Gartner names its Media Monitoring Leaders in Magic Quadrant
Gartner published its first Magic Quadrant for PR and Media Monitoring Tools. Gartner’s methodology and rigorous approach digs deep into an organisation’s current product set, and it is a reflection of where the industry is right now. Gartner named Meltwater, Onclusive, Muck Rack, Signal AI and LexisNexis in a tightly packed Leader group, trailed by Roxhill and CisionOne. Truescope was flagged as a Challenger, PeakMetrics a Visionary and Dow Jones Factiva and Hypefactors both named as Niche Players. Meltwater was ranked first in all six use cases in the accompanying Critical Capabilities report.
X14 Media goes agentic
The Abu Dhabi-based media intelligence company X14 Media has signed a memorandum of understanding with Presight, the ADX-listed applied AI company. The two companies will explore combining X14’s Arabic-first, multilingual media monitoring and analysis with Presight’s agentic technology to help governments and enterprises spot emerging narratives across media sources. No commercial terms or timelines were disclosed, however, X14 Media has only recently launched its new platform and is clearly focused on building an AI-powered future.
Digital 2027: One in three now use GenAI
Meltwater and We Are Social have jointly published Digital 2027. Across a stonking 900 pages, the report explores global digital adoption trends and it is an interesting read. Given the sharp rise in AI search analytics tools, we want to dig into GenAI adoption. The report estimated that 3.24 billion people, or 38.9% of the world’s population, use generative AI tools each month, and that social media user identities grew 2.7% to 5.81 billion. The report also flags that 92.1% of internet users consume online video each week, so this seems a good place to share Meltwater’s new brand campaign starring Kim Cattrall.
Bazaarvoice partners with Profound
Bazaarvoice formed a strategic partnership with Profound, pairing Profound’s AI search analytics with Bazaarvoice tools that make ratings, reviews and visual media crawlable for AI engines. Joint research found that category leaders held around 57% share of voice in ChatGPT shopping recommendations across five categories. It also found that 34% of shoppers who hesitated over an unfamiliar private-label product blamed a lack of reviews.
Hootsuite’s ICE contract raises questions
Biometric Update has reported that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) published a sole-source justification for a three-year Hootsuite Enterprise and Talkwalker contract, awarded through Carahsoft and worth just under $USD 1 million. The document described AI analysis of how conversations spread, image and video recognition across more than 30 social networks and around 150 million websites, and two years of accumulated historical data. ICE said Sprout Social and Meltwater had both declined to engage.
Media Intelligence Product Updates
Here are some of the product announcements that caught our attention this month:
Muck Rack launched Generative Pulse as a standalone platform and has opened for early access without a Muck Rack subscription, ahead of a full launch in early 2027. The platform expands the number of available engines and measures brands against a new SEEN framework (Share-of-answer, Evaluation, Error-Rate and Narrative), while comms teams kept a new AI Visibility tab inside Muck Rack’s Coverage Hub.
MT Connect solves one of media monitoring’s longest running problems and am a massive fan. Media Track have now launched MT Connect 2.0, adding AI-powered search that turns monitoring requirements into structured Boolean queries. A new Quote Builder estimates costs across markets and suppliers for client quotes, and fixed pricing models now sit alongside per-clip pricing. If you are a media monitoring provider and have not yet spoken to the team at MT Connect, now is the time.
Agility PR Solutions launched Agility Agent 2.0, adding coverage curation, automated broadcast clipping and media intelligence inside Slack, all driven by plain-language prompts. Outputs drew on more than 2 billion licensed media items indexed each year and were presented for review before reaching stakeholders.
Peec AI launched Peec Agent alongside expanded recommended actions. The agent connected to more than 25 tools marketing teams already used and asked for approval before making changes by default. Ramp Rate also named Peec AI the fastest-growing AEO vendor, as its ARR grew from USD 10 million to $USD 15 million in three months and it opened a flagship New York office.
CreatorIQ unveiled Q, an agentic system for creator marketing, at its CreatorIQ Connect event in Los Angeles. Q’s first deployment was an analytics agent inside MeasureIQ, a new business intelligence product, launched alongside SafeIQ brand safety enhancements.
Dataminr became one of the first organisations to achieve AIUC-1 certification for AI agent security, safety and reliability, after testing against more than 1,000 adversarial scenarios. It also brought its agentic AI into the Crisis24 Horizon risk management platform, the first milestone of the two companies’ strategic partnership.
eMedia Monitor appointed Maya Koleva as Head of Product. She joined from Commetric, where she was Research and Insights Director, and sat on AMEC’s global board from 2019 to 2026. In other people news, Jason Weekes is joining Onclusive as Head of Sales. Jason joins from Echo Research, where he was Commercial Director.
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