Is your company optimized for generative AI? Startup GEO says it should be
By Chloe Aiello | Published: 2025-10-31 18:25:00 | Source: Inc.com
Forget SEO. Generative Engine Optimization – or GEO – is currently top of mind for brands looking to keep up with and stay relevant in the rapidly changing world of online search.
As part of the shift in how people find information online, a startup called The Prompting Company has raised $6.5 million to help companies get their websites and products featured in AI search results, such as apps like ChatGPT.
“The way[younger generations]interact with the web is going to be very different. ChatGPT will likely be the main interface,” says Prompting Company CEO and co-founder Kevin Chandra. “It’s going to be where you do your work, your shopping, and everything else.”
Just four months ago, Prompting was part of Y Combinator’s Summer 2025 cohort. It helps optimize websites for generative AI by creating an AI-facing site for businesses. Today, most companies have websites designed for humans, complete with thoughtful design elements and what Chandra describes as “marketing copy.” When an AI agent arrives with a specific query from a user at a website designed for humans, Chandra says it typically combs through each page of the site in an attempt to piece together an answer.
But this is changing. “In this new world, there has to be an AI-facing website and a human-facing website,” Chandra says. “We offer a website facing LLM.”
Chandra says these AI domains are set up a little differently than human-facing sites. They provide a directory from which LLMs can choose specific pages to visit to address a particular question, so that “they don’t have to browse the entire site.”
The sites that Prompting Company sets up for its clients are standalone, meaning they are automatically updated based on how the types of claims received from LLMs change over time. Prompting already has a list of companies it serves, including companies that Chandra says are in the top 100 of the Fortune 500. It also lists companies like Rho, Rippling and Motion. On its website. Customers pay a monthly subscription fee for Prompting Company’s GEO services.
Chandra, 28, co-founded The Prompting Company alongside Michelle Marcellin, 27, and Albert Purnama, 28, in June. Despite their youth, the three are already serial founders. They were part of the teams behind AI-based website builder Typedream, which Beehiiv acquired last year, and Cotter, an authentication startup. Stytch was acquired in 2021.Â
Chandra says the expertise the team developed at Typedream was actually part of what inspired Prompting Company. As they built websites, they began to notice an acceleration in traffic to the sites from LLMs directly, as well as from users referred by LLMs to the websites.
“The websites we were making were for humans, they had a lot of design and they had a lot of animations like that. But for the MBAs, it was very difficult for them to understand what was going on on the page. “So we thought to ourselves, ‘Okay, we’ve made websites for humans, let’s try it for agents.’”
There is always inherent risk when building a business or meeting ever-changing technology needs – and that’s a lesson Many publishers I learned the hard way With meta and its algorithms. But Chandra says The Prompting Company was designed to confront those often ambiguous changes. “With tools like ours you can see these changes. We track these changes,” he says. “That’s our mission, to help people understand how these LLM programs work.”
Of course there are ways businesses can improve GEO without signing up for services from a provider like The Prompting Company. Chandra advises entrepreneurs and leaders to do the legwork: check how much traffic the website is receiving and where on the site LLMs are visiting, “then try to find out what questions LLMs are asking and try to intercept the target.”
(tags for translation) ai
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