Many sites saw their organic traffic decline in 2024, in big part due to the rise of AI-generated search results. Many queries no longer lead to click-throughs, and even when users click, it is hard for companies to get more context on searches made within apps like ChatGPT or Perplexity.
The answer to this problem is sometimes called generative engine optimization, or GEO, in a nod to SEO. “Some call it AI search visibility optimization, which is a bit longer, but I believe is a bit more accurate,” said Otterly.AI CEO Thomas Peham (on the right in the image above).
Like New York-based competitor Profound, the Austrian startup builds dashboards to help companies and ad agencies monitor and optimize their presence in AI results. But while Profound is still in closed beta, Otterly is exiting stealth mode after passing the 1,000-user milestone, Peham told TechCrunch exclusively.
You may have heard of Otterly before: It launched on Product Hunt earlier this year to some success. Then, Google shook everything up.
“To be honest, the reality was we rebuilt the product from scratch after Google introduced AI Overviews in May,” Peham said.
AI Overviews are Google’s implementation of AI-powered results, often resulting in so-called zero-click searches where users never go beyond the search engine.
As AI Overviews starts rolling out globally, companies who relied on organic search traffic are feeling the sting. Peham gave the example of a SaaS business that saw its organic search presence decline in the U.S, only to realize through Otterly that Google showed AI Overviews search results for half of its SEO keywords.
The next question is how to make this knowledge actionable, especially when LLMs are often described as a black box. That’s one reason why Otterly plans to add a recommendation engine, and in the meantime, why it went from monthly to weekly tracking — so marketing teams can conduct experiments to optimize their content and quickly see what might be working or not.
While this tinkering is partially akin to SEO, clicks are less of a focus. “I think calling it AI search visibility optimization really highlights the aspect that we as marketing teams also need to think about our brand position, our brand visibility,” Peham said.
Peham himself spent most of his career in marketing. A former VP of marketing at CMS company Storyblok, he started Otterly to scratch his own itch and understand how ChatGPT was impacting search from a brand perspective.
Eventually, he teamed up with two co-founders, Josef Trauner (in the middle in the image above) and Klaus M. Schremser (on the left), who are respectively the former CEO and head of growth at Usersnap, a user feedback platform they sold to saas.group in 2023.
Having two co-founders helps them all split tasks, with Schremser focused on operations and product, and Trauner on technical aspects. It doesn’t hurt either that the pair had an exit together. His incubator, GroWTF, also supported Otterly, but the startup won’t seek external funding, Peham said.
Instead, he said Otterly plans to keep on growing with its customer base, with the ambition to become what Semrush or Ahrefs are for SEO, but in the AI search space.
There’s always a risk that these companies may want to expand their scope and become direct competitors, but Otterly is hoping they can work together, and plans to announce details of a partnership with Semrush next month, Peham said.