As consumers ditch Google for ChatGPT, Peec AI raises $21M to Shift from SEO to GEO

As consumers quietly reroute their questions from Google’s search box to ChatGPT’s prompt bar, a whole cottage industry is scrambling to answer a new question: when AI does the searching for us, how do brands stay visible?

Berlin-based startup Peec AI thinks it has an answer, most importantly, investors agree. The company has just raised a $21 million Series A, led by European VC firm Singular, with participation from Antler, Combination VC, identity.vc and S20, barely four months after its seed round.

The round values Peec AI at north of $100 million, according to CEO Marius Meiners, and comes on the back of an impressive early growth story: more than $4 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in just ten months and around 1,300 brands and agencies onboarded across sectors.

But the financing is only half the story. The more interesting part is why this category exists at all, and what it says about the future of search, marketing and AI-native discovery.

From Blue Links to One Answer: The Great Search Hhift

For two decades, the playbook for being found online was simple: win on Google. SEO budgets, backlink strategies, content farms, structured data, all of it revolved around persuading one search engine to rank you near the top of a page of blue links. That world is cracking.

Consumers are increasingly asking conversational AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini to do the sifting for them to answer which CRM is best for their startup. Instead of 10 links and sponsored results, they get a single synthesized answer, with sources wrapped inside an AI-generated paragraph.

For brands, that shift is brutal:

• There’s no obvious “first page” to chase. You either appear in the AI’s answer, or you don’t.
• Attribution is opaque. AI tools may reference sources, but the logic that decides which sources and how much they influence the answer is hidden.
• The user’s journey is compressed. Fewer clicks, fewer chances to intercept them with ads or retargeting.

If traditional SEO was about “optimizing for Google,” this new reality is about “optimizing for how AI models talk about you.” That’s the gap Peec AI is trying to fill.

What Peec AI actually does

Peec AI describes itself as a marketing platform for the era of AI search. In practical terms, it behaves like an analytics and optimization layer that sits on top of major AI search engines.

According to public reports and product descriptions, Peec AI’s platform does four main things:

1. Tracks how your brand appears in AI-generated answers
   Marketers can define key prompts. For example, best project management tools for remote teams or top sustainable sneaker brands, and Peec AI monitors whether, and how often, their brand shows up in responses from tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini.
2. Reveals which sources are shaping the narrative
   Instead of just telling you if you appear, Peec AI surfaces the underlying sources that the AI is leaning on. That might be Reddit threads, niche industry blogs, large media outlets, product review sites, or even comparison pages created by competitors.
3. Measures sentiment and positioning
   Visibility alone isn’t enough. Peec AI also analyses whether the AI is describing your brand positively or negatively, what keywords and descriptors it attaches to you, and how you stack up against rivals in the same answer set.
4. Suggests concrete actions to improve your presence
   The company’s dashboard doesn’t just present data; it suggests tactical steps. One example shared in coverage: if a company wants to be recommended as one of “the best CRMs for fast-growing companies”, Peec might suggest joining specific subreddit discussions where the topic is actively debated, because those communities are feeding into AI-generated answers.

Under the hood, Peec AI leans on a proprietary data pipeline. The company buys raw datasets of user requests from various providers and then filters them aggressively to isolate commercially relevant queries, that is, questions about brands, purchases, products and services amid the general noise of people asking AI everything from homework help to poetry.

GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, the “new SEO”

Peec AI is one of the main evangelists of a concept it calls Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) essentially, SEO for AI-native search.

Where classic SEO centres on keywords, crawl budgets and SERP features, GEO revolves around:

• Prompts instead of keywords
  Instead of targeting project management software as a keyword, you optimize for prompts like What’s the best project management tool for distributed teams with under 50 employees? Peec’s dashboard is organised around these prompts, not just single words or phrases.
• Source authority in the eyes of AI models
  GEO practitioners care deeply about which pages and domains LLMs treat as reliable when composing an answer. A small, well-structured niche blog that exactly matches a query might matter more than a generic paragraph on a big publication.
• Cross-model consistency
  AI search isn’t monolithic. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity may give different answers to the same question because they rely on different models, retrieval strategies and training data. GEO is about understanding, and nudging your position across that ecosystem.
• Sentiment-aware visibility
  In generative answers, being mentioned negatively is different from not being mentioned at all. GEO, as Peec AI frames it, combines visibility with sentiment analysis, so brands can prioritise quality of representation, not just quantity.

In other words, GEO is less about gaming a single algorithm and more about curating the information environment that AI models pull from.

Fast growth, Fast Money

The numbers behind Peec AI’s funding explain why VCs are suddenly paying attention to this obscure-sounding niche.

• $21 million Series A led by Singular, with Antler, Combination VC, identity.vc and S20 participating.
• Seed round raised just four months earlier, led by 20VC.
• Total funding now around $29 million, making it one of the better-funded players in the AI search optimisation space.
• ARR above $4 million and 1,300+ customers within ten months of launch, growing by roughly 300 new customers per month.

Customers reportedly range from old-guard enterprises like Axel Springer and TUI to AI-native startups like ElevenLabs and n8n, underlining that the AI search problem cuts across both traditional and digital-first brands. With the new capital, Peec AI plans to:

• Hire around 40 new employees in the next six months, roughly tripling its team.
• Maintain Berlin as a product and data hub, where the three co-founders Meiners, CTO Tobias Siwonia and CRO Daniel Drabo originally met through Antler’s 2024 cohort.
• Open a sales-focused office in New York, signalling a North American push and a bet that GEO will resonate with US CMOs as strongly as it has with European ones.

A crowded category in the making

Peec AI is far from alone in spotting the opportunity.

Competitors like Profound in New York and OtterlyAI in Austria are also building tools to help brands understand how they appear in AI-generated results.

At the same time, established marketing platforms and SEO suites — from content automation tools to analytics dashboards — are scrambling to bolt on AI search visibility features. For them, this is both a threat and an extension:

• If they move too slowly, standalone GEO tools like Peec AI risk owning the new discovery layer, in the same way early SEO tools became must-have infrastructure in the Web 2.0 era.
• If they move quickly, GEO might just become a feature inside a broader marketing stack, rather than a category-defining product of its own.

Peec AI’s bet is that specialisation plus design will win. Public comments from the team emphasise “clean data, clear workflows, and a UI that teams actually like using” is a tactical way of saying that the complexity will be under the hood, not in front of the marketer.

What this means for brands today

For marketing teams, the story here is bigger than one startup’s funding. It’s an early signal that “AI visibility” is becoming as strategic as Google rankings were in the 2010s.

Three big shifts stand out:

1. Content strategy has to be prompt-shaped
   Marketers will need to map out the real questions their buyers are now asking AI tools. They're often longer, more conversational, and more context-rich than a typical keyword and make sure there’s high-quality, authoritative content that answers those questions in the open web.
2. Communities and niche publishers matter even more
   If AI models increasingly lean on forums, GitHub repos, subreddit threads, comparison blogs and niche vertical media, then those environments become the new “backlinks”. Being part of the conversation where it actually happens, not just on your own site becomes a visibility strategy.
3. Measurement won’t be optional
   Just as no CMO would run a search strategy without tracking their Google rankings, the AI equivalent will soon seem reckless. Whether through Peec AI or a rival, brands will need ongoing feedback on:
   • “Do we show up for the prompts that matter?”
   • “How are we described versus competitors?”
   • “Which sources drive those narratives — and do we have a presence there?”

In this frame, Peec AI’s $21 million round looks less like a speculative bet and more like early infrastructure funding for a shift that feels structurally inevitable.

The Risks and Questions

The emerging GEO ecosystem isn’t without its unanswered questions.

• Black-box dependence
  AI search systems change frequently and have new model versions, new retrieval strategies, new safety filters. Any GEO tool, including Peec AI, is inherently chasing a moving target. There’s a risk that optimisations become brittle or outdated as the underlying models evolve.
• Hallucinations and brand safety
  If an AI system incorrectly attributes a scandal, lawsuit or negative review to the wrong brand, who’s responsible? And how quickly can such errors be detected and corrected? Tools that monitor AI output for brands could become an early-warning system, but they also raise tricky questions about remediation and recourse.
• Regulation and transparency
  As regulators in Europe and elsewhere push for more transparency around AI systems, we may see requirements for clearer source attribution or labelling in AI search results. That could either make GEO easier (more visible signals) or harder (tighter constraints on what can be influenced).
• Ethics of “optimising” generative answers
  At what point does optimising your presence in AI-generated answers start to feel like manipulating them? GEO walks the same ethical tightrope SEO did in its early days, just with higher stakes because users see fewer alternative options.

These aren’t reasons not to engage with AI search. They are reasons to do so eyes open, with a realistic sense of both the upside and the constraints.

Beyond Peec: a glimpse of the AI-native marketing stack

Zooming out, Peec AI’s fundraise slots neatly into a broader pattern: the gradual unbundling and rebundling of marketing tools for an AI-first world.

In the short term, GEO tools will likely be bought by growth teams, CMOs and performance marketers as specialised analytics and optimisation products — today’s equivalent of early SEO suites. Over time, several scenarios are plausible:

• GEO metrics become a standard column inside major marketing dashboards, just like email open rates and Google Ads CTRs.
• AI-native CRMs and marketing automation tools start to use GEO data to decide which campaigns or assets to generate next, based on gaps in AI search coverage.
• Large agencies incorporate GEO insights into their media planning and PR strategies, pitching clients not just on column inches but on how those placements propagate into AI assistants.

In all of those futures, one thing stays constant, and that is, the new gatekeepers of discovery won’t be human editors or ranking teams, but generative models trained on vast, ever-shifting corpora of text.

Startups like Peec AI are trying to make that gatekeeping, if not transparent, then at least legible and actionable for brands whose business depends on being found.

The takeaway

Peec AI’s $21 million Series A is more than just another AI funding headline. It’s a signal that the industry is waking up to a simple but uncomfortable truth:

If your brand isn’t visible in AI-generated answers, it may as well not exist for a growing slice of users.

As consumers increasingly chat with models instead of scrolling through result pages, the battle for visibility is moving from keywords to prompts, from backlinks to training data, and from SERPs to synthesised paragraphs.

For now, Peec AI is one of the loudest and best-funded voices arguing that Generative Engine Optimization will become as fundamental to marketing in the 2030s as SEO was in the 2010s. Whether it ends up owning that category or being absorbed into a larger stack, its latest round shows that brands aren’t waiting to find out. They’re already paying to see how AI sees them and to start nudging that reflection in their favour.