For more than a decade, monitoring has been structured around the same prism: listening to what is said, whether it is social conversations, press coverage or signals of influence, they have constituted the raw material of the communication and marketing departments. With the acquisition of Trajaan, Cision is making a strategic shift in its activity; what is sought becomes as structuring as what is said.
This operation goes beyond the simple functional enlargement and reflects a more profound evolution of the monitoring market, faced with the progressive erosion of traditional signals and the transformation of information pathways under the effect of AI.
Social listening has long made it possible to capture opinion, measure the resonance of a brand or subject and identify crisis signals. However, it is based on already formulated, public data, often amplified by algorithmic or community dynamics. A growing part of demand now escapes this framework. It is expressed upstream, in requests, when individuals compare, obtain information or seek to resolve a problem, before any public speaking.
It is precisely on this square of the chessboard that Trajaan has developed. Since 2021, the French startup has continuously analyzed search behavior in a geolocalized manner, on traditional engines, social platforms, e-commerce environments and, more recently, generative AI interfaces. By integrating this technology, Cision broadens its field of observation and seeks to go back to intention, where decisions are formed before their media or social translation.
This search listening brick complements an ecosystem already structured around Brandwatch, CisionOne and PR Newswire. The ambition is to connect research, conversation and editorial coverage in the same working environment. Monitoring is no longer limited to observing what circulates in the media or on networks, but to understanding how a subject emerges, progresses and transforms over time.
This shift opens the way to more anticipatory monitoring. The analysis of queries makes it possible to detect micro-trends before their media exposure, to identify weak signals on a local or sectoral scale and to more precisely guide content, press relations or media activation strategies.
The challenge is reinforced by the rise in power of generative AI interfaces in information pathways. Tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity or AI-enriched engines produce synthetic responses, prioritize sources and influence the visibility of brands and topics without going through traditional channels. By integrating Trajaan, Cision seeks to extend monitoring to these new interpretation systems, which have become prescribers in their own right.
The details of the operation have not been communicated, created in 2021 by Hugo Duportet, Matthieu Danielou and Guillaume Banc, Trajaan carried out a seed round in 2023 of 550,000 euros from AB Capital Partners and business angels including Nenad Cetkovic and Andrea Bensaid.
