How Okara's AI CMO Runs on TinyFish Search & Fetch
At a glance
- Company: Okara , an agentic AI Chief Marketing Officer for teams of up to 50
- Use case: Onboarding research at scale crawling every new customer's site, mapping how the internet perceives them, and repeating the analysis for 10 to 15 competitors per signup
- Previously: Other agentic search providers, with confusing search configurations and costs that scaled badly
- Now: TinyFish Search and Fetch power Okara's core onboarding research
- Why: On-par-or-better quality, faster and cheaper, with none of the configuration maze
An AI CMO is only as good as its understanding of the company it's marketing.
That's the problem Okara has to solve before anything else. Okara is an agentic AI Chief Marketing Officer built for teams of up to 50 people: around ten agents handle social and organic distribution end to end, connecting to CMS platforms, websites, and social accounts to plan and execute marketing strategy. But every one of those agents depends on the same foundation, a deep, current picture of who the customer is, how the internet perceives them, and who they're up against.
That picture is built on search.
The problem
When a new customer integrates their website, Okara kicks off a three-layer research pass:
- Crawl and understand the customer's site, what the company does, page by page
- Map perception, how Google and the wider internet actually see them
- Repeat all of it for 10 to 15 competitors, recursively, for every new signup
That's a lot of searches per customer, and Okara is scaling aggressively. Search volume, and search cost, grows with every signup. If the research layer is slow, expensive, or unreliable, all ten agents downstream inherit that.
Before TinyFish
Okara ran this on other agentic search providers first. The problem wasn't capability. It was complexity and cost.
The providers offered a maze of search types, neural search, incremental search, and more, with little useful guidance on which to pick. At one point, following recommendations from a provider's own engineers, Okara was running around 500 searches to research a single website. The bill reflected the confusion.
"There were different kinds of searches, neural search, incremental search, and sometimes for one website we were doing 500 searches. We felt like we were misguided on how to best use the system, and we were spending a lot of money."
Fatima Rizwan, Founder, Okara
The switch: a POC, no sales call
The Okara team found TinyFish, ran a proof of concept without ever contacting the team, and benchmarked results against the providers already in production.
The verdict: on par or better quality, faster, cheaper, and no configuration maze. Okara moved its core onboarding research to TinyFish Search and Fetch.
"We did the POC, we didn't have to reach out to anyone. It was fast, it was cost-effective, and it wasn't complicated. The results were on par with the other providers we were using, so we said, let's just move here."
Fatima Rizwan, Founder, Okara
One detail worth noting: Okara has since become one of TinyFish Search's biggest users, and the query-limit increase requests that were routine with previous providers simply stopped. Whether that's down to Okara's own optimizations, TinyFish's infrastructure, or both, the team has never had to ask.
Where TinyFish fits
TinyFish's job is narrow and clear in Okara's stack:
- Search powers the crawling and perception-mapping layer understanding customer sites, competitor sites, and how search engines see both
- Fetch pulls clean page content back into Okara's agents
Okara's job is everything on top: the ten-agent CMO system, the CMS and social integrations, the strategy. TinyFish is the layer that keeps it grounded in the live web.
What's next
Search and Fetch cover the publicly available web, but Okara is starting to hit the edges of it: sites that block crawlers, captcha checks, pages with no API behind them. The team is exploring where TinyFish Agent, built for exactly those browser-based workflows, could fit into the Okara system next.
An AI CMO needs both intelligence and reach. Okara built the intelligence. TinyFish keeps it connected to the web it markets on.
Building something that needs the web as a reliable data layer?
