With €11.8 million in funding, SEARCHABLE aims to become the Semrush of AI search engines.

Search is entering a new phase. For more than two decades, brands optimized their visibility around the rules imposed by Google: indexing, keywords, backlinks, technical performance, and paid traffic acquisition. The rise of conversational engines and AI assistants is now reshaping this historical architecture of search.

In an environment where users directly query ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or Claude for recommendations, companies are trying to understand how their brands appear — or disappear — within responses generated by artificial intelligence models.

It is within this emerging layer that Searchable is positioning itself. The London-based startup has just raised €11.8 million in a Seed round led by Headline, whose portfolio includes Mistral AI, Bioptimus and De Facto.

The company’s ambition is to build a visibility analysis and optimization platform for AI search engines, following a model similar to what Semrush or Ahrefs represented for traditional SEO.

The platform developed by Searchable tracks brand presence across ten AI search engines, aggregates data from Google Analytics and Google Search Console, and transforms these signals into operational recommendations. The company describes its product as a “growth command centre” designed for marketing teams facing the fragmentation of conversational search.

The issue extends far beyond traditional search engine optimization. With generative models, the very logic of product discovery is beginning to evolve. In traditional search, users browsed results pages made up of sponsored links, articles, and indexed websites. In conversational interfaces, AI directly synthesizes an answer and implicitly selects the actors it considers relevant.

This shift transfers part of the power previously held by search engines toward the models themselves.

For brands, the challenge now lies in understanding why certain companies are cited in AI-generated responses and identifying the levers that can improve this visibility.

Chris Donnelly, founder of Searchable, believes this transition represents a structural break for the digital marketing industry. According to him, users arriving through AI assistants demonstrate higher levels of intent and trust than those coming from traditional search. The company claims that visitors originating from ChatGPT and other LLMs convert up to three times more effectively.

Although these metrics remain difficult to measure at a market-wide scale, several signals already point to a gradual reconfiguration of acquisition strategies. Some marketing departments are beginning to monitor conversational platforms as new traffic channels, while an entirely new category of tools dedicated to “LLM visibility tracking” is rapidly emerging.

This transformation is also opening a new market for martech platforms. Historical SEO tools were built to analyze web pages, Google queries, and link performance. Conversational engines now introduce entirely new challenges: analyzing AI-generated citations, monitoring conversational responses, understanding the sources used by models, and managing the algorithmic reputation of brands.

Searchable’s funding round comes amid a broader reconfiguration of the search market. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Perplexity are no longer simply offering conversational interfaces; they are gradually becoming new intermediaries in the discovery of products, services, and content.

For companies, the risk is now losing visibility without ever disappearing from a traditional search results page. In a conversational engine, not being mentioned often means disappearing entirely from the user journey.

Founded in 2025 and commercially launched in January 2026, Searchable plans to use this funding to accelerate development of its product execution engine and strengthen its presence in both the United Kingdom and the United States.