According to Inc., The Prompting Company has raised $6.5 million to help businesses optimize their websites for generative AI search results. The four-month-old startup, part of Y Combinator’s Summer 2025 cohort, creates AI-facing websites that provide structured directories for large language models to efficiently find information without crawling entire human-designed sites. Founded by 28-year-old Kevin Chandra alongside Michelle Marcelline and Albert Purnama, the company already serves Fortune 500 companies and charges monthly subscription fees for its GEO services. The founders previously built Typedream, which was acquired by Beehiiv, and Cotter, acquired by Stytch. This emerging field represents a fundamental shift in how businesses must approach online visibility as AI becomes the primary interface for information discovery.
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The Dawn of AI-First Digital Strategy
We’re witnessing the early stages of what could become the most significant shift in digital strategy since the mobile revolution. While artificial intelligence has been transforming backend operations for years, The Prompting Company’s approach signals the beginning of AI-first frontend design. This isn’t merely about optimizing existing websites—it’s about creating parallel digital experiences specifically engineered for non-human users. The implications extend far beyond search optimization to fundamentally rethinking how businesses structure their digital presence when the primary “customer” might be an AI agent rather than a human visitor.
The Technical Reality Behind GEO
Current websites optimized for human consumption present significant challenges for generative AI systems. Modern web design emphasizes visual hierarchy, interactive elements, and persuasive copy—all of which create noise for AI agents seeking factual information. When an LLM visits a traditional website, it must parse through navigation menus, hero sections, and marketing language to extract the core information it needs. This inefficiency leads to higher computational costs, slower response times, and potentially incomplete or inaccurate answers. The structured directory approach that The Prompting Company advocates represents a more machine-readable format that could become the standard for AI-facing content delivery.
Broader Market Implications
The emergence of specialized GEO startup companies signals a maturation of the AI ecosystem. We’re moving beyond basic AI integration toward specialized services that address specific pain points in the AI value chain. This trend mirrors the early days of SEO, where what began as simple keyword optimization evolved into a sophisticated industry of analytics tools, content strategists, and technical specialists. The rapid adoption by Fortune 500 companies suggests that GEO is being treated as a strategic priority rather than an experimental initiative. As more businesses recognize that appearing in ChatGPT responses could be as valuable as ranking on Google’s first page, we should expect significant investment in this space.
Strategic Risks and Dependencies
The biggest concern with GEO specialization is platform dependency—a lesson many publishers learned painfully with social media algorithms. Companies building AI-specific websites face the risk that LLM providers might change their crawling behavior, rendering specialized optimizations obsolete. However, The Prompting Company’s approach of creating autonomous sites that adapt to changing prompt patterns suggests they’re attempting to build resilience into their model. The challenge will be maintaining this adaptability as the underlying AI models from companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google continue to evolve. Businesses investing in GEO must balance the immediate benefits of AI visibility against the long-term risk of building their digital strategy around third-party platforms they don’t control.
The Coming Competitive Landscape
As a Y Combinator-backed company with experienced founders, The Prompting Company has strong early positioning, but they won’t have the GEO market to themselves for long. We should expect established SEO platforms to rapidly develop GEO capabilities, either through internal development or acquisition. The technical barrier to entry isn’t exceptionally high—the real competitive advantage will come from data about how different LLMs behave and what optimization strategies prove most effective across various AI platforms. The companies that succeed will likely be those that can provide cross-platform GEO analytics and adapt quickly as the AI search landscape fragments across multiple providers.
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The Road Ahead for AI-First Business
Looking forward, GEO represents just the first wave of AI-specific business optimization. As AI agents become more sophisticated, we’ll likely see specialized interfaces for different types of AI interactions—shopping agents, research assistants, customer service bots, and more. The fundamental shift is from designing for human perception to designing for algorithmic efficiency. Companies that master this transition early will gain significant advantages in discoverability, while those that delay may find themselves increasingly invisible to the AI-powered interfaces that younger generations, as Chandra noted, are already adopting as their primary way of interacting with digital information.
