Searchable Raises $4M to Prepare Brands for the AI Search Era

London-based startup Searchable has raised US $4 million in pre-seed funding, valuing the company at US $40 million, just four months after the idea was conceived and less than two weeks after launching publicly. The round reflects rapid market interest in a new category emerging at the intersection of SEO and artificial intelligence: ensuring brands remain discoverable inside AI search engines.

Searchable positions itself as one of the earliest platforms built to address a fundamental marketing shift. As large-language-model powered search interfaces become mainstream, brands risk losing visibility if they’re not indexed, structured and referenced inside AI agents and AI-native search results. Searchable is an agentic SEO and AI Search tool designed to help companies understand how their brand appears inside generative AI responses, conversational search platforms and emerging LLM-based discovery channels.

The company revealed unusually strong early traction: more than 4,500 sign-ups, thousands of active trials and hundreds of paying customers just days after launch. While these are self-reported figures, they reflect accelerating demand among marketers concerned about losing organic reach as AI reshapes content retrieval.

AI Search Is Replacing the Traditional Search Engine

For nearly two decades, Google shaped digital marketing, discovery, content strategies and brand visibility. But the rise of generative AI introduces a seismic shift. Instead of typing a query into Google, users increasingly ask questions directly to AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and embedded LLM search inside devices, software platforms and browsers.

In these environments, results aren’t ranked webpages, they’re synthesized answers. That means brands can no longer depend solely on traditional SEO signals such as backlinks, keywords, domain authority or search rankings. The competitive question is no longer “How do I rank on Google?”, but rather “How does an AI answer questions about me and does it mention me at all?”

Searchable was founded to provide clarity and measurement in this emerging reality, helping companies evaluate how AI agents interpret their brand, where gaps exist and how to optimize visibility in AI-generated responses.

What Searchable Actually Does ?

Searchable aggregates how a brand appears across leading AI search interfaces and LLMs, turning fragmented AI responses into structured insights. It enables marketing teams to test prompts, analyse content strength, identify missing information and understand whether their brand is being ignored, misrepresented or inaccurately summarised by AI systems.

The platform helps brands optimize their content architecture for AI retrieval rather than traditional web crawling. That includes identifying content sources AI models are referencing, evaluating semantic strength and assessing whether core brand positioning appears consistently in AI responses.

The broader goal is AI-visibility optimization, where brands monitor sentiment, authority, topical relevance, factual accuracy and competitive comparisons inside LLM-based answers.

A New Marketing Category: Agentic SEO

Searchable’s core thesis is that the future of search will be conversational and agentic, not keyword-driven. Instead of entering queries into a search bar, users increasingly rely on AI agents integrated into workflow, productivity tools, browsers and operating systems.

Searchable argues this shift creates a new discipline: agentic SEO, ensuring AI agents can understand, represent and recommend a brand correctly.

Traditional SEO optimizes webpages for Google’s algorithms but agentic SEO optimizes structured information, metadata and contextual relevance for multi-model AI interpretation. This new paradigm forces brands to rethink content strategy. AI rewards structured knowledge, verifiable authority and contextual completeness.

Why Are Marketers Paying Attention ?

The founder team claims that if brands are not indexed within AI search engines, they are going to lose out. Early reaction from marketers suggests this fear resonates deeply. For most businesses, organic search remains the single largest source of inbound customer acquisition. Losing visibility inside AI-generated answers could rewrite acquisition economics entirely.

In a marketing landscape already reshaped by privacy regulations, cookie deprecation and rising paid media costs, AI search becomes yet another competitive layer. Early-adopter brands may gain a multi-year advantage while slower competitors disappear from AI-driven discovery.

Searchable is responding to an emerging anxiety: brands don’t know how AI describes them and they don’t know how to influence it. The company’s pitch is simple: measure what AI thinks you are and then optimize what AI says you are.

Funding, Traction and Market Validation

The company’s pre-seed valuation reflects confidence that a major digital shift is underway. The founders note that more than 100 global companies are already paying customers, including marketing teams, agency partners and growing start-ups.

Searchable reports that customers span e-commerce, software, consumer brands and digital marketing indicating cross-industry demand rather than a single vertical niche. With only four months of development and less than two weeks of public access before fundraising, the company’s early numbers signal strong market pull rather than push.

The Bigger Picture: A Post-Google Discovery Era

If generative AI becomes the dominant way people research topics, compare products or evaluate brands, businesses will need a second layer of visibility beyond classical search.

Searchable is betting on this transformation: even if Google remains dominant, the discovery layer around it is moving toward embedded AI agents, meaning search won’t look like a list of blue links, but a synthesized narrative drawn from the entirety of indexed digital information.

In that world, SEO becomes an AI optimization discipline instead of Google optimization discipline. If that thesis proves correct, future marketing stacks will require AI indexing readiness as a core function, the same way websites once required Google indexing readiness in the early 2000s.

Searchable is addressing one of the most important emerging shifts in digital marketing: the need to be visible inside AI answers, not just web search. The company is early, but the problem is real and accelerating. Tools that help brands navigate AI-driven discovery will almost certainly form a new software category in the coming years.

Whether Searchable becomes the dominant infrastructure layer remains unclear, but the thesis driving its rapid growth deserves serious attention. Search is becoming conversational, distributed and AI-adaptive. Visibility inside AI systems will decide competitive reach. For brands that depend on search, which mostly do, the time to prepare is now.