Tagged: generative-engine-optimization
15 results
Thenuka Karunaratne
Thenuka Karunaratne is the CEO and co-founder of daydream, a San Francisco startup building an AI-native agency for organic search that pairs SEO agents with human growth experts. He started making money from affiliate websites in high school, bootstrapped a streaming-search business called Flixed through college using programmatic SEO, and in September 2023 launched daydream with co-founder Shravan Rajinikanth. The company raised a $15M Series A in April 2026 led by WndrCo, bringing total funding to roughly $21M.
Botify
Botify is an enterprise platform that helps large brands stay discoverable across search engines and AI assistants. Founded in Paris in 2012 and now headquartered in New York, it combines large-scale website crawling, server-log analysis, AI-driven recommendations and automation to protect and grow organic traffic. As search shifts toward AI answers and shopping agents, Botify has repositioned around 'agentic AI' visibility, serving 500+ brands including Marriott, Expedia, Farfetch, Macy's and The New York Times.
What ChatGPT Actually Knows About Your Company
When a customer asks ChatGPT about your company, the answer is not pulled from your website in real time. It is assembled from what the model absorbed during training - Common Crawl web pages, Wikipedia, news, reviews, Reddit threads, job postings and structured databases like Crunchbase and Wikidata - frozen at a knowledge cutoff months before the model shipped. This story explains where that knowledge comes from, why it drifts stale, how gaps and old narratives creep in, and what companies can actually do to correct the record.
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.
YesPress vs Semrush: SEO for Search Engines vs Publishing for AI
Two tools, two eras. Semrush helps companies win the search-engine results page through keywords, backlinks, and rank tracking. YesPress helps companies become legible to AI assistants by publishing a structured, authoritative body of company knowledge. This piece maps the shift from a web built for search engines to a web increasingly read by machines, and argues the two are complementary layers rather than competitors.
Be the Source, or Be the Guess: How to Get an AI to Say Your Name
A field guide to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): the practice of structuring your content and earned-media footprint so ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini cite your startup as a source. It explains why citations equal retrieval trust, the platform-specific mechanics, a step-by-step playbook, and the single biggest mistake founders make — publishing only when they raise. It closes with YesPress as the engine that runs GEO on a continuous schedule.
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.
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.
The Companies AI Recommends Tomorrow Are the Ones Writing Today
A manifesto arguing that the next era of marketing is won not by ranking higher but by being the company AI understands best. It reframes constant publishing as the act of teaching AI systems who you are: every story becomes a citable source, every citation increases trust, and every increase in trust makes AI more likely to retrieve you. The piece introduces the YesPress Newsroom as an always-on publishing engine that gives startups the same compounding institutional-knowledge advantage that Microsoft, Salesforce, OpenAI, NVIDIA and Stripe already enjoy.
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 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.
Salesforce Has a Newsroom. Now Your Series B Does Too.
YesPress Newsroom gives growth-stage companies the same always-on publishing engine that Fortune 500 firms run — without the massive comms team. It turns launches, hires, partnerships, transcripts, and founder interviews into editorial stories engineered to be cited by journalists, analysts, and AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Plans start free to claim, with full newsrooms from $750/month.
BrightEdge
BrightEdge is an enterprise SEO and content performance platform that turns the chaos of search into a measurable system of record. Founded in 2007 by Jim Yu and Lemuel Park, it built one of the largest proprietary data sets in marketing - billions of pages and keywords - and pairs it with an AI engine (DataMind) to power products like Data Cube, ContentIQ, Autopilot and AI Catalyst. Used by thousands of brands including a majority of the Fortune 100, BrightEdge has pivoted hard into measuring and optimizing for AI-driven search experiences like Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity.
Ross Hudgens
Ross Hudgens is the founder and CEO of Siege Media, a content-led SEO agency he built from a one-person freelance operation in 2012 into a 100-person, Inc. 5000 honoree (six consecutive years) backed by private equity at an eight-figure valuation. A Chapman University marketing graduate, he cut his teeth as the first employee at Single Grain before going solo after Google's Penguin update reshaped the industry. Today he advises brands like Zapier, Casper, and Airbnb on organic growth, co-created the GrowthComet agency training course, angel-invested in SparkToro, and in 2026 published 'Generative Engine Optimization: The Definitive Guide to AI SEO' with Wiley — cementing his position at the forefront of AI-era search strategy.
Wildcard
Wildcard is a Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) platform that helps e-commerce brands get their products discovered and purchased through AI shopping channels like ChatGPT Shopping, Google Gemini, Amazon Rufus, and Perplexity. Founded by Kaushik Mahorker and Yagnya Patel - both veterans of Scale AI, Tesla, and Amazon - Wildcard addresses the core problem that 67% of products lack the structured attributes AI engines need to recommend them. Their platform provides SKU-level analytics, catalog optimization, and content creation tools so brands can win in the emerging AI-first commerce landscape.