Uri Martinich has spent more than two decades winning search. Now the founder of ROI is turning that head start into an edge in AI search, and building one of his agency's fastest-growing revenue lines in the process.
The 20-year search veteran behind ROI
Uri Martinich, Founder and CEO of ROI, has been doing SEO since 2004, more than two decades in search, and has run ROI as an agency since 2009. Over that time ROI has worked with hundreds of medium and large companies across B2B, multinationals, ecommerce, healthcare, education, banking, insurance, retail, and trade associations. Today the agency serves dozens of active clients.
What ROI does as a Latin American SEO and AEO agency
ROI is a Latin American agency specialized in organic visibility, online reputation, and optimization for both traditional search engines and AI-powered answer engines. It is currently running AI search visibility work for a growing share of its clients, and that number is climbing fast as more of them realize visibility is no longer only about Google rankings. It is about how ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, and other AI systems understand, cite, recommend, and compare their brands.
Why AI search now shapes which brands buyers consider
The questions that used to start on Google are moving into AI. Users now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini the same things they once typed into a search bar: what is the best company for this, who are the top providers, which solution should I choose. "It was not just a new interface," Martinich said. "It was a new layer of visibility, influence, and decision-making."
For ROI's clients, that is where the stakes are. In many industries the answer engines are already shaping perception before a buyer ever visits a website. A brand the models recommend gets onto the shortlist; a brand they leave out is invisible at the exact moment the decision is being made. Covering Google rankings alone no longer covers a client's visibility.
How Temso takes the manual work out of ROI's AI search workflow
Temso is now part of ROI's weekly AEO workflow, used almost daily by the technical and reporting teams. Before Temso, keeping up meant running prompts by hand across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, copying answers into spreadsheets, and reviewing citations one by one, work that was repetitive, error-prone, and impossible to scale across a roster of clients. "It can work when you are checking a few prompts for one client," Martinich said. "It does not work when your ambition is to become the number one AEO agency and you need to monitor hundreds of prompts across multiple clients, competitors, and answer engines." Now that manual layer runs through one system. On the operational side, Temso handles the work that used to eat the team's week:
- Monitoring large groups of prompts across multiple AI engines
- Comparing a client's visibility against competitors
- Identifying which sources are repeatedly cited by AI systems
- Detecting gaps where the client should appear but does not
- Finding new content opportunities based on real AI-generated answers
- Building evidence for client meetings
- Tracking whether AEO actions are moving the needle over time
That shift changes where the team spends its time. "Instead of spending most of the time gathering evidence, the team can spend more time interpreting the data and deciding what to do with it," Martinich said. Temso gives ROI the operational base; the agency keeps the strategy. The human team still defines the AEO roadmap, prioritizes actions, creates and optimizes content, works on authority and reputation signals, and explains the business implications to clients. "Temso does not replace strategy," Martinich said. "It removes a lot of manual work and lets us focus on the high-value strategic layer."
How Temso's data changes ROI's client conversations
The leverage shows up most clearly in the client meeting. For many companies, AI search is an abstraction until they see where they actually stand. "For many clients, AI search felt abstract until they saw the data," Martinich said. "Once they see that a competitor is being recommended and they are not, the conversation changes immediately. It becomes a strategic business issue, not just an SEO experiment."
The comparison is easy for any executive to grasp: here is where you appear, here is where your competitors appear, here are the sources the models are using, and here are the questions where you are invisible. That clarity is what turns a curiosity into a budget line.
How Temso helped an ROI client go from invisible to most-cited in AI search
The work produces results clients can see. One ROI client went from not being mentioned by AI systems in industry queries to becoming the most cited brand in ChatGPT and Gemini, and ranking in the top three in Perplexity and Copilot.
That kind of progress has reshaped ROI's business. The agency has won new AEO clients and upsold AEO services to existing SEO clients who already trusted it for Google but needed help with AI search. Higher-leverage work, in other words, has turned into one of the agency's fastest-growing revenue channels.
Why ROI moved into AEO before the category existed
None of this was an accident. The moment it clicked was late 2023, when the team started testing ChatGPT seriously. "We said: this is the future, we need to get ahead of it," Martinich said. The decision came from pattern recognition built over twenty years of platform shifts. "In search, the agencies that learn first usually build the strongest advantage. Waiting until the market is mature means you only react to what everyone else is already doing." The goal was to build the methodology and internal know-how early, and become one of the leading AEO and GEO agencies in the region before the category became obvious to everyone.
Why ROI trusts Temso's AI search data
For an agency, leverage only matters if the underlying data is sound. ROI learned that while evaluating tools. One platform it tested pulled answers through API calls rather than the web interface real users actually see. "Approximately 70% of API-based answers were different from the answers delivered through the web interface," Martinich said. For a firm building client reports and strategic recommendations, that gap was disqualifying. "We cannot build client reports, strategic recommendations, or commercial decisions on data that does not reflect the real user experience."
That is why ROI runs on Temso. Temso measures AI search the way a real user experiences it, in the web interface rather than through an API, so what ROI reports to a client matches what a buyer would actually see asking ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or Copilot. It is the foundation the rest of the service is built on. The agency can put its team on strategy, change the client conversation, and stand behind its results because the data underneath holds up. It is the bet ROI made early, and the one it is still building on.
