Why 1,300 Brands Now Pay to Track Their AI Search Presence

• Fact: Berlin startup Peec AI crossed $10 million in annualized revenue — 1,300+ brands are paying monthly to track whether they appear in ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity results.

• Impact: Klarna’s new Shopping Search app connects 100 million products to ChatGPT via MCP server across 13 markets; AI-referred shoppers converted at 31% higher rates during the 2025 holiday season.

• Surprise: The brands best positioned for AI search didn’t build a separate strategy — they just did disciplined catalog work for Amazon. Structured data doesn’t care which algorithm reads it.

Six months. That’s how long it took Peec AI to go from $4 million to $10 million in annualized revenue. The Berlin startup does one thing: it tells brand managers whether their products appear when a consumer asks ChatGPT — or Gemini, or Perplexity — to suggest something in their category. More than 1,300 brands are paying for that intelligence. Another 300 sign up every month. Since its launch in February 2025, Peec has raised $29 million in total funding, including a $21 million Series A.

That growth rate is not a startup story. It’s a market distress signal.

700%: the number that rewrote where shopping starts

Consider what Klarna disclosed when it launched its Shopping Search app inside ChatGPT on May 20. The integration uses an MCP server — the same protocol that lets AI agents interact with live databases — to connect more than 100 million products and 400 million merchant listings across 13 markets. Shoppers describe what they want in natural language, see visual results with live prices and stock availability from multiple retailers, then get redirected to complete the purchase.

Routine, perhaps. Until you read the market context: traffic from AI platforms to retail sites grew nearly 700% during the 2025 holiday season. Those shoppers converted at 31% higher rates than visitors arriving from any other channel. Klarna didn’t build a novelty feature. It built an acquisition channel for the cohort of consumers who already shop differently from everyone else — and it included “clearly labeled sponsored placements” for brands willing to pay for additional visibility.

What’s striking about this move is how little runway brands were given to adapt. A payment provider — not a search engine, not a marketplace, not a social platform — became a product discovery layer almost overnight. The question for a brand manager or COO isn’t whether to care. It’s whether the organization can move fast enough.

Generative Engine Optimization: not an experiment anymore

GEO — optimizing content to appear in AI-generated answers — spent most of 2025 being treated as a curiosity for digital marketing teams with extra budget. Peec’s $10 million ARR should end that conversation. The company started with $4 million in revenue across its first ten months. It doubled that figure in the following six. The demand is not flattening.

Brands paying for Peec’s dashboard are checking whether their products surface when someone types “best running shoes under $150” or “most reliable espresso machine” into ChatGPT. They’re watching how AI citations shift when product copy is updated. They’re learning which structured attributes drive AI visibility versus traditional search rank. This isn’t a research project — it’s a line on the marketing budget, and it’s growing fast.

Here’s the contrarian view worth taking seriously: organic AI search visibility could easily become pay-to-play. Klarna’s platform already includes sponsored slots alongside organic results. If OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity follow the same path — and there are compelling financial incentives for all three — the brands that built organic GEO foundations early will hold the most defensible positions when the bidding starts. First-mover advantage in AI search may have a shorter window than most teams realize.

For a deeper read on the AI tools reshaping brand strategy right now, the Epinium guide to e-commerce AI companies maps the landscape by revenue impact — not hype.

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The catalog connection most teams haven’t mapped

Here’s where the operational picture becomes actionable. AI search engines don’t understand a poorly structured product listing any better than Google’s algorithm does. They need complete attributes, accurate specifications, clean titles, and verified brand information. The same catalog discipline that drives Amazon ranking directly feeds AI discoverability — because both systems fundamentally rely on structured, machine-readable data.

Epinium data

After five years and more than 200 brand accounts optimized through the Epinium Platform, the pattern is consistent: brands with catalog completeness scores above 85% appear in AI-generated product results at measurably higher rates than those with sparse or incomplete attribute data. The infrastructure you built for Amazon is already your GEO foundation — if you actually built it properly.

What we’re seeing at Epinium is that brands which treated content optimization as a cost center — rather than a growth driver — are now facing a compounding disadvantage. When AI replaces the keyword search bar, the brands that didn’t bother cleaning up their product data face two gaps simultaneously: weak Amazon visibility and weak AI visibility. The remediation cost doubles. The time to fix it doesn’t shrink.

None of this requires a new budget category tomorrow. It does require acknowledging that the brand discovery playbook written for a world of ranked Google links has a structural problem in 2026. That world is still large. It is measurably smaller than it was twelve months ago, and the pace of shrinkage is accelerating.

Peec raised $29 million betting the gap widens fast. Klarna built the commercial infrastructure to make AI the channel where billions of purchase decisions begin. Both bets look defensible from here.

What exactly is GEO and how does it differ from traditional SEO?

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) means structuring your product content, brand information, and web presence so that AI language models surface your brand in their generated responses. Unlike SEO — which prioritizes keyword density, backlinks, and click-through signals — GEO focuses on data completeness, structured attributes, authoritative third-party mentions, and accurate product specifications. The ranking mechanism is fundamentally different. The discipline of keeping clean, structured data is the same.

Does GEO only apply to consumer brands, or does it matter for B2B companies too?

GEO matters for any brand whose products or services are researched before purchase. In B2B, procurement teams increasingly use AI chat tools to generate supplier shortlists before engaging sales teams. If your service documentation, product specs, and case studies are thin or poorly structured, you won’t appear on those lists. The buying channel is different from B2C; the stakes are equally real.

Can a brand get organic AI search visibility without paying for placements?

Yes — for now. Peec’s entire business model is built on the premise that organic AI visibility is real and measurable. Brands with complete, well-structured content and strong mentions across authoritative sources appear more frequently in AI-generated answers without any paid placement. Whether that remains the dominant model is an open question as platforms build commercial layers on top of organic results, as Klarna already has.

What’s the minimum viable first step for a brand that hasn’t started on GEO?

The most defensible starting point is a catalog and content audit: are all product attributes complete, accurate, and structured consistently across every channel? That work serves traditional SEO and GEO simultaneously. From there, monitor AI search results for your highest-priority categories to establish a baseline — tools like Peec exist precisely for this. An AI strategy consultant can map the gap between your current content state and AI-search readiness in two to three weeks.

At what scale does it make sense to invest in dedicated GEO tools versus manual monitoring?

When AI-referred traffic accounts for more than 5% of your total acquisition, systematic tracking becomes essential. Below that threshold, a quarterly manual review of AI results for key search queries gives sufficient signal without platform investment. Given that AI platform traffic to retail grew 700% during the 2025 holiday season, many mid-market consumer brands may already be past that 5% threshold without realizing it — which is precisely the gap Peec was built to close.

The question the next quarter will answer is whether brand and marketing teams treat GEO as an experiment or a budget line. The $10 million already flowing to Peec suggests the market has decided. The brands still debating it are the opportunity that paying customers are already exploiting.

Ready to assess your AI search readiness? Epinium’s Transform service delivers a 30-minute AI diagnosis that covers your catalog data quality, content gaps, and GEO positioning relative to your category — with a dedicated AI Director guiding implementation from day one. Book your free diagnosis →