SBJ Power Up: Teaching the sports industry the AI search game

Happy Monday, and welcome back from the weekend. It’s SBJ Game Changers week in New York City. We’ll celebrate our 15th class of honorees on Wednesday evening, followed by a full day of programming. Be sure to sign up to attend in-person or virtually here. — Ethan Joyce

In today’s edition of Power Up:

• Literate AI helping sports organizations prepare for AI-driven internet
• Tennis Channel debuts animated alt-casts for Laver Cup
• Arizona Cardinals sign Lumifi as cybersecurity sponsor

As internet users increasingly trade trails of purple links for bulleted artificial intelligence-generated summaries as their primary mode of search, an emerging firm is seeking to help teams, leagues and adjacent brands maintain their online visibility.

Literate AI is a 4-year-old subsidiary of Red Krypton Inc., a digital marketing agency co-founded by former Group SJR co-founder Mitch Stoller and ex-Tough Mudder and NBC Sports executive Dan Weinberg in 2019. Its specialty is “AI optimization,” a new-age version of search engine optimization that evaluates how often and in what context certain terms show up in popular AI queries, then implements strategies for increasing and refining that presence. It launched an AIO offering specific to sports a little less than a year ago.

“We see [AIO] as SEO 15 years ago — a time to disrupt and a little bit of a golden age, especially within the next two to three years,” Weinberg, Red Krypton’s CEO, told Sports Business Journal. “It’s really been in the last six to 12 months we understood the significant opportunity in sports and entertainment.”

Web publishers are feeling the impact of AI’s rise as a search/recommendation tool. Platforms such as ChatGPT and features such as Google’s AI-synthesized search summaries are at once siphoning web traffic across the internet and reshaping the way hundreds of millions of people retrieve and process information. In February, Bain & Company published research that found 60% of internet searches terminate without the user clicking through to another website, and that organic web traffic had decreased 15%-25% due to reliance on AI-written results.

The primary opportunity for sports organizations and brands in this area, in the view of Literate AI’s leadership, is reputation management. That could mean reaching fans who ask an AI search platform for recommendations of activities in their city on a given weekend, or potential partners whose market research includes probing AI for the sports properties or consumer brands that deliver the best sponsorship ROI.

“[Large language models] are nothing if not hungry — they want content, they want information constantly,” Literate AI CEO Matthew Van Dusen explained. “It’s not link-driven. It synthesizes and aggregates. And so, there’s this need to speak directly to the machines.”

Literate AI’s consulting process includes an audit of a brand’s visibility and reputation within a range of programmatically generated AI search queries, then targeted content development that addresses priority areas. Its initial audit can be priced at $15,000 to $100,000, depending on complexity, with projects typically lasting six to 12 months once they move to proactively managing one’s brand signals in AI platforms.

Weinberg says Literate AI is in talks with more than 25 teams, leagues and sponsors, including All Elite Wrestling and Michigan-based sports investment/management firm Simon Sports as clients. The latter recently underwent a six-month AIO project intended to drive traffic to online merchandise for the Halifax Mooseheads, a Quebec Maritimes Junior Hockey League team it owns, and is now exploring ways AIO can influence other areas of its business.

Simon Sports President Peter Simon called fan discovery one of the biggest potential impact areas of AIO.

“If I’m a sports fan and I live in Michigan, and I look up a game to go to tonight on Google, what teams are going to show up first on AI search?” Simon said. “If that’s based on their brand and their media and their visibility on the internet, that could be the difference in missing out on a potential revenue source if someone is going to buy tickets to your game.”

As another example of its audit process, Literate AI compiled an independent report on which NFL teams and sponsors are most visible in ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity when asked which deliver the most ROI to partners.

Based on a “visibility score” formula that weighs how many times a team was mentioned in AI search results, where teams ranked in lists generated by AI search platforms and the number of users each AI platform has, Literate AI’s research found the Cowboys (visibility score 41), Rams (38) and Giants (25) to be the leaders among NFL teams, while the Saints (2), Buccaneers (2) and Cardinals (1) were the least visible. On the brand side, meanwhile, Gatorade (33), Verizon (30) and Bud Light (27) were particularly visible. (The firm considers visibility scores between 31-45+ to be strong, 15-30 to be moderate and 14 or less to be weak.)

Literate AI Associate Director Henry Eisler also called out a key learning from the NFL team list in the sixth-ranked Jaguars (19) and eighth-ranked Raiders (17), which each beat out teams based in larger media markets.

“[The Jaguars and Raiders] had 3.5 times more content about their sponsor partnerships cited by the large language models than any other team on average did,” Eisler said. “That means that there are case studies, there’s news coverage, there’s content coming out of the teams about how the Jacksonville Jaguars are partnering with a sponsor, or the Las Vegas Raiders assigned naming rights for Allegiant Stadium.

“That kind of content is becoming important source material to the AI platforms, and it’s making these teams a lot more visible than maybe [you’d expect].”

Weinberg views the next two to three years as a major opportunity for those who invest in understanding how AI surfaces information, before advertising in AI platforms becomes “pay for play” the way it is now on social platforms and traditional search engines.

“It is a fast-moving space,” Weinberg said. “But at this exact time, I think smart, innovative companies and leaders are understanding there’s an opportunity to capture share here that won’t exist in a year or two.”

Tennis Channel will debut live, animated alt-casts of singles matches played during Laver Cup at S.F.’s Chase Center from Sept. 19-21.

The alternate streams, available to U.S. viewers in full in Tennis Channel’s direct-to-consumer app and for select matches on the T2 FAST channel, will be produced through a collaboration between Tennis Channel, Laver Cup (via their domestic media rights deal) and Tennis Australia, which is a stakeholder in the event and will provide the animation technology through its in-house tech incubator AO Labs.

The alt-casts are a first for Tennis Channel, but not in tennis media at large. Tennis Australia has pioneered this style of stream during the Australian Open for the past three years, with its cartoonified recreations of matches drawing particular attention on YouTube and social media during the 2025 event. (Those streams accounted for 440 hours of tennis and drew more than 5.2M views, according to Tennis Australia.)

“We saw all the success they had, and they shared a lot of really strong engagement numbers,” Tennis Channel SVP/Marketing Liz Buhn told SBJ. “We looked at it for Laver Cup and said, ‘This feels right.’ This was a cool way to differentiate our viewing experience over this three-day window and give our social and our app team and our secondary network [T2] some extra content for that younger audience -- and folks that are just going to get a kick out of this.”

The animated feeds are underpinned by optical tracking data supplied by Bolt6, Laver Cup’s electronic line-calling vendor, which encompass 27 skeletal data points on players’ bodies and five on players’ rackets. Animated versions of the players, stadium and graphics are then produced through a custom-built production engine. In addition to match streams, Buhn added that Tennis Channel will animate virtual avatars of studio talent Prakash Amritraj, Brad Gilbert, Steve Weissman and Jon Wertheim as well.

Buhn called the streams a “trifecta” for Tennis Channel in that they hit business priorities around driving app subscriptions, drawing younger viewers and creating incremental digital content Tennis Channel can use beyond match broadcasts.

“It’s certainly going to be a priority for us, looking at alt-feeds that we can apply to different platforms,” Buhn said. “We have to go beyond traditional linear and you’re going to see more alt-feeds -- whether that’s court, or practice, or mic’d [up] coaches and players -- we definitely want to get into the alt-feed space with our tournament partners and the tours.”

The Arizona Cardinals have signed a multiyear sponsorship deal with Scottsdale-based Lumifi Cybersecurity. The partnership will include the implementation of the local firm’s technology to help protect the team from attacks.

As part of the agreement, Lumifi becomes the presenting sponsor of the Cardinals’ mobile app, and it will be highlighted in physical and digital signage by team properties. It also works with another local sports property, the WM Phoenix Open, an annual PGA Tour stop.

Cardinals VP of Technology Erik Jones spoke about the importance of “emboldening our posture around cybersecurity” earlier this week at AXS Drive, a couple days before this formal announcement. As part of a larger digital transformation project that includes adding resiliency to physical and cloud infrastructure to modernize State Farm Stadium, which was built in 2006.

“For a sports franchise like an NFL team or a high-profile event like the Waste Management Phoenix Open, the real cost of a cyber breach isn’t just downtime; it’s trust lost, headlines made, and brand equity eroded in real time,” Lumifi CEO Michael Malone told SBJ. “Unlike most businesses, sports operate in the spotlight: a breach during a live event can disrupt fan experience, broadcast feeds, and sponsor activations — turning a moment of celebration into a crisis seen by millions."

Cardinals owner Michael Bidwill is Chairman of the NFL’s Security and Conduct Committee and touted cybersecurity as “a major priority across every industry.”

“Bolstering our cybersecurity program [goes] hand in hand when you look at creating innovation out of opportunity, but then also being able to scale and secure the systems that we’re building out,” Jones said.

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