That work led them to co-found Contrlr, an AI reputation intelligence and control company, and the idea for CRISP and the Index took shape along the way. The products are linked, as CRISP will be one of the components of Contrlr's reputation score. CRISP and the AI Authority Index are Third Hemisphere's.
Background
Before CRISP, Jeremy built and backed companies across technology, finance, and climate:
- He is a founding partner of the climate tech investment and advisory firm SDGx.
- He served as President for Australia at the G20 Young Entrepreneurs' Alliance.
- He co-authored the G20 and United Nations white paper on youth entrepreneurship, and took part in the formation of the Sustainable Development Goals.
- He has spoken at the UN General Assembly, the G20 Summit, and TEDx.
- He wrote the book From Idea to Startup.
- He holds a Bachelor of Business from Monash University and a Graduate Diploma of Finance from Griffith University.
He joined Third Hemisphere four years after Hannah Moreno founded it in 2014, and co-founded the agency in its current form.
Where Third Hemisphere comes in
AI authority sits where PR and search meet, and that is the ground Third Hemisphere has worked for over a decade: earning coverage, shaping what trusted sources say, and making sure a company's own record stands up. CRISP gives that work a measurement, and the Index shows what it looks like across a whole market. For a brand that wants to know where it stands, the free AI Authority Check is the place to start. For one that wants a plan to move, the AI Authority Blueprint sets out what to change and in what order.