Conversational AI Built to Earn
The honest comparison
Ask My Brand’s revenue-centric enterprise infrastructure integrates natively into your CMS, enforces strict editorial guardrails, and deploys without tapping your engineering team.
Competitors leave the hard part to you. Our publishing experts do the opposite.
We’ll deploy your secure instance, configure the guardrails, and wire the paywall logic. You’re live in minutes, with zero developer work required.
Continuum, WordPress, Ellington, Drupal, Brightspot, etc.
You’re the human in the loop. We give you the precise guardrails required to protect your brand liability and enforce your house style.
Instantly block off-domain topics, sensitive issues, and competitor mentions. The AI never freelances outside your strict boundaries.
Match your exact editorial tone. Dictate citation formats and enforce brand voice so every response reads as if your domain published it.
True growth requires infrastructure built by a team that understands paywalls, sponsorships, and editorial integrity. Ask My Brand protects your facts, enforces your brand style, and keeps your first-party data exclusively yours, eliminating the hidden liabilities of generic software.
Installs fast but lacks media context. Missing native monetization and deep guardrails, it routes your audience data to external third-party models.
Built for ecommerce, these require heavy developer lift. They treat your content as a flat database rather than a protected, monetizable media brand.
A permanent engineering commitment. You absorb the compounding costs of hallucination control, paywall logic, and ongoing security reviews indefinitely.
Proof from the hardest room to win
“…300% growth in usage over the first month.”
“From fine-tuning the AI's clinical context tracking to implementing safety rules for drug names, the ePublishing team has been responsive at every step. We quickly moved to a wider launch.
We’ve seen more than 300% growth in usage in the first month alone, with some users running more than 15 queries per day.”
Jeff Ives
CMO, Carlat Publishing
Direqt is a conversational widget with advertising attached. Ask My Brand is a publisher monetization and intelligence engine with deep CMS integration. Here is where the architecture differs.
Swipe to compare →
| Capability | Ask My Brand | Direqt |
|---|---|---|
| Core Design | Publisher answer engine with monetization and intelligence built in | Chat and site-search widget with network ads |
| CMS & Paywall Integration | Native integration with Continuum, WordPress, Brightspot, and any CMS; integrates with your paywall strategy | Surface-level widget, limited backend integration |
| Editorial Control | Full prompt control, topic blocking, brand-voice enforcement, vertical guardrails (including drug-name safety) | Limited guardrails |
| First-Party Intent Data | Captured, clustered into a live intelligence dashboard, and owned by you | Raw chat logs |
| Monetization Depth | Inline ads using your ad server, persistent sponsor slots, lead gating, subscription conversion, sellable intent data | Microsoft Ad Network |
| Deployment | White-glove, done for you, live in minutes | Self-managed |
| Built By | A team with 25 years in publishing technology | Software Vendor |
| Support | 24/7 US-based | Standard |
Ask My Brand is the only intelligence engine built specifically for publishers to deepen reader engagement, secure first-party data, and compound revenue.
Asked & Answered
Why not just use a cheap AI plugin or chatbot?
Generic AI plugins install quickly but are built by vendors who do not understand publishing. They typically offer no real monetization, weak editorial guardrails, and they route your audience’s first-party data to a third-party model. Ask My Brand is built specifically for publishers, with monetization, control, and data ownership as core features rather than afterthoughts.
How is Ask My Brand different from Direqt?
Ask My Brand and Direqt solve different problems. Direqt is a conversational ad widget. Ask My Brand is a full publisher monetization and intelligence engine with native CMS and paywall integration, complete editorial control, owned first-party data, and white-glove deployment.
Direqt brings Microsoft ad demand. Do you provide ad fill?
Ask My Brand is enterprise infrastructure, not an ad network. You keep 100% of the revenue generated from your own high-CPM inventory using your existing ad server, rather than renting your audience to a third-party network for a revenue share.
We have engineers. Should we just build this ourselves?
A working prototype is achievable in-house. A secure, brand-safe, revenue-generating answer engine with hallucination control, paywall logic, monetization, a first-party data pipeline, and a private model is a permanent software commitment. Ask My Brand has already built and hardened all of that and deploys it for you, so a publisher can be live in minutes instead of staffing an indefinite engineering project.
Do we need to be on Continuum to get the full benefit?
Ask My Brand works natively with any CMS, including WordPress, Drupal, and Brightspot, to deliver immediate value.
Because it is part of the ePublishing AI stack, Continuum CMS unlocks the deepest native integration across search, content, and entitlements, providing a clear upgrade path rather than a requirement.
You don’t have to staff a permanent engineering project to get an enterprise-grade answer engine. Let us deploy your secure instance, configure the guardrails, and wire the paywall logic so you can focus on growing revenue.