11 of the Best-Funded GEO Startups Racing to Win AI Search

Today, roughly one in 10 online searches globally goes through a standalone AI tool like ChatGPT or Claude rather than a traditional search engine like Google or Bing, according to Similarweb data. Of course, Google itself is also transforming its search product with AI, increasingly producing AI-generated replies atop a familiar list of blue links. In response, companies are scrambling for new ways to up their chances of showing up in AI-generated answers. A burgeoning cottage industry of tech startups promises to have the solution. Last summer, ADWEEK profiled seven of the hottest companies to watch in the space, based on their fundraising, clientele, and products. A year later, some of those companies, like New York-based Profound, have seen their valuations balloon. Others have stagnated. One, Scrunch, was snapped up by content platform Sitecore in a deal worth a rumored $225 million. Meanwhile, new entrants like Searchable and Mega are making their mark. All the while, money is pouring in. This year, 94% of enterprises plan to dial up their investments in generative engine optimization, or GEO, according to research from Conductor. And the venture capitalists are hungry for a slice of the pie. Organized by funding amount, here is ADWEEK’s updated list of GEO startups to watch. 1. Profound Total raised: $335 million Overview: Profound is building an AI-driven platform that uses billions of real-world prompt and answer combos to help marketers understand how their brands show up across all major AI answer engines. With those insights, it pinpoints a marketer’s best opportunities and helps them create projects and deploy specialized agents across earned media, content, competitive research, and advertising. In the six months preceding its Series D, announced in September, Profound grew revenue by 200% and more than doubled its enterprise customer base. The company now works with more than 2,000 customers, it said, including a third of all Fortune 100 companies. Market: Enterprise Notable clients: Comcast, Estée Lauder, Walmart, LinkedIn, Zoom Headcount: 350+ Recent developments: Last month, Profound announced a $180M Series D at a $1.8B valuation, co-led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, with participation from Lightspeed, Khosla, and others. The round came less than seven months after its $96M Series C. The infusion will be used to develop the company’s AI-powered marketing platform and will also help it grow its AI research practice and expand global operations. On the product and go-to-market fronts, Profound has expanded its focus from delivering analytics on AI visibility and discovery with the goal of building what it calls a “category-defining AI marketing platform.” As part of that project, the startup in July launched its Profound AI Marketer, or Aim, an always-on agent that continuously monitors a company’s marketing and AI search data, surfaces opportunities, and orchestrates specialized agents to execute tasks. The adjacent Profound Context Manager plugs in key info about a brand and its strategy, making sure the AI Marketer has access to foundational brand documents, comms records, and more, so that the AI Marketer adjusts its behavior in accordance with important contextual information about the brand. The company also rolled out FactCheck, a tool for finding inaccurate claims about a company in AI answer engines, as well as Profound Index, a free, public leaderboard to show what brands are winning in specific categories, and Ads Studio, which helps customers understand ad performance in real user conversations happening in ChatGPT. A word from the C-suite: “AI has created an entirely new customer for every brand, and that customer is now an agent. SEO and AEO/GEO are smaller pieces of a much bigger shift, because agents want far more from the web than humans do, and the volume of marketing required to stay relevant just increased by orders of magnitude. That's why we're building the AI platform for marketing: Profound AI Marketer, does the work, and Context Manager gives it the brand context that is the antidote to slop. Give talented marketers the right context and the ability to steer, and the quality of the work compounds from there.” - James Cadwallader, CEO and co-founder 2. Bluefish Total raised: ~$68 million Overview: New York-based Bluefish helps brands monitor how they appear in AI answer engines and shopping platforms, and is gradually developing new tools to help automate larger swaths of the marketing lifecycle. The startup works with hundreds of enterprise businesses, including 10% of the Fortune 500, according to the company’s own telling. It closed a $43 million Series B, co-led by Threshold Ventures and NEA, in April, lifting its total funding to $68 million. Market: Enterprise Notable clients: Adidas, Hearst, Tishman Speyer Headcount: ~120 Recent developments: The company is looking to move beyond just measuring AI visibility. In June, Bluefish debuted autonomous agents to help marketers analyze historical campaign performance, generate AI marketing tactics designed to address performance issues, and track the impact of those changes on their own. It is also moving beyond standard GEO metrics like sentiment ratings with a new tool for measuring AI accuracy, or, in other words, helping marketers understand whether the claims made by AI systems about a brand are actually right. Bluefish is inching into ecommerce, too, in May extending its AI shopping monitoring systems beyond ChatGPT to Amazon Rufus and Alexa for Shopping. A word from the C-suite: “A year ago, enterprise brands were focused on one question: how is our brand showing up in AI? Today the question has evolved—how do we manage AI as a full marketing channel, with its own strategy, execution, and measurement? Bluefish is an end-to-end agentic marketing platform that orchestrates the entire AI journey, including insights, action, and measurement across the entire marketing team.” - Alex Sherman, CEO and co-founder 3. AirOps Total raised: $62.5 million Overview: AirOps is a content automation platform that also offers GEO services; it wants to be a one-stop shop that lets marketers generate content and manage marketing workflows with the help of AI. In November of last year, the company closed a $40 million Series B led by Greylock, with the stated aim of building “the definitive platform, playbook, and profession for winning AI search.” To do so, the company marries proprietary AI search data, software, and human expertise to find opportunities and help companies execute work across content, social, influencers, communities, and emerging AI ad channels. Rather than just simply tracking where brands appear in AI answers, AirOps is now expanding its platform to help companies guide buyers through the entire AI-driven shopping journey and track real sales results. Market: Enterprise, mid-market, SMB Notable clients: Spotify, Booking.com, Airbnb, Ramp, Asana, Capital One, ServiceNow Headcount: 130 Recent developments: In September, the upstart debuted AirOps Services, which helps companies audit both traditional SEO and GEO performance, then helps them develop a strategy, produce and distribute content, and measure results. AirOps also expanded its breadth. It’s added tools this year to help brands find opportunities beyond their own websites, create content, track performance at the webpage level, and coordinate campaigns across channels. It has also expanded its reach to platforms like Reddit, YouTube, creator content, and AI ads. A word from the C-suite: “AI discovery has graduated from visibility to selection. Agents are becoming a new kind of buyer, one that can choose and, increasingly, act on a person's behalf. That compresses the entire buyer journey into one moment: when an agent decides who to trust. We built AirOps to help brands understand what agents actually believe about them, build real evidence across the channels shaping that belief, and connect that work to pipeline and revenue." - Alex Halliday, CEO and co-founder 4. Peec AI Total raised: ~$40 million Overview: Peec helps marketers track brand visibility in AI engines and offers AI search analytics tools. To stay up-to-date, its tech executes prompts for customers daily across various AI platforms, and then analyzes patterns over time. The company raised a $21 million Series A in November 2025 led by Singular, which it used to open a New York office, hire talent in the U.S. and Europe, and expand its product offering. The company has since barrelled past $15 million in annual recurring revenue and serves over 2,500 customers. Market: Enterprise, mid-market, SMB Notable clients: Squarespace, Hugo Boss, Omnicom Headcount: ~100 Recent developments: The company has launched a range of updates in the last year, including a tool for measuring how a brand is perceived by AI, and a fact-checking feature to understand the accuracy of a brand’s representation in AI responses. Like some other GEO startups, Peec is also branching into shopping analytics to help customers understand how their products are surfaced and recommended, and a referral tool now links AI search with what is actually happening on a brand’s website. Peec’s breadth of coverage has extended, too; it can now do GEO tasks across emergent platforms like Mistral, China-based DeepSeek, South Korea’s Naver AI Briefing, and Qwen. A word from the C-suite: “A year from now, we want Peec to help marketers close the whole loop. Today, we can give you a really good picture of where you stand in AI search and what’s shaping that. The next step is going from “here’s what’s happening” to “here’s what we should do about it,” helping teams actually do it, and then showing them whether it worked. That gets especially interesting as AI moves from answering questions to actually doing things. More of the customer journey is going to happen through agents acting on people’s behalf, and brands will need to understand both how those agents are interacting with them and whether their business is ready for it. Can an agent find you, understand what you offer, navigate your website, and complete a task? We want Peec to help marketers measure that new world and understand what they need to change to perform well in it.” - Malte Landwehr, CMO and chief product officer 5. Brandlight Total raised: $36 million Overview: Brandlight, a Tel Aviv-based startup, raised $30 million in February in a round led by Pelion Venture Partners. With a focus on large enterprise businesses, the company positions itself as infrastructure for the wider world of AI-driven marketing beyond just GEO. The company claims to work with “many” of the Fortune 500. The company offers a range of capabilities, including AI visibility and intent tracking, sentiment analysis, and source and citation attribution. It also delivers customers with data heat maps, optimization strategies, and insights to help marketers influence AI answer engine recommendations. Market: Enterprise Notable clients: Procter & Gamble, Kimberly-Clark, Samsung Headcount: 100 Recent developments: Brandlight used its $30 million Series A in February to shift beyond AI search; at the time the round was announced, CEO Imri Marcus said the company “was built to become a marketing operating system for AI as a channel.” Since then, the company has worked toward that goal, building capabilities beyond AI visibility to work across agentic commerce and ads in AI interfaces. The platform now includes a suite of tools that can measure and optimize how discoverable a brand’s products are by agents that conduct research or shop on consumers’ behalf. A word from the C-suite: “Most coverage of this category is still about ‘ranking in ChatGPT.’ The bigger shift is that AI is becoming the place where consumers form their opinion of a brand, and increasingly where they make the purchase. Brands that treat this as an SEO side project will fall behind the ones that run it as a core function.” - Imri Marcus, CEO and co-founder 6. Daydream/Sunbeam Total raised: $21 million Overview: San Francisco-based Daydream began as a traditional SEO agency before launching Sunbeam, its standalone autonomous agent for SEO and AI search. The Sunbeam offering can, the company claims, manage end-to-end SEO and AI search operations fully autonomously, from strategy development to managing content schedules and remedying technical issues. The company raised a $15 million Series A this April, bringing its total backing to $21 million. It’s using the new infusion to invest in engineering, research and development, and go-to-market. Market: Daydream: Enterprise, growth-stage; Sunbeam: Growth-stage, early-stage Notable clients: Notion, Thumbtack, Lighthouse Headcount: 17 Recent developments: Daydream processed key insights on the various tasks required for succeeding in both traditional SEO and in AI answer engines, from keyword research to visibility monitoring to optimization and technical fixes, to build Sunbeam, its autonomous agent for handling all kinds of SEO and GEO workflows. Sunbeam was launched in late May. A word from the C-suite: “For Daydream, our vision is to build the world's leading growth agency, starting with a focus on SEO & AI search.” - Thenuka Karunaratne, CEO 7. Evertune Total raised: $20 million Overview: Evertune’s platform spans owned, earned, affiliate, and paid media. The company measures AI visibility like its rivals but also connects GEO to paid ads in AI, evaluating gaps to place buys in answer engines, and through programmatic partners like The Trade Desk and Index Exchange, reach or retarget audiences post-AI interaction. Evertune services clients across a wide array of verticals, including financial services, pharma, automotive, healthcare, insurance, CPG, and software. The upstart is backed by investors including Felicis Ventures, Eniac Ventures, NextView Ventures, and others. Market: Enterprise, mid-market Notable clients: Coach, Canada Goose, Roku, Athenahealth, WPP Headcount: 55 Recent developments: This year, Evertune made its foray into agentic ad buying, using agents powered by its own GEO data to buy ads directly for clients within ChatGPT. “If a brand like American Express is not visible for a travel credit card search, they need to work on GEO, but they also need to use paid advertising to respond to what the AI model told the consumer,” said CEO and co-founder Brian Stempeck. Evertune has also debuted AI agents that can summarize insights and execute action on behalf of a client. Plus, like a few of its competitors, the company has also rolled out a tool meant to fact-check accuracy in AI with the aim of helping move beyond marketing use cases and into areas like customer service. A word from the C-suite: “The most misunderstood data point in GEO is sample rate. If a GEO platform is asking a question like ‘Best running shoes’ once per day to an LLM, that data will not have statistical significance, because AI models give a different answer every time. Evertune prompts models hundreds of thousands of times to provide a more reliable metric, and then helps understand if published content and PR help influence the model, outside of the margin of error.” - Brian Stempeck, CEO and co-founder 8. Searchable Total raised: $18 million Overview: Founded in 2025, Searchable tracks mentions, citations, and comparisons across 10 AI platforms, and works with customers to advise how to show up in them. Its dataset spans more than a billion AI citations and 400 million brand mentions. The company raised $4 million in December 2025 and another $14 million in May of this year, bringing its total funding to about $18 million. It’s using funds to hire in its product, engineering, partnerships, and go-to-market divisions, as well as to invest in marketing. It has worked with more than 2,000 brands. Market: Enterprise, mid-market, SMB Notable clients: Coach, American Express, Siemens, KPMG, Boston Consulting Group Headcount: 37 Recent developments: Last month, Searchable acquired Meridian, a New York-based AI search visibility startup in a seven-figure deal, though specific terms were not disclosed. It’s among the first M&A activity between two GEO startups. The acquisition was announced just four months after Searchable closed a $14 million round. In early October, Searchable rolled out its Prompt Universe, which maps meaningful queries that users might ask an AI system about a business, and suggests which ones to target first. The company has released a range of other features this year, including a traffic analytics tool that matches citations to the site visits those citations produced, a tool for tracking which products surface in AI shopping carousels, and an AI agent that analyzes a company’s data, pinpoints content and technical changes to make to improve AI visibility, and builds plans and content to deploy. Plus, it poached two execs from rival Scrunch AI. A word from the C-suite: “I've never seen an industry move as fast as this one. Over the next 18 months, we want Searchable to be the AI performance platform every brand turns to first, for the people searching with AI and the agents that increasingly search on their behalf. We'll build fast on our new hires and our acquisition in the United States, and push even further on what the product does to cover every major shift in AI search. Today our agent reads a brand's data, writes the content and prepares the technical fixes, but pretty soon it will also finish the job: making those changes itself and reporting back on how they moved the answer.” - Chris Donnelly, CEO and co-founder 9. GeoSurge Total raised: $13 million Overview: London-based GeoSurge is taking a different tack than its rivals. While many GEO platforms focus on retrieval, essentially pulling what AI systems produce when they search the web in real time, GeoSurge instead targets models’ “parametric” knowledge, or what they absorb during training. Using an approach it calls "corpus engineering," GeoSurge helps brands create high-quality content meant to end up inside models’ training data, so models know about a brand without having to look across the web.The company works exclusively with global enterprises, with annual contracts starting at $150,000, and bills itself as “the infrastructure layer of AI visibility.” It raised a $12 million seed round in July led by AlbionVC, with participation from Octopus Ventures and various angels. Market: Enterprise Notable clients: Undisclosed; the company said its largest customers are publicly traded and covered by NDAs Headcount: 40 Recent developments: This year, GeoSurge made prompt tracking free, accessible via a desktop app, letting agency and brand marketers track AI visibility using their own existing LLM subscriptions. The company has also scaled its go-to-market teams and is pouring investment into its own GPU infrastructure for machine learning research. A word from the C-suite: “As AI models know more, they search less. The future of brand visibility will be decided by what models remember, and the brands that understand that first will own the next decade of discovery." -Francisco Vigo, CEO and co-founder 10. Mega Total raised: Unknown; $11.5M Series A announced in March 2026 Overview: Mega works with over 1,000 small to medium-sized businesses, targeting organizations that generate between $500,000 and $20 million in revenue, per a March newswire release. Though it offers GEO services, its platform can also automate SEO tasks, digital ad campaigns, and site management. More than half of the company’s work is wholly automated, while about 35% of operations are primarily automated but include human oversight. Just 10% is managed entirely by humans, the company has said. In March, the company clinched $11.5 million in Series A funding, led by Goodwater Capital with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Atreides Management, and others. It notched $10 million in revenue within 10 months of its 2025 launch. Market: SMB Notable clients: Undisclosed Headcount: 34 as of March, according to Forbes Recent developments: Upon raising its Series A this spring, Mega said it plans to push beyond SEO, GEO, paid ads, and websites into email, outbound, organic social, lead qualification, sales operations, and reporting; the evolution would position the company more like an outsourced growth engine rather than a primarily GEO-focused business. The “long-term vision,” the company said at the time, “is to provide a fully automated growth infrastructure that allows small and mid-sized businesses to compete with enterprise-grade marketing capability, without enterprise overhead.” The company did not respond to ADWEEK’s requests for comment. 11. Gushwork Total raised: $11 million Overview: Gushwork is primarily a lead generation-focused company, but includes a GEO offering. It creates and refreshes content for discoverability in search and AI systems, builds backlinks via hundreds of partner sites, and tracks inbound leads. Its keystone offering is AI Feeds, which Gushwork categorizes as a smart content management system built for AI search. The company has roughly 800 paying customers, primarily small B2B companies across sectors like manufacturing, industrial distribution, and commercial services. An average customer pays roughly $10,000 annually. The company doesn't offer the visibility measurement that pure-play GEO providers generally do, but rather pays for the leads generated by the platform. Per CEO Nayrhit Bhattacharya, “We sell AI employees that do the work, not tools to measure your score. The customer does not log in to a dashboard and do the work themselves.” Gushwork raised a $9 million round led by Lightspeed and Susquehanna International Group in February, bringing its total funding to $11 million. The company said it plans to scale from $200,000 in annual recurring revenue to $10 million by the end of the year. Market: SMB Notable clients: N/A Headcount: 90 Recent developments: The company is extending its agent workforce. It started the year with just an SEO-focused agent and now has an agent that can build custom websites and a developer agent that builds bespoke agents. In September, it launched a paid ads agent capable of running paid campaigns. The company is now working on building an operating system that customers can use to manage workflows and measure performance across different agents in the system. A word from the C-suite: “We are building an agent operating system for small and medium businesses worldwide where agents and humans work together to drive business outcomes. The owner sets the goals and checks the results, and the agents do the work and are held accountable to goals & outcomes. We started with GEO agents, and we are now building and launching several other agents for different customer pockets.” - Nayrhit Bhattacharya, CEO and co-founder Editor's note: GEO startup Scrunch raised $26 million in total funding prior to its acquisition by Sitecore, but was omitted from this list as it is no longer a startup.

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