Tagged: seo
30 results
Popular on Instagram, Invisible to the Algorithm That Matters Next
This YesPress feature examines why many large direct-to-consumer (DTC) fashion brands — despite hundreds of millions in revenue and massive social followings — are underrepresented in AI-generated shopping recommendations. AI assistants tend to favor brands with strong editorial coverage, structured product data, and broad third-party authority over those that rely mainly on paid social, influencer, and email marketing. The piece maps the visibility gap across brands like Fashion Nova, Gymshark, Princess Polly, and Cuts Clothing, and outlines how DTC labels can close it without matching the marketing budgets of legacy giants.
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.
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.
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.
The AI Visibility Audit (Step-by-Step)
The AI Visibility Audit is a step-by-step method for checking how ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini describe a brand. It runs a set of buyer-intent prompts across each engine, measures whether answers stay consistent, flags hallucinated or outdated facts, surfaces missing product knowledge and use cases, and turns the gaps into a ranked list of fixes. The goal is simple: know what the machines are saying about you before your customers ask them.
Ocula Technologies
Ocula Technologies is a UK-based B2B SaaS company that uses agentic AI to generate, enrich and optimize ecommerce product content at scale. Founded in 2021, its platform sits alongside a retailer's PIM and turns structured product data into brand-aligned, search-optimized copy and metadata that stays discoverable across search engines, marketplaces and emerging AI shopping engines. Ocula works with brands and retailers including AO, Boots, Coty, Hornby Hobbies and the Kansas City Chiefs, and raised a £4 million Series A in October 2024.
Peec AI
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.
Placester
Placester is a Boston-based real estate technology company that gives agents, teams and brokerages a no-code way to build IDX-ready websites and run their marketing. Founded in 2011 by former agent Matt Barba and technologist Frederick Townes, it pairs drag-and-drop website building with MLS/IDX listing search, a built-in CRM, and email automation. After raising roughly $100M-plus in venture funding and acquiring RealSatisfied, Barba and a group of investors bought the company back from its VCs in 2020 to refocus on its core product and customers. Placester says its tools have served on the order of 400,000 real estate professionals.
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.
Milestone Inc
Milestone Inc is a Santa Clara-based, AI-native digital experience platform (DXP) company that helps enterprises get discovered across search and AI engines, personalize customer experiences, and accelerate customer acquisition. Founded in 1998 by Benu Aggarwal as a marketing company for hotels, Milestone has grown into a composable software and services provider whose GEO-first CMS, Schema Manager, Content Studio, AI Agents, Local Listings, Personalization Engine, and analytics power more than 2,000 brands across hospitality, financial services, restaurants, automotive, retail, and healthcare.
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.
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.
The Analyst in the Machine: Why AI Reads Your Company Like Wall Street Does
This YesPress story reframes AI visibility not as a search-engine optimization tactic but as the ongoing work of building a public company. The core argument: AI describes your business the way an independent investment analyst would—by assembling a picture from whatever public evidence exists. Most companies generate enormous amounts of information internally but publish almost none of it, leaving AI with little to work with. The fix isn't optimization; it's evidence. YesPress Newsroom, powered by Story Engine, treats a continuously growing public record as infrastructure rather than PR, capturing the product updates, customer breakthroughs, and executive insights that would otherwise never leave the building.
Thomas McKenna
Thomas McKenna is the CEO and co-founder of Ocula Technologies, an AI content engine that writes and optimizes product copy at scale so retailers can be found in both traditional and AI-driven search. Founded in 2021 with Dr. Gregory Fletcher, Ocula has signed more than 25 major retail customers including Marks & Spencer, Frasers, Boots and AO, raised multiple funding rounds totaling around £11.7m, and headquartered its software development center in Belfast with an £11m R&D commitment. A former consultant and data executive at Bain & Company, Deloitte, dunnhumby and Procter & Gamble, McKenna pitches Ocula as a way to level the AI playing field for brands that otherwise fail to make profitable use of their own data.
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 Robots Read Your Press Releases Now, and They Never Skip a Line
For two decades companies built newsrooms so journalists could find press releases, bios, and logos. Now the primary reader is artificial intelligence. When customers, investors, and analysts ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Perplexity about a company, the answer is assembled from whatever public record exists. Companies that publish constantly get learned, cited, and retrieved; companies that stay quiet get filled in by the AI's best guess. YesPress positions itself as the publishing engine that turns every announcement, customer story, and milestone into authoritative newsroom content, founding a new discipline it calls AI Reputation & Knowledge Management.
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 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.
Elena Verna
In this keynote, Elena Verna—Head of Growth at Lovable and a 10-year veteran of growth teams at companies like Dropbox—argues that great products don't build great companies; distribution does. She explains why product-led growth was born from four market shifts, how AI is now collapsing the traditional distribution channels of SEO and social, and how vibe-coding tools like Lovable are letting customers rebuild simple SaaS functionality themselves. She lays out a new playbook for defensibility: product loops, shipping velocity, proprietary data, brand as a product function, ecosystem integrations, founder/employee socials, and the creator economy.
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.
ProductWind
ProductWind is a Seattle-based retail influencer marketing platform that helps enterprise brands ramp new product launches in days instead of months. Founded in 2020 by former Amazon product lead Jason Kowalski and ex-Uber engineer Tom Hirschfeld, the company mobilizes thousands of retail-native creators to drive social content, reviews, SEO and sales velocity on marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart. Its core idea - 'marketing to the algorithm' - treats retailer AI systems as a second customer alongside human shoppers, coordinating waves of creator activity to push products from page five to page one.
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.
Terry Lee
Terry Lee is a Bay Area technology executive who serves as CEO at Cube (cubehq.ai), an AI-powered digital marketing platform that helps businesses run and optimize campaigns across search, social, email, and web from one dashboard. A UC Berkeley graduate based in San Jose, California, he has spent his career across media and marketing ventures including Storyblender, Shin & Lee Corp., and Lachesis Media & News Co. before stepping into the marketing-AI space.
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.
KUKUI
KUKUI is a SaaS marketing and customer relationship platform built specifically for the automotive aftermarket. Its 'All-in-One Success Platform' connects directly to a repair shop's point-of-sale system and bundles branded websites, CRM, digital advertising, call tracking, online scheduling, text and email marketing, review management, and analytics so independent auto shops can track ROI, win new customers, and bring existing ones back. The Hawaiian word 'kukui' means enlightenment, and the company frames its job as giving shop owners clear, data-backed visibility into marketing that used to be a guessing game. More than 2,200 auto repair businesses across the U.S. and Canada run on the platform.