Chris Andrew bet that AI chatbots, not Google, would become the front door to every brand. Twenty-six months and $26 million in venture money later, Sitecore agreed - and bought the company for a reported $225 million.

The startup collapsed events, courses, and forums into one branded platform - and quietly won over the AI labs everyone else is chasing. Founder Jerry Li built it out of a side-project mailing list for engineers.

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.

"Every company has a website. Every company has social media. Every company needs a public record." is the thesis behind YesPress, an editorial engine built for the age of answer engines. The argument is simple: a website is what you say about yourself, social media is what you shout, but a public record is the structured, citable source material that AI systems like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity actually learn from and quote back. YesPress builds that record - an always-on newsroom publishing company, people, and product stories under the company's own name, kept honest by editors and a public corrections process.

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.
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.
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.

YesPress is an editorial engine built for the age of answer engines. It gives a company its own always-on newsroom, publishing structured stories under the company's own name so that ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity have an authoritative public record to cite. The pitch is blunt: your next customer starts with an AI assistant, not your homepage, and AI can only recommend what it can understand. YesPress turns launches, wins, and expertise into machine-readable stories, shipped within 24 hours with entity markup, then tracks which engines quote them.
Peec AI is a Berlin-based software company that helps marketing teams measure and improve how their brand shows up in AI-generated answers. Its platform tracks a brand's visibility, ranking, sentiment and cited sources across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and other generative engines, then recommends prompts and strategies to close gaps. Founded in early 2025 by Marius Meiners, Tobias Siwonia and Daniel Drabo, the company reached roughly $10M ARR within its first year and raised a $21M Series A led by Singular in November 2025.
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.
A strategic breakdown of two philosophies for surviving the age of answer engines. Scrunch AI measures how brands appear inside ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, then flags the gaps. YesPress argues that measurement is downstream of a deeper problem: whether a company has published enough structured, first-party knowledge to be legible to AI at all. One monitors the mirror. The other builds the record. This is not a feature comparison - it is a look at two different bets on where durable advantage will live.
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.
Two companies staring at the same problem from opposite ends of the pipe. Peec AI is an analytics platform that watches how brands show up inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude, and scores them on visibility, position and sentiment. YesPress is a content operation that manufactures the citable, structured stories that make brands show up in the first place. One measures. One publishes. Together they describe the emerging discipline that marketers are calling Generative Engine Optimization.

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.
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.
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 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.

Fireflies.ai is a San Francisco-based AI meeting assistant that joins video and phone calls across Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams to record, transcribe, summarize and analyze conversations. Its bot captures speaker-labeled notes and action items, its AskFred assistant answers questions about past meetings, and its Perplexity-powered Live Assist offers real-time web answers during calls. Founded in 2016 by Krish Ramineni and Sam Udotong, the company reached a $1 billion valuation in 2025 while staying profitable and is used by teams across more than a million organizations.
Bluefish is a New York-based agentic marketing platform (AMP) that helps Fortune 500 brands monitor, influence, and measure how they appear inside AI systems like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and Amazon Rufus. Founded in 2024 by repeat ad-tech founders, it pioneered the category often called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and reached roughly 10% of the Fortune 500 within two years, raising $43M in Series B in April 2026 to bring total funding to $68M.
Edward Tian is the co-founder and CEO of GPTZero, the AI-detection tool he wrote in three days at a cafe over the 2023 New Year holiday while a senior at Princeton. Within days, tens of thousands of teachers swarmed the app and crashed its server. Two years on, GPTZero has raised $13.5 million, reached millions of users, turned profitable, and become a default check for educators, recruiters, and grant agencies trying to tell human writing from machine writing.

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.

Catherine 'Cack' Wilhelm is a General Partner at Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), where she focuses on cloud infrastructure, data infrastructure, and information security investments. A former Nike-sponsored professional runner and seven-time All-American at Princeton, she was the first American finisher at the 2007 World Cross Country Championship in Kenya. Wilhelm is the first woman promoted to general partner at IVP since 1983, having led major investments in companies like Perplexity, Cribl, CircleCI, and Monte Carlo Data. Her unconventional path from elite athletics to enterprise sales at Oracle and Cloudera to venture capital has shaped her approach to partnering with technical founders building transformative infrastructure companies.