The Prompting Company has raised $6.5 million to help businesses get mentioned in AI-generated answers from tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, signalling a major shift in how people now discover products online.
Who Is The Prompting Company?
The Prompting Company is a young, Y Combinator-backed startup (Y Combinator is a Silicon Valley startup accelerator) that wants to redefine online marketing for the age of artificial intelligence. Founded just four months ago by Kevin Chandra, Michelle Marcelline, and Albert Purnama, the company specialises in what it calls Generative Engine Optimisation, or GEO. The idea is that as people increasingly ask AI tools for advice instead of searching Google, brands must learn how to make their products visible to these systems.
The three founders, all originally from Indonesia, previously built Typedream, an AI-assisted website builder later acquired by Beehiiv, and Cotter, a passwordless authentication service bought by Stytch. Their latest venture reflects what many see as a fundamental turning point in digital discovery, i.e. AI assistants are becoming the new gateway to information, and by extension, to products and services.
Client List
The company’s early client list already includes Rippling (an HR and payroll software platform), Rho (a corporate banking and spend management platform), Motion (an AI-powered productivity and scheduling tool), Fondo (a tax automation platform for startups), Kernel (a data and machine learning infrastructure company), Traceloop (a developer observability platform), and Vapi (an AI voice agent platform), along with one unnamed Fortune 10 business.
What The Prompting Company Does
The startup’s service is actually built around a relatively simple process. For example, first, it identifies the kinds of questions AI systems are being asked in a particular market. Rather than focusing on short search keywords like “best business bank account”, GEO looks for longer, more contextual prompts such as “I’ve just set up a small company, what’s the best business account with no monthly fees?”
Once those queries are identified, The Prompting Company creates structured, machine-readable content that directly answers them. These AI-optimised pages strip away human-facing clutter like pop-ups, menus, and marketing slogans. Instead, they present clean, factual information written in a format that large language models can easily interpret and reference. The company then automatically routes AI crawlers to these pages instead of the brand’s normal website.
In short, it is search engine optimisation for AI rather than for humans. Its goal is to make brands “the product cited by ChatGPT”, as its own website puts it. The service operates on a subscription model, starting from $99 per month for basic tracking of 25 prompts and rising to enterprise plans with custom integrations and support.
The Trend
The Prompting Company’s entire business seems to rest on a simple observation that people are no longer starting their product searches on Google. They are asking AI assistants instead.
For example, Adobe’s 2025 Digital Economy Report found that US traffic from generative AI tools surged 4,700 per cent in a single year, with 38 per cent of consumers saying they had already used AI for shopping. Of those, 73 per cent said AI had now become their main tool for product research. The same report showed that visitors coming via AI assistants stayed 32 per cent longer on sites, viewed more pages, and were 27 per cent less likely to leave immediately. In other words, more shoppers are turning to generative AI tools to find deals, research products, and make buying decisions.
These changes suggest that AI assistants are now beginning to perform the filtering role that search engines once did. Instead of scrolling through links, users receive an instant shortlist of relevant products, often only two or three names. Being one of those names, therefore, has obvious commercial value.
Why Investors Are Paying Attention
That value explains why investors have been so quick to back The Prompting Company. The $6.5 million seed round, led by Peak XV Partners and Base10 with participation from Y Combinator and others, reflects growing belief that the next phase of digital advertising will take place inside AI assistants.
For investors, the logic is pretty straightforward. Whoever shapes how AI tools make product recommendations will control the top of the sales funnel for entire industries. Traditional search and pay-per-click advertising rely on visible results and bids for keywords. In AI-driven discovery, there may be no visible results page at all. An assistant could simply say, “You should try Rho for business banking,” and the conversation ends there.
That urgency among brands is reflected in the company’s own analysis, which suggests that much of the recent growth in website traffic is now coming from AI bots rather than human visitors. The founders say that developers are already using AI tools to ask for product recommendations inside their workflows, and they believe that ordinary consumers are beginning to do the same.
What Will The Funding Be Used For?
The startup says it will use the $6.5 million to scale its platform, develop AI-facing website templates for customers, and expand partnerships with major AI providers. It is also collaborating with Nvidia on “next-generation AI search”, though the details of that project have not been disclosed.
The company currently claims to host around half a million AI-optimised pages and to be driving double-digit millions of monthly visits for clients. Its customers span fintech, developer tools, and enterprise software, but the founders say the model applies to any sector where customers ask detailed, conversational questions.
The Lead In A New Sector
The funding gives The Prompting Company a clear lead in what could soon be a major new marketing sector. For example, by positioning itself as the first dedicated GEO platform, it is creating a new type of infrastructure for online visibility. The company argues that the fastest-growing “users” of the internet today are AI agents, not humans, and that brands need to design websites for those agents first.
It also aims to make GEO repeatable and data-driven, similar to how SEO matured into an industry over the past two decades. The difference is that in AI discovery, results are generated dynamically rather than ranked on a static page, meaning brands will need constant updates to stay visible.
Competitors
The rise of GEO is highly likely to unsettle traditional SEO agencies and digital advertisers. The overlap between Google search results and AI recommendations is shrinking, with some analyses suggesting it has dropped from around 70 per cent to below 20 per cent. That means a brand ranking first on Google might not even appear in an AI assistant’s answer.
Agencies built around keyword bidding and link optimisation now face the challenge of learning how to influence AI-generated answers, which rely on context and relevance rather than metadata and backlinks. This transition could change how marketing budgets are allocated, with more money flowing towards GEO-style services.
AI Companies
For companies like OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Meta, this trend could be an opportunity as well as a risk. For example, on the one hand, AI-driven shopping and product discovery could open new sources of revenue, especially as assistants move beyond recommending items to actually completing purchases. OpenAI’s recent integration with Stripe, for example, already allows ChatGPT to handle some transactions directly.
On the other hand, questions around bias and commercial influence are inevitable. For example, if AI assistants begin recommending brands that have paid for optimisation or have supplied AI-friendly data, users may expect clear disclosure of those relationships. Transparency will become crucial as assistants start to resemble personal shoppers or product curators.
There are also technical implications to consider here. GEO depends on AI models being able to browse the open web and ingest structured content. ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity can already do this, but others, such as Anthropic’s Claude, have been more limited. This could lead to a divided ecosystem with some assistants open to optimisation, while others keep recommendations strictly in-house.
Businesses And Advertisers
For businesses, the important message is that appearing in AI-generated answers may soon matter as much as appearing on page one of Google once did. The Prompting Company claims its system allows even small or new brands to compete by creating high-quality, context-aware content that AI tools are more likely to cite.
Early signs suggest that AI-driven traffic, while smaller in volume than search, may be higher in quality. For example, Adobe’s data shows that visitors arriving from AI recommendations tend to stay longer and are more focused on buying decisions. They also use AI most often for complex or big-ticket purchases, where research matters more than impulse.
For advertisers, however, it also poses some new questions, such as how do you measure success when a chatbot’s conversation, not a click, triggers a purchase? How do you influence visibility in an algorithm that changes with every prompt? Also, how do you maintain brand trust when recommendations are made by machines rather than people?
Challenges And Criticisms
As with any fast-moving technology, the rise of generative engine optimisation (GEO) raises a number of ethical and practical questions for both businesses and consumers.
The first challenge is transparency. For example, if brands start paying to be mentioned by AI, users must be able to tell whether a recommendation is organic or commercially influenced. Regulators could extend existing advertising disclosure rules to AI assistants, just as they have done with influencer marketing.
Bias is also a key issue to consider. AI systems are only as balanced as the data they are trained on, and introducing commercial optimisation risks amplifying existing inequalities. Studies of AI in retail have already raised concerns about how these systems collect and use customer data, and whether they treat all consumers fairly. Experts have warned that businesses must prioritise transparency, bias testing, and responsible data use if AI-driven commerce is to gain public trust.
Another challenge is attribution. For example, AI traffic still converts at lower rates than traditional search or social referrals, though the gap is narrowing. Marketers can’t yet prove, with precision, that being mentioned in an AI answer directly leads to a sale. Until that attribution problem is solved, investment in GEO may remain experimental for many firms.
Finally, there are issues around the subject of dependence. For example, if AI assistants become the main interface for product discovery, the brands that are mentioned will dominate attention, and those that are not may struggle to be seen at all. For now, The Prompting Company is just positioning itself as the bridge between those two realities, betting that businesses will soon have to market to AI agents as actively as they do to people.
What Does This Mean For Your Business?
If GEO takes hold in the way its backers expect, the structure of online discovery could change faster than many realise. For UK businesses in particular, this means rethinking how visibility is achieved and measured. Instead of fighting for Google rankings or paying for search ads, companies may soon need to consider whether their products can be understood, cited, and recommended by AI systems that are shaping what customers see first. That shift could favour agile firms that adopt AI-ready content strategies early, while leaving slower competitors struggling to appear in the new recommendation landscape.
For advertising and marketing industries, GEO could become both a challenge and an opportunity. For example, traditional SEO agencies may need to retrain their focus on machine-readable design, structured data, and conversational context, while media buyers could face a future where there are no clear ad slots to purchase. Instead, visibility might depend on maintaining technical partnerships, feeding accurate data to AI systems, and monitoring how generative models respond to brand information in real time.
AI companies also face growing scrutiny as these practices expand. If assistants begin to behave like digital sales representatives, they will need to explain how and why specific products are recommended. Regulators and consumer watchdogs will expect transparency around paid optimisation, and users will demand the ability to distinguish between genuine relevance and commercial influence. Maintaining public trust will require clear standards, and the companies that set them will likely shape the rules for everyone else.
For investors and innovators, the appeal is pretty obvious. GEO creates a new layer of infrastructure in the digital economy, one that could define how brands reach audiences as AI assistants replace search boxes. However, the broader outcome will depend on how responsibly the model is used. If transparency and fairness are built into the system from the start, AI-powered product discovery could simplify choices for consumers and open new routes to market for smaller firms. If not, it risks becoming another opaque advertising channel that benefits only those able to pay for visibility.
For now, The Prompting Company has positioned itself at the centre of that debate. Its technology reflects a future in which algorithms act as gatekeepers to consumer attention, and its early funding shows how much confidence investors have in that vision. Whether this transforms online marketing or simply adds another layer to it will depend on how quickly businesses, regulators, and AI developers adapt to a world where products must be marketed not only to people but to the machines that speak to them.