About
We saw the shift to AI-mediated discovery early
Tocanan was founded in Hong Kong in 2019 on a clear thesis: the world is moving toward AI-mediated discovery, and brands that do not optimise for that layer will become invisible.
Our story
We started as a social listening and consumer intelligence company, helping brands across Asia-Pacific extract usable insight from the noise of online conversation. The roots go deeper than the founding date suggests — our founder Eden Lau (劉偉良) previously co-founded Brandtology in 2009, one of the pioneering social listening companies in the region.
When AI-powered search began reshaping how consumers discover brands, we saw it early. In 2024 we expanded into GEO — monitoring, measuring and improving how brands appear in AI-generated answers across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek and Kimi.
Today Tocanan sits at the intersection of social intelligence and AI search optimisation, holding a position very few others do: native coverage of both Western and Chinese AI platforms.
Difference
What makes us different
- Chinese AI platform coverage
- Most GEO firms measure ChatGPT and Perplexity. We also monitor DeepSeek, Kimi, Doubao, Qwen and Baidu Ernie, which collectively serve hundreds of millions of users. For any brand with exposure to Chinese-speaking markets, that is the gap in every Western tool.
- We eat our own cooking
- We run our own GEO monitoring on Tocanan and publish what it finds, including when it is unflattering. In our most recent tracking window we measured 24,729 queries across five engines — on ourselves. The best proof of a GEO practice is demonstrating it on yourself.
- 30+ years of intelligence heritage
- Our team has worked through the evolution from traditional media monitoring to social listening to AI-native intelligence. We have seen a measurement discipline get rebuilt before.
- Metrics, not guesswork
- We built proprietary GEO metrics — AI Generative Visibility Rating, Gap Score, Position Score, Platform Consistency, Recommendation Rate — because you cannot improve what you do not measure.
Leadership
Eden Lau (劉偉良)
Founder & Chief Executive Officer
Eden Lau is a marketing and data strategy veteran with more than 30 years of experience. He co-founded Brandtology in 2009, one of Asia's pioneering social listening companies, before founding Tocanan in 2019.
He spotted the GEO opportunity before it had a name — recognising that as AI engines replaced traditional search for more queries, brands would need a fundamentally different approach to visibility.
Natively bilingual in English and Chinese, he gives Tocanan authentic cross-cultural capability across both platform ecosystems. He has worked with enterprise clients across insurance, government, retail and technology in Hong Kong, Southeast Asia and the Middle East, and comments regularly in the trade and business press.
Areas of expertise
Recent commentary in Marketing-Interactive, 香港經濟日報 (Hong Kong Economic Times) and 香港經濟日報 (hket.com) — see all coverage
At a glance
The essentials
- Founded
- 2019, Hong Kong
- Offices
- Hong Kong and London
- Languages
- English, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Arabic
- Sectors
- Hospitality, financial services, insurance, government and tourism boards, consumer brands
- Regions
- Asia-Pacific, Greater China, Middle East
Find out what the engines say about you
The audit runs a category query set across every engine we cover and returns your baseline AIGVR, with the specific answers where you are missing or misdescribed.