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YesPress Wants AI to Quote Your Startup, Not Skip It
B2B buyers now open ChatGPT before they open Google. YesPress builds machine-readable newsrooms so answer engines cite your product instead of scrolling past it.
The Six Tools Racing to Get Your Brand Into AI Answers
A new category of software has one job: making sure ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity name your company when a buyer asks. Five of them measure the gap. One writes the record that closes it.
Evertune AI
Evertune AI is a New York-based analytics and generative engine optimization (GEO) platform that measures and improves how brands appear inside AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity. Founded in 2024 by veterans of The Trade Desk, it runs hundreds of thousands to over a million prompts per customer to score brand visibility, benchmark against competitors, and generate AI-optimized content. The company raised a $15M Series A in August 2025, led by Felicis Ventures.
Mimos
Mimos is a Y Combinator (S25) startup building an Answer Engine Optimization platform that helps regulated companies in health, finance, and legal get cited by AI search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. Founded by ex-Microsoft and ex-Amazon engineers Rohit Sirosh and Michael Korovkin, Mimos turns a firm's compliance expertise into an advantage, streamlining the path from insight to compliant, citation-ready content. The company started as a growth and intake system for plaintiff-side law firms before focusing on AI visibility for regulated industries.
Fashion AI Visibility
Fashion discovery is moving from search engines to answer engines. When shoppers ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Perplexity for the best minimalist label or the most sustainable brand, the names that surface are not the biggest ad spenders but the brands with the most public, structured knowledge for AI to cite. This YesPress Newsroom analysis lays out what large language models look for, why many direct-to-consumer fashion brands underperform despite strong paid-social businesses, and how an always-on newsroom turns internal expertise into compounding, citable assets.
Brian Stempeck
Brian Stempeck is the CEO and co-founder of Evertune AI, a New York startup that helps brands measure and improve how they show up inside AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity. He spent 11 years on the executive team of The Trade Desk as employee number eight, serving as Chief Client Officer and later Chief Strategy Officer and a board member, and helped grow the company from a tiny team to a public company worth tens of billions. Before adtech he was a management consultant at Bain & Company and, earlier still, a political journalist. He founded Evertune in 2024 with former Trade Desk colleagues to build the category he calls Generative Engine Optimization.
AirOps
AirOps is a San Francisco-based software company that helps brands stay visible as search shifts from Google links to AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude. Its platform combines visibility analytics with AI-assisted content creation and refresh workflows, letting marketing teams monitor how often they are cited by AI, find content gaps, and produce brand-consistent pages at scale. Founded in 2022 by Alex Halliday, Matt Hammel and Berna Gonzalez, AirOps raised a $40M Series B in November 2025 led by Greylock and counts Ramp, Webflow, Chime, Carta, Klaviyo and Kayak among its customers.
How AI Builds a Mental Model of Your Company
A plain-language field guide to how large language models decide what your company is, who it competes with, and whether to mention you at all. AI does not read a homepage the way a customer does. It assembles a mental model from six raw materials - entities, relationships, sources, repetition, consensus, and freshness - and the companies that understand those six levers are the ones that get named when someone asks an AI for a recommendation.
Why AI Doesn't Recommend Your Startup
A field guide to a quiet problem: when a customer asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini for the best tool in your category, your startup never comes up. This story breaks down the five reasons AI models skip you - missing authority signals, sparse public information, weak documentation, few third-party mentions, and inconsistent messaging - and lays out how to fix each one. The core idea: AI doesn't invent authority, it reflects it. If the open web doesn't clearly, consistently, and repeatedly describe what you do, the model has nothing to recommend.
The AI Content Consultant
Every platform shift mints a new profession. SAP gave us the SAP consultant. The mobile and search era gave us the certified digital marketer. YesPress argues the AI era is minting its own role - the AI Content Consultant - and is opening a training program to build the first cohort. The pitch: learn Answer Engine Optimization, help companies become the answer that ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews cite, and get in early on a job title that barely exists yet.
GEO vs SEO vs AEO Explained
SEO, AEO, and GEO are three overlapping disciplines describing how content gets found in the age of AI-mediated search. SEO ranks pages on Google and Bing. AEO optimizes for direct answers - featured snippets, voice, and AI Overviews. GEO optimizes for citation inside generative responses from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini. The 2026 consensus: they are additive, not substitutive.
Why Your Company Doesn't Exist to ChatGPT Yet
A field report on the quiet reason mid-sized companies vanish from AI answers: not quality, not product, not people, but publishing cadence. Salesforce and Microsoft publish daily. Most companies publish quarterly. The models cite what exists, and the rest becomes a guess.
Top 10 AI Visibility Companies Leading the Future of AI Search in 2026
As buyers increasingly ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot for recommendations, a new marketing discipline called AI Visibility has emerged. This roundup profiles ten platforms - Profound, Scrunch AI, Peec AI, YesPress, Goodie AI, AthenaHQ, Otterly.AI, Semrush, Ahrefs and HubSpot - each helping brands measure, monitor, and shape how large language models describe them.
AthenaHQ
AthenaHQ is a San Francisco AI-search optimization platform that helps brands see, measure, and improve how they appear inside generative engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini. Founded in 2025 by ex-Google Search and DeepMind PM Andrew Yan and ex-ServiceNow engineer Alan Yao, the Y Combinator-backed company treats GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) as the successor to traditional SEO, analyzing millions of AI responses to tell companies whether AI models recommend them - and what to change if they don't.
Averi
Averi is a New York-based AI content engine for startups that blends generative-AI agents with a curated marketplace of vetted US marketing experts. The platform researches, drafts, publishes and optimizes content in one workflow - handling strategy, SEO/GEO, competitor tracking and analytics while keeping humans in creative control. Founded in 2023 by Zack Holland, Averi raised a $2M pre-seed in 2024 and a $3M seed in 2025, and reports roughly $2.1M in revenue with a small team of around a dozen people.
The Dashboard and the Printing Press: How Profound and YesPress Split the Job of Being Seen by a Machine
A head-to-head look at two companies fighting the same war from opposite trenches. Profound is the instrument panel — it measures how ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity talk about your brand. YesPress is the printing press — it manufactures the citable, on-the-record stories those engines actually quote. One tells you the score; the other puts points on the board. For scaleups, B2B startups, enterprise sales teams and employer-branding leaders, the two are less rivals than a dashboard and an engine bolted into the same machine.
The Dashboard Knows You're Losing. It Can't Tell You What to Say.
An editorial argument that the marketing playbook is splitting in two. Semrush answers what is happening in search; YesPress answers what the world and AI should know about your company. As millions shift from searching Google to asking ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, visibility is no longer enough — companies must become authoritative, citable sources. The piece frames Semrush as analytics (measuring demand) and YesPress as publishing (shaping perception), arguing the smartest companies use both.
The Ten Blue Links Are Dead. Long Live the One Answer.
For twenty years businesses fought for the click: rank #1, get the traffic, win the customer. That war is ending. Millions of buying decisions now begin inside ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews, where AI doesn't return ten blue links but a shortlist of a handful of recommendations, sometimes only one. This piece argues that the winners of the next five years won't have better SEO, they'll own the conversations AI has with their market by becoming the most credible, useful, and trustworthy source on the topics buyers care about. It offers a concrete exercise: write down the 25 questions your ideal customer asks before buying, ask the AI, and see whether you appear at all.
Ethan Smith
In this episode of Lenny's Podcast, Ethan Smith, CEO of Graphite and a veteran SEO expert, breaks down answer engine optimization (AEO) - the practice of getting your product to show up inside answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity. He explains why AEO is the second-biggest shift in his 18-year SEO career, how it differs from traditional SEO (the head and the tail are different), why being mentioned most often across citations matters more than ranking first, and shares a tactical seven-step playbook covering question research, tracking, landing pages, and off-site citation strategies across YouTube, Reddit, and affiliates. He also debunks widespread AEO misinformation and warns of the dangers of AI-generated content and model collapse.
AI Search & GEO: It's Just Good SEO (with Matt Kenyon)
In this Surfer-sponsored explainer, growth partner Matt Kenyon demystifies AI-driven search and 'generative engine optimization' (GEO). His core thesis: ranking in AI tools like ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews isn't a mysterious new discipline, but rather an additional layer on top of solid, traditional SEO. He walks through writing content AI loves (natural-language question headings, EEAT, semantic richness, lists, tables, FAQs), technical crawlability considerations (robots.txt, GPTBot, Bingbot, HTML over JavaScript), the role of schema markup, and building authority and trust signals through backlinks, directory presence, and topical authority. He also introduces Surfer's AI Tracker for measuring brand mentions across LLMs.
Rob Walling
In this MicroConf keynote, serial SaaS entrepreneur Rob Walling lays out a framework for prioritizing B2B content marketing using Eugene Schwarz's five stages of customer awareness (unaware, problem aware, solution aware, product aware, most aware). Drawing on a costly failed content experiment from his early Drip (velvet mail) days, he argues founders should build content from the bottom of the funnel up, map keyword intent to each stage, and use tools and sales calls to identify where prospects sit. He illustrates each stage with real B2B SaaS companies from the bootstrapper community, showing how versus pages, alternative-to pages, case studies, templates, and compliance content each serve a specific awareness level.
SmartCustomer
SmartCustomer (formerly Sitejabber) is a San Francisco reviews platform that helps buyers spot trustworthy online businesses and helps businesses collect, manage, and surface authentic customer reviews. Born in 2007 out of a National Science Foundation grant to fight online fraud, it has grown into a two-sided marketplace of trust - said to have helped 200M+ buyers and gathered more than 25M reviews across 140K+ businesses - and now positions verified reviews as fuel for AEO/GEO visibility in AI answer engines like ChatGPT.
The Machines Are Reading. YesPress Decided to Give Them the Facts.
As AI answer engines replace the ten blue links, being cited beats being ranked. This YesPress story unpacks Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) — the practice of structuring content at the fact level so ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Overviews quote you verbatim — and explains why YesPress builds verified, machine-legible profiles so generative engines cite confirmed facts about founders and companies instead of half-remembered ones.
Andrew Yan
Andrew Yan is the co-founder and CEO of AthenaHQ, a Y Combinator-backed San Francisco startup building tools to help brands get discovered inside AI answers from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. A former Google Search product manager who also worked at DeepMind, the US Army Lab and Vimeo, he finished a Columbia degree in computer science and math in three years. Before tech, he was a touring jazz saxophonist who played in the band that inspired the Oscar-winning film Whiplash.
Siteimprove
Siteimprove is a Danish-founded SaaS company that helps organizations build accessible, high-performing, and compliant digital experiences. Its platform unifies digital accessibility, web analytics, SEO/AEO, content quality, and governance into a single suite, increasingly powered by the Siteimprove.ai agentic content intelligence engine. Used by thousands of enterprises, governments, universities, and healthcare and financial institutions worldwide, Siteimprove turns sprawling, hard-to-audit websites into measurable, standards-compliant assets.
The Ask-and-Act Web: How AI Is Rewiring the Internet 2026–2029
A data-driven editorial report mapping how the AI-native internet will reshape search, content, attention and brand visibility between 2026 and 2029. The piece argues the web is shifting from 'search and click' to 'ask and act' — answer engines synthesize replies, agents transact on users' behalf, and the open link economy is being renegotiated in real time. Drawing on 30+ primary sources including Pew Research, McKinsey, Cloudflare, Stanford HAI, and Similarweb, it covers the adoption explosion (900M weekly ChatGPT users), the great decoupling of searches from clicks (69% zero-click), the stumbling first steps of agentic commerce, the rise of synthetic content (52% of new articles AI-generated), and a practical playbook for publishers, brands, and e-commerce operators navigating the shift.
GrowthX AI
GrowthX AI is a San Francisco growth platform that blends AI workflows with forward-deployed human experts to turn content into compounding organic traffic and pipeline. Founded in 2024 by Marcel Santilli and Daniel Lopes, the company pioneered a 'services-as-software' model for SEO, AEO and content marketing, and counts Reddit, Webflow, Ramp, Superhuman, Abnormal Security and Bolt among its 40+ customers.
Marcel Santilli
Marcel Santilli is the CEO and Co-Founder of GrowthX AI, a San Francisco-based 'service-as-software' company that combines expert-led strategy with AI workflows to drive organic growth for B2B companies. Born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, Santilli spent 15+ years as a CMO and marketing executive at companies including IBM, HP/HPE, HashiCorp, Scale AI, and Deepgram, helping scale a combined $1B+ in ARR across three unicorns. After spending over 1,000 hours encoding marketing workflows into AI at Deepgram, he co-founded GrowthX AI in September 2024 with CTO Daniel Lopes. The company reached $7M+ ARR profitably in under 12 months — using only its own methodology, zero paid ads — before raising a $12M Series A led by Madrona Ventures in May 2025.
Webflow
Webflow is a San Francisco-based SaaS platform that lets designers, marketers, and developers build production-ready websites without writing code - or with it, if they want. Founded in 2013 after three failed attempts and a near-bankruptcy, the company grew into a $4 billion business serving over 300,000 teams including The New York Times, TED, Dropbox, Dell, Discord, and Monday.com. Its visual editor outputs clean HTML, CSS, and JavaScript automatically, while its built-in CMS, hosting, ecommerce, and now AI-powered tools make it a full-stack web platform. In 2025 and 2026, Webflow pushed deeper into enterprise with a next-gen CMS, AI prompt-to-production site building, answer engine optimization (AEO), and the acquisitions of animation library GSAP and AI content platform Vidoso.ai.