London, 31st July 2025 – Integrated digital marketing and advertising agency Cheil UK has today announced a strategic partnership with Spotlight, an enterprise startup focused on brand visibility and performance in an AI-driven search landscape. The collaboration will see Cheil UK and Spotlight collaborate on a next-generation platform that helps brands navigate the growing influence of large language models (LLMs) on digital discovery.

The partnership is grounded in ongoing collaboration, with Spotlight able to adjust its roadmap inline with Cheil’s insights and client needs. Spotlight will work closely with Cheil’s global development and strategy teams to co-create proprietary tools designed to future-proof brand visibility. The new platform combines Spotlight’s LLM SEO expertise with Cheil’s broader marketing technology capabilities.

The move reflects a shift in how consumers discover and engage with brands. As LLMs increasingly shape what users see and believe, the platform will enable brands to manage how they appear in AI-powered environments. Spotlight is developing new capabilities informed by Cheil’s client priorities, giving them early access and strategic influence, while building solutions applicable to the wider market.

The platform is being developed in close collaboration between the two businesses, with teams from both sides working on areas such as prompt engineering, brand voice optimisation, AI-driven content systems, and integration into Cheil’s wider tech infrastructure. Cheil clients will receive early access to the platform, including onboarding support, beta features up to six weeks before public release, API integrations, and dedicated support channels.

This partnership is part of Cheil’s wider investment in AI innovation across its services, from digital and content to retail and e-commerce. The Cheil x Spotlight platform will sit alongside other AI-powered tools developed by the agency to support connected, scalable marketing solutions.

Cheil UK and Spotlight are also forming a cross-company innovation council to co-develop more products.

Chris Camacho, CEO of Cheil UK, said: “This is not about bolting AI onto old ways of working. It’s about building the future from the inside out. Our clients need tools designed for the way the world is changing. Spotlight shares our urgency and ambition. This partnership marks a new phase in AI-led marketing development, helping brands take a leading role as search and discovery models continue to evolve.”

Michael Hermon, CEO of Spotlight, added: “Partnering with Cheil means building alongside a global leader that understands what innovation looks like. Together we’re defining what LLM-native marketing means - both for today’s platforms and tomorrow’s consumers.”

Notes:

About Cheil UK
Cheil UK is an integrated digital and advertising agency bridging physical, digital, and immersive experiences. With a commitment to pushing innovation, Cheil works with progressive brands like Samsung to optimise the edge across technology, retail, and emerging sectors, helping brands forge deeper, more rewarding customer experiences.

About Cheil Worldwide
Cheil Worldwide is the leading business-connected agency operating in 45 countries worldwide with around 6,500 employees. We specialise in performance-driven marketing across three core offerings – brand communications, experiential, and commerce. With our focus on enhancing business performance of our clients and brand experience of consumers, we create connected experiences that matter by forging connections between all the marketing silos, putting together creativity, data, tech, and retail. Our global network includes Cheil Worldwide, Barbarian, BMB, Cheil Centrade, Cheil PengTai, ColourData, Experience Commerce, Iris, McKinney, and One RX.
About Spotlight

Spotlight is the first platform built to help brands measure, understand, and grow their presence inside Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Google AI OverviewsClaude, Gemini, and Perplexity. By fusing real-time LLM outputs with Google Search Console data and competitive benchmarking, Spotlight reveals where your brand shows up in AI-generated answers and where it doesn’t. But it doesn’t stop at insights. Spotlight is the only platform that not only identifies content gaps but also tells you exactly what to do about them and then tracks whether it worked.

By analyzing the actual sources LLMs use to form their answers, Spotlight uncovers the hidden structure of LLM-optimized content: preferred formats, ideal length, use of citations, authorship signals, semantic layout, and more. It surfaces the patterns across hundreds of thousands of high-performing pages to reverse-engineer what the models prioritize.

These insights are then transformed into robust, ready-to-use content briefs; giving your team a blueprint for creating LLM-friendly content that is not only optimized, but strategically structured to rank. From there, Spotlight continuously monitors how and when your new content is picked up by LLMs, closing the loop between strategy, creation, and real-world impact.

Cheil UK and AI startup Spotlight forge strategic partnership to power brand discovery in the age of AI