Tony Castillo

Tony Castillo founded WISLR.ai, which measures how brands show up in AI search and what that traffic is worth. Fifteen brands run on it today. Before that he spent 20 years in enterprise ecommerce analytics, led a 16-person department at Corra, and built the client strategy practice at The Maze Group.

Tony Castillo is the founder of WISLR.ai and Redirects.net, and has spent 20 years in organic growth and user behavior analytics for enterprise ecommerce.

He built WISLR.ai after conventional analytics stopped explaining where traffic was coming from. AI crawlers do not fire JavaScript tags, so the visits and citations produced by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Claude were landing in direct or in unknown, and brands were reading a growing channel as a rounding error. WISLR.ai reads server logs instead. It classifies AI referrals, verifies bot traffic against the IP ranges the model vendors publish, and attributes the path from crawl through citation to visit, lead, and revenue. 15 publishing and ecommerce brands run on it today across Adobe Commerce, Shopify, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud. One of them now sees 12 percent of total revenue arrive through the AI channel.

Before starting his own practice, Tony was Director of CRO and SEO at The Maze Group, a Shopify Premier Partner, where he built the client strategy practice from a standing start in three years and led organic and conversion work for GNC.com, Toms.com, and MichaelKors.com. Prior to that he was Director of Optimization at Corra, a Shopify Platinum Partner later acquired by Publicis Sapient. There he recruited and led a 16-person department for five years with 90 percent retention, delivered across 24 concurrent enterprise brands, and launched more than 100 ecommerce sites on Magento Enterprise and Shopify. The largest of those launched without losing organic traffic or revenue, and averaged 15 percent revenue growth in the 90 days after go-live.

He authored a patent-pending algorithm for redirect mapping that uses NLP and vector search to match old URLs to new ones through a site migration. It is the engine behind Redirects.net.

Tony publishes original research on AI crawler behavior at wislr.com/articles and re-tests his findings as the models change. He speaks on how generative surfaces choose their sources, what makes a brand citable, and how to measure a channel that does not report itself.

He volunteers with the Coca-Cola Scholars Foundation, where he has sat on the selection committee since 2017 and mentors two to three scholars a year through their first year of college. He was a Coca-Cola Scholar himself, receiving the scholarship for college in 2000. He holds a Bachelor of Science with Honors from Rochester Institute of Technology, where he studied Information Technology and Design. He lives in Atlanta.

Tony Castillo is the founder of WISLR.ai, which measures how brands show up in AI search. It reads server logs to classify AI referrals and attribute the path from crawl through citation to revenue, and 15 publishing and ecommerce brands run on it across Adobe Commerce, Shopify, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud. One now sees 12 percent of total revenue arrive through the AI channel. Tony spent 20 years in organic growth and analytics for enterprise ecommerce, most recently leading a 16-person department at Corra and building the client strategy practice at The Maze Group. He holds a patent-pending algorithm for redirect mapping and publishes research at wislr.com/articles.