A former Google Search engineer is betting on the end of traditional SEO, and building tools to help marketers prepare for what comes next.
Andrew Yan, who left Google’s search team earlier this year, co-founded Athena, a startup focused on helping brands stay visible in AI-generated responses from tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity.
The company launched last month with $2.2 million in funding from Y Combinator and other venture firms.
Athena is part of a new wave of companies responding to a shift in how people discover information. Instead of browsing search results, people are increasingly getting direct answers from AI chatbots.
As a result, the strategies that once helped websites rank in Google may no longer be enough to drive visibility.
Yan told The Wall Street Journal:
“Companies have been spending the last 10 or 20 years optimizing their website for the ‘10 blue links’ version of Google. That version of Google is changing very fast, and it is changing forever.”
Building Visibility In A Zero-Click Web
Athena’s platform is designed to show how different AI models interpret and describe a brand. It tracks how chatbots talk about companies across platforms and recommends ways to optimize web content for AI visibility.
According to the company, Athena already has over 100 customers, including Paperless Post.
The broader trend reflects growing concern among marketers about the rise of a “zero-click internet,” where users get answers directly from AI interfaces and never visit the underlying websites.
Yan’s shift from Google to startup founder underscores how seriously some search insiders are taking this transformation.
Rather than competing for rankings on a search results page, Athena aims to help brands influence the outputs of large language models.
Profound Raises $20 Million For AI Search Monitoring
Athena isn’t the only company working on this.
Profound, another startup highlighted by The Wall Street Journal, has raised more than $20 million from venture capital firms. Its platform monitors how chatbots gather and relay brand-related information to users.
Profound has attracted several large clients, including Chime, and is positioning itself as an essential tool for navigating the complexity of generative AI search.
Co-founder James Cadwallader says the company is preparing for a world where bots, not people, are the primary visitors to websites.
Cadwallader told The Wall Street Journal:
“We see a future of a zero-click internet where consumers only interact with interfaces like ChatGPT. And agents or bots will become the primary visitors to websites.”
Saga Ventures’ Max Altman added that demand for this kind of visibility data has surpassed expectations, noting that marketers are currently “flying completely blind” when it comes to how AI tools represent their brands.
SEO Consultants Are Shifting Focus
The shift is also reaching practitioners. Cyrus Shepard, founder of Zyppy SEO, told the Wall Street Journal that AI visibility went from being negligible at the start of 2025 to 10–15% of his current workload.
By the end of the year, he expects it could represent half of his focus.
Referring to new platforms like Athena and Profound, Shepard said:
“I would classify them all as in beta. But that doesn’t mean it’s not coming.”
While investor estimates suggest these startups have raised just a fraction of the $90 billion SEO industry, their traction indicates a need to address the challenges posed by AI search.
What This Means
These startups are early signs of a larger shift in how content is surfaced and evaluated online.
With AI tools synthesizing answers from multiple sources and often skipping over traditional links, marketers face a new kind of visibility challenge.
Companies like Athena and Profound are trying to fill that gap by giving marketers a window into how generative AI models see their brands and what can be done to improve those impressions.
It’s not clear yet which strategies will work best in this new environment, but the race to figure it out has begun.
Featured Image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock
