Google SEO Is Yesterday's Game

01 /The Concept

"Your customers are already using ChatGPT and Perplexity instead of Google," Otterly.AI declares. "The future of AI optimization starts today."

That shift creates a new imperative for brands: track how visible they are inside AI-generated answers, not just on search results pages.

Otterly.AI built a platform that lets companies monitor their presence in AI engine responses – across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and the AI Overviews Google has begun embedding in search results.

Users start by defining keywords tied to their brands, products, or relevant attributes. The platform then suggests the kinds of questions users are likely to ask AI engines on those topics. From there, companies can see exactly what those engines say in response – understanding what's being planted in consumers' minds.

The platform automatically runs queries through the AI engines and tracks brand and product mentions in the answers. It then builds share-of-voice rankings based on mention frequency.

Beyond raw mentions, Otterly.AI analyzes the context in which brands appear – producing detailed reports on how AI engines position each brand across different attributes and topic areas. All of this is viewable both as a current snapshot and as a trend over time.

Since virtually all AI engines now include source citations in their responses, the platform also tracks which websites are cited, and where those citations appear within each answer – with time-series charts to show how that changes.

The workflow is straightforward: define a query list, run an analysis (results arrive in roughly 5 minutes), then set those queries on continuous automated monitoring to track whether your AI visibility is improving or declining.

Pricing is $29/month for 10 queries, $189 for 100, and $989 for 1,000.

Otterly.AI has not raised external funding. The company announced its platform launch on Product Hunt a few days ago.

02 /Why It Matters

Otterly.AI's bootstrapped status doesn't suggest investors passed – it looks more like the founders haven't gone looking yet.

The space already has a funded comparable: Evertune, [covered here](/review/poiskovaja-optimizacija-uzhe-proshlyj-vek), raised $4 million in its first round in October. Evertune offers one feature Otterly.AI currently lacks – recommendations on what content a brand should create to improve its AI rankings. Those suggestions are admittedly more art than science right now, but they add a prescriptive layer to the monitoring.

On the core thesis, Otterly.AI is on solid ground. ChatGPT's active user base has grown dramatically over the past two years, reaching an estimated 250 million users as of September 2024. The AI answer engine is becoming a primary discovery channel.

If that holds, the market for AI visibility monitoring and optimization could rival the traditional SEO market – which was valued at nearly $70 billion in 2022 and is projected to hit $157 billion by 2032. Unless, of course, that spending migrates to AI optimization first. Which also isn't out of the question.

While we're on the subject of information discovery, Adobe's recent consumer research is worth noting. Google still dominates with 91% of respondents using it for search. But YouTube sits in second place at 39%, TikTok fourth at 17%, Twitter sixth at 12%, Facebook and Pinterest tied at 7% – and ChatGPT in seventh at 11%, currently behind both Twitter and TikTok.

That distribution suggests that "search optimization" for forward-thinking brands probably needs to span not just AI engines but YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter as well. Each is a discovery surface with its own optimization logic.

On the advertising side of the same coin: the Financial Times has reported that OpenAI is exploring advertising inside ChatGPT responses, despite Sam Altman's reluctance. The economics may eventually force the issue, just as they did for Google. Perplexity is already further along – it began running ad experiments inside its responses in November.

That's happening within the native interfaces. But enormous numbers of third-party apps and services run on OpenAI, Perplexity, and other AI engine APIs. Most of those developers are currently building on subscription monetization – a model that doesn't scale elegantly, because revenue depends on the number of paying users rather than on API call volume. Set the price too high and you lose light users; too low and you leave money on the table.

Enter ad platforms designed for AI app developers – letting them offer their products for free and monetize through advertising instead. One recent example is KOAH, [covered here](/review/nakonec-to-ii-prilozhenie-mozhno-prevratit-v-masshtabiruemyj-biznes) in late November. KOAH's angle: an AI engine itself inserts the ads, making them maximally relevant to the response context – which should meaningfully improve click-through.

03 /Opportunities

Put it all together, and AI optimization and AI advertising are converging into a market that could end up as large as – or larger than – traditional search optimization and search advertising.

The winners won't just be OpenAI, Perplexity, Anthropic, and the other core AI engine developers. As happened with the traditional SEO and SEM ecosystem, an enormous layer of supporting platforms and tools will emerge around them.

The playbook is relatively clear: the new AI optimization market is structurally similar to the old search optimization market. That means conceptual analogs of existing SEO tools will emerge for AI contexts – which makes it easier to reason about what to build.

Which existing SEO or SEM tool would you want to rebuild for AI engines?

The window is still open – but it won't stay that way. The fastest-moving startups are already staking out positions, and each new entrant narrows the available white space. The time to move is now.