By: Jessa Marie Dollesin
Andrew Maltin spent 17 years building products for some of the world’s most recognized brands. His new company, Cytd.ai, is built around a single observation: for a growing number of customers, the decision has already been made before they ever reach a website.
A homeowner with a burst pipe no longer scrolls through ten blue links. They ask an AI assistant who to call, and whatever name comes back is the one who gets the job. Andrew Maltin built Cytd.ai around that single, quiet fact: the conversation between a business and its next customer increasingly starts and ends with a machine’s answer.
Maltin spent 17 years co-founding MEDL Mobile, a digital product company whose clients included The New York Times, Disney, Toyota, and Emirates Airlines. That background gave him a direct view of what happens when a major shift in consumer behavior catches an industry unprepared. He’s seen this pattern before. He’s betting most business owners haven’t.
The Moment Before the Click
A real estate agent spends years building a website, collecting reviews, and climbing search rankings. A local insurance broker does the same. Both assume that work still counts for as much as it used to, because for two decades it did.
That assumption is getting shakier by the month. Buyers, renters, and homeowners are increasingly opening an AI assistant first and asking it to narrow the field for them. The assistant answers with a short list, confidently and without footnotes, and the person asking rarely goes looking beyond it. A business left off that list doesn’t get a second chance later on a results page, because there isn’t one. There’s only the answer given, and the answer not given.
The scale of this shift is no longer theoretical. One in ten U.S. internet users now turns to AI first when searching online. AI-referred sessions to websites grew 527 percent year-over-year in the first half of 2025. Research from Acquia found that 70 percent of organizations believe AI search will significantly affect their strategy within three years, while only 20 percent have started doing anything about it. For CEOs managing businesses without dedicated marketing departments, that 50-point gap between awareness and action is where Cytd.ai operates.
Maltin describes this as an entirely different kind of contact point, one that happens before a website ever loads or a phone ever rings. The businesses most exposed, in his view, are the ones that never needed to think about how a machine describes them, because until recently, nothing did.
Training the Machines That Do the Introducing
Cytd.ai’s work sits inside that gap. The company built a patent-pending layer that trains AI models directly on a business’s behalf, teaching them who a business serves, what it actually offers, and why it belongs in an answer a customer is asking for. A live team of account managers runs that process for every client, tracked through a dashboard that the business owner can check at any time, supported by monthly reporting rather than a one-time audit handed off and forgotten.
That distinction matters to Maltin more than most. Cytd.ai isn’t built to tell a business what’s wrong and leave the fixing to them. The company does the training itself, adjusting how a business shows up across platforms like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Anthropic’s Claude, and Grok, much the way an agency might once have managed a client’s search rankings by hand. An owner checks a dashboard. They don’t manage a project.
“We are not just a reporting platform. We built a technology company that teaches AI systems what a business does, who it serves, and why it should be cited. Our team does that work on behalf of every client.” – Andrew Maltin, founder, Cytd.ai
The pitch, stripped down, is straightforward. Most small businesses have neither the time nor the technical background to manage how an AI model perceives them, and few even know that’s now something to manage. Cytd.ai exists to close that gap quietly, in the background, while the business keeps doing what it does.
Getting Ready Before the Rules Are Set
No one has finished writing the rulebook for how AI platforms decide what to recommend, and that’s precisely the moment Maltin wants small businesses paying attention to. Standards that feel unsettled now tend to calcify fast once enough companies build around them, and whoever shapes their presence early has an advantage that’s difficult to claw back later.
That urgency isn’t abstract for the businesses Cytd.ai works with. A plumber, a boutique hotel, a small insurance office: none of them have the internal resources to reverse-engineer how a language model forms opinions about who deserves a mention. Larger companies with dedicated marketing teams will eventually address this problem on their own. Smaller ones are more likely to notice only after a competitor has already claimed the spot they didn’t know was open.
Reputation management, on this view, is quietly becoming less about what a customer reads on a review site and more about what a machine says out loud before that customer ever gets there. A five-star rating still matters, but it matters differently when the first impression happens inside a conversation the business itself never sees. Maltin’s bet is that businesses willing to treat AI visibility as seriously as they once treated their Google presence will be the names still standing when the field settles. The ones who wait for certainty may find the introductions have already been made without them.
