These Are the 7 Hottest Startups Shaping the Future of AI Search Optimization

AI answer engines are increasingly stealing search traffic. In June, AI searches on desktop, through platforms like OpenAI-owned ChatGPT and Perplexity, accounted for 5.6% of all search traffic, according to market research firm Datos. Google, long the dominant player, still controls around 90% of the total online search market, but it too is leaning into AI search with its AI Overviews and AI Mode for complex and multi-step queries. As users turn to AI summaries and chatbots with their queries, publishers’ traffic and clicks are declining. The publishers and brands that previously employed search engine optimization (SEO) tactics to increase visibility and traffic are seeing diminished returns from those efforts. Now, they’re seeking out new ways to find out how they show up in AI-generated answers, and optimize their content for AI discoverability. In response, a new industry focused on AI search optimization—sometimes called answer engine optimization (AEO) or generative engine optimization (GEO)—is springing up. Here are seven companies at the vanguard of the AEO space. 1. Profound What it does: Arguably the category leader in the burgeoning AI engine optimization space, Profound is a comprehensive marketing platform built to help businesses understand their visibility in AI search—and optimize their content with custom tools to improve how they show up in chatbots and answer engines. The platform allows users to track brand mentions, and also create and distribute optimized content, and then measure the impact of that content across various platforms. Differentiator: The company marries large datasets—including hundreds of thousands of prompts and responses—with workflow-building tools that enable marketers to stand up sophisticated content creation processes. As cofounder and CEO James Cadwallader told ADWEEK: “Say I'm a marketer at La Croix, and I want to create a piece of content. A bunch of these slightly smaller competitors will say, ‘Hey, we do content generation in the platform.’ But what we're doing is…plumb[ing] all of the data and insights that you're getting—thousands of data points that are coming from the answers that we're getting in the platform…and then we're building these deep reasoning model workflows where marketers can actually go in and manipulate them themselves, and actually orchestrate the content generation within the platform. It's not just it's not one ChatGPT call. It might be 20 or 30 different AI reasoning model calls that are being used to distill all the data and insights and analyze all of the content that is performing and create new content.” Market: Profound caters to both enterprise brands and small- to medium-sized businesses, with the split being around 70% and 30%, respectively. Notable clients: US Bank, Indeed, Zapier, Docusign, Mejuri Talent: The startup is building out its ranks aggressively, hiring across various teams including partnerships, marketing, and customer success. It currently employs about 40 people, up from about 5 at the start of this year. Funding: In early August, the company closed a $35 million Series B led by Sequoia Capital. Other backers include Kleiner Perkins, South Park Commons, Saga Ventures, and Khosla Ventures. Profound will use most of that money on product development. The news came less than two months after closing a $20 million Series A, a follow-on to a $3.5 million seed round last year. Asked why he’s bullish on Profound, key investor Max Altman, cofounder and managing partner at Saga Ventures, said: “They’re six months ahead of everyone else, which is usually enough, because it's sort of like a virtuous cycle where once you get ahead and you start hiring the best people, and you get the best investors, and you get the best contracts, the best logos, it sort of takes care of itself…where [rivals] can’t really catch up.” Evolution: “My expectation is that Profound will evolve to become a general marketing platform for the agentic internet that we're entering, or the age of superintelligence,” Cadwallader said. 2. Bluefish What it does: Bluefish is an AI marketing suite that offers both self-service tools and managed services. Its three core components are a monitoring suite, an optimization tool, and a measurement system. Together, these features help brands track how they’re portrayed in AI models, influence outcomes organically, and measure impact. Differentiator: “One big difference between us and some of the other players in our category—outside of a focus on the Fortune 500—is that we actually think that this is bigger than search,” said CEO Alex Sherman. “Our customers certainly include search marketers, but we also work with brand marketers, content marketers, paid editorial, social teams, PR, and corporate comms. We don't see AI as some channel that sits aside from everything else. It's the channel that's eating all the other channels.” Market: Bluefish targets Fortune 500 companies specifically. Notable clients: Adidas, Omnicom, Tishman Speyer Talent: As of August, Bluefish has about 40 employees. The company is “adding a few people every week” on average, according to CEO Alex Sherman, and is prioritizing growth in its engineering and go-to-market teams in particular. Funding: Bluefish closed a $20 million Series A round on August 20, led by NEA. Other investors in the round included Salesforce Ventures, Crane Venture Partners, Swift Ventures, and Bloomberg Beta. The round brings the company’s total funding to $25 million within 12 months of its launch. Evolution: “A lot of marketing teams are new to AI marketing. They're largely using legacy systems and tools to manage this new channel,” Sherman said. “So, our goal and our focus over the next year is to really focus on what does the new kind of relationship between commercial brands and LLMs need to look like in this next chapter of the internet, and what are the AI-native tools and solutions that they need in order to in order to manage that?” 3. Scrunch What it does: Scrunch, founded in late 2024, is designed to help companies understand how they appear in AI answer engines and optimize for these new search environments. The platform’s core offerings include real-time monitoring of how a brand is appearing across different AI engines, persona mapping and competitor analysis to help benchmark performance, and technical audits that help ensure content is structured in ways AI systems can interpret effectively. The company recently launched its agent experience platform, which helps develop content formats so agents can retrieve and use information about a given company. Differentiator: “We’re making everything in the platform configurability driven and API-first so that companies can get the data they need and use it the way they want to use it,” said Chris Andrew, Scrunch’s CEO and cofounder. “The add-on layer goes beyond the monitoring and insights. It's actually giving companies the ability to have the infrastructure to optimize and interact with AI agents. That is the core differentiator in U.S. compared to the rest of the space. There's a monitoring and insights category, and we are squarely putting ourselves in the customer experience category.” Market: The company works primarily with enterprises, from mid-market tech players to Fortune 500s. Notable clients: Over 500 customers including Lenovo, Skims, Headspace, RunPod, Penn State University Talent: The company has about 20 employees. Andrew says Scrunch is hiring "as fast as we can" and bringing on a couple new hires per week on average, across all functions. Funding: Scrunch closed a $15 million Series A in July led by Decibel, with participation from Mayfield, Homebrew, and others. It raised $4 million in a seed round led by Mayfield earlier this year. Evolution: “The conversion rates from AI search are three to five times what we've seen from traditional search,” Andrew said. “So a visitor coming from AI search is buying faster than a traditional organic visitor. We want to be facilitating that entire process and dynamically optimizing what an AI agent consumes. Today, when an agent lands on a website, it is not optimized to retrieve the content or understand the intent of the page. We want to scrunch the internet. We want to take the content from a brand, scrunch it and enrich it, optimize it for agent retrieval—and be powering that experience.” 4. Evertune What it does: Founded by three alums of The Trade Desk, Evertune is focused on helping major global brands understand and influence how they appear in AI-driven search. The company runs millions of prompts each month across leading LLMs to produce insights into how brands are ranked, recommended, and described. Its flagship product, the AI Brand Index, measures brand visibility and sentiment across models, while its analytics tools surface the key factors—such as pricing, reviews, and media mentions—that shape those outcomes. Beyond measurement, Evertune guides clients with custom content briefs and guidance on PR efforts, affiliate partnerships, and technical optimizations that could help shift models’ perceptions of the brand. Differentiator: “A lot of the startups are focused just on the insights, like, ‘Is your brand being recommended by AI?,’ and that's a starting point, but that’s not the be-all business,” said Brian Stempeck, cofounder and CEO of Evertune. “We're really the only ones thinking about building a brand for AI. Where do you do partnerships? What content do you build? We don't think about this as just AI search. We think of AI as a marketing channel.” Market: Evertune works primarily with large, multinational brands and agencies. Notable clients: Canada Goose, Miro, Choreograph Talent: Evertune has about 30 employees, split between New York and Seattle. The startup is hiring across its sales, client services, engineering, and product teams. Funding: In early August, Evertune closed a $15 million Series A round led by Felicis Ventures, with additional support from Eniac Ventures, NextView Ventures, and Roger Ehrenberg. This brings the company’s total funding to $19 million following a $4 million seed round last October. Evolution: “A few of the LLMs are just starting to experiment with ads, like Perplexity, but that space is coming soon, and the commerce side is likely to take off," Stempeck said. "The minute that you can look at moisturizers, it recommends one, finds the best price, and then you just click to buy it. We're headed there soon. We're already building out [tools to accommodate that] and talking to clients about it. There's more we can do.” 5. Peec AI What it does: Berlin-based Peec AI tracks brand mentions, source citations, and competitor visibility across AI models, surfacing insights through dashboards, alerts, and reports. Peec AI positions itself on delivering deep analytical features and actionable workflows tailored to marketers, including tools for identifying digital PR opportunities that can boost brand visibility in AI search results. Differentiator: Peec AI is focused primarily on delivering deep analytics rather than aiding in content creation. It also aims to service a broader market than many of its competitors. Market: The company aims to be a mass-market tool for organizations of all sizes and stages. Notable clients: Supporting 700 to 800 brands and agencies, including Chanel, ElevenLabs, Edelman Talent: Peec AI’s team includes about 15 staffers today, but the company aims to double that number within the next couple of months. It is hiring across functions and departments, looking to build out its ranks of engineers, product designers, account executives, and other roles. Funding: Peec AI secured a €1.8 million ($2.1 million) pre-seed raise in April, quickly followed by a €5.2 million ($6 million) seed round led by 20VC, with participation from Antler, Foreword VC, Identity.VC, Combination VC, and S20. Founder and CEO Marius Meiners said the company is actively looking to raise a Series A round, with hopes to close within the next three months. Evolution: The company plans to open an office in the U.S., either in San Francisco or New York, after it raises additional capital, Meiners said. “We also want to support more of the U.S. ecosystem. We already do that to some degree—half the customers, roughly, are U.S. companies. But then, of course, the U.S. is the biggest market, and it's also the best market to be in.” 6. Brandlight What it does: Brandlight offers both broad monitoring and advanced content development features. The platform continuously queries across major AI engines to track how brands appear across regions, languages, and even new AI shopping experiences like those introduced to Google’s AI Mode. It offers monitoring including insights into what pieces of content are driving visibility, and includes modules for optimizing content and tracking changes within the system. Differentiator: “We are trying, and I think succeeding, to be the most robust data platform from all aspects—from the quality [of data] to essentially querying the different AI engines and also the different volumes and cadences,” said Imri Marcus, Brandlight's CEO and cofounder. “Every client of ours gets to work with AI specialists hand-in-hand on both their AI visibility and also prepping at all times for what's coming. I think this is probably the biggest differentiation in the U.S. versus the competition.” Market: Brandlight caters to Fortune 500 companies. Notable clients: Kimberly-Clark, LG, Aetna, Caesars Entertainment, Publicis Groupe Talent: Brandlight employs about 20 people. It has a presence in New York and in Tel Aviv, and is scaling quickly across all major functions, including research, customer-facing teams, and engineering. Funding: The startup raised $5.75 million in seed capital in April. The round was led by Cardumen Capital and G20 Ventures, with support from investors and advisors including former Dunkin CMO Tony Weisman and former Aetna CMO David Edelman. Evolution: “I do not expect that our platform will be even remotely the same in a year's time, because the market will be different,” Marcus said. “Agentic search is coming. Purchasing from within the AI engine [is coming]. There are many, many different doors that brands need to be aware of, and we…need to be preparing so when each of these doors in the future of the market opens, we can immediately take them five steps forward because we will already have solutions for them.” 7. AthenaHQ What it does: AthenaHQ, or Athena, is designed to track brand influence, competitor share of voice, and other key metrics in AI engines. The platform monitors how often brands are surfaced within AI chatbots and which sources feed into their responses. Differentiator: “Athena is about action. Athena is about taking the insights from AI search that we distill and turn that into actual impact,” cofounder and CEO Andrew Yan told ADWEEK. “We've actually been able to influence business metrics like increasing leads from AI search, which is, besides dollar amounts, I guess as close as you can get to the business outcome. That's where we're leading.” Market: Athena works with both startups and Fortune 500 companies. About 60% of clients are self-serve and about 40% require higher-touch enterprise service. Notable clients: Paperless Post, Officely, Checkr, Coupons.com Talent: Athena is currently a team of 10 and is hiring in both its engineering and go-to-market divisions. Funding: Athena has raised $2.2 million from various angel investors including SEO consultant Eli Schwartz, and has backing from Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator. Evolution: “In one year, we hope to help any brand, regardless of size, geography, or industry, launch their interface for AI agents,” Yan said.

Search Engine Optimization

These Are the 7 Hottest Startups Shaping the Future of AI Search Optimization

As keywords and blue links give way to LLMs, a new crop of startups are rising to meet brands’ demands for visibility

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