About BrandTags

Where this comes from

BrandTags was built in May 2008 by Noah Brier, on this domain. The idea fit in a sentence, and the site put it on the front page: a brand exists entirely in people's heads, so whatever people say a brand is, is what it is. It showed a logo, asked for one word, and turned the answers into a cloud where the size of a word was the number of people who had said it. Nothing else. By January 2009 the counter read 1.2 million tags, there was a battle mode where two logos fought for a word, and a leaderboard where Lego had won 39 of its 44 battles.

It was written up by Ad Age, chiefmartec and Futurelab in its first weeks, was later acquired by Solve Media, and went dark around 2013. For most of the years since, the domain held a website that had nothing to do with any of this.

The clouds on this site are what people wrote there in 2008 and 2009, recovered from public web archives and shown with their original counts. The two model columns are new: the same question, asked of ChatGPT and Gemini fifty times each. This relaunch is independent. It is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, Noah Brier or Solve Media, and it does not claim to be the same project. It claims to be the same question, seventeen years later, with a new kind of respondent.

The product

BrandTags is a public media, community and perception-data project. Every profile shows dated model snapshots independently, invites a low-friction human response and keeps recovered historical material as a clearly labelled memory layer.

The relationship with AI Rankia

BrandTags explores what AI says a brand is. AI Rankia measures whether AI systems mention, recommend and cite that brand across tracked queries. Qualified professional requests can pass securely from BrandTags into AI Rankia; the two databases remain separate.

What this is not

• Not a representative opinion poll.
• Not a reputation score a company can purchase.
• Not a coupon or cashback directory.
• Not thousands of empty programmatic pages.