Berlin-based Peec AI has doubled its annual recurring revenue to $20 million in six months. Founder founder Marius Meiners says there’s been a brutal shakeout in the Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) market, leaving just two serious contenders standing.
At the height of the frenzy around helping brands appear in AI-generated search results, Peec AI CEO Meiners says his company was tracking 131 competitors. Now, he argues, the race for market leadership has effectively narrowed to his company and heavily funded US rival Profound.
"We started working on the topic in November 2024," Meiners told Pathfounders over an exclusive interview. "At the time there was only Profound. Profound had raised their $3.5 million seed round in August that year. They were roughly nine to 10 months ahead of us."
Founded by Meiners, Daniel Drabo and Tobias Siwonia, by the time Peec launched in February 2025, the market was exploding.
"There was already like four or five more players, and then there was like a new player every three, four days. It was really, really crazy. Just more players, more players, more players, more YC companies."
"I think in total now we have 17 YC companies that do exactly what we do. It was getting extremely crowded, to the point that I think in August last year we had 131 competitors that we tracked in Excel. It exploded as a category."
Meiners claims many of those rivals have since fallen away.
"I think we already won to a degree, because I think at this point it's really only between Profound and us," he said. "All the YC companies have either pivoted out or failed. At the start of the year, it came down to a top three, so it was really Profound, Scrunch and us."
Scrunch was acquired by enterprise software company Sitecore in June. That said, there continues to be other GEO providers, including Bluefish, Brandlight, Evertune, AthenaHQ and European competitors such as Promptwatch in Amsterdam. The latter has raised a total of €7.2 million in venture capital funding from Blum Ventures and Arches Capital.
Profound, meanwhile, raised $180 million in September at a $1.8 billion valuation, bringing its total funding to more than $335 million. The company says it serves more than 1,000 enterprise brands, including a third of the Fortune 100.
Peec has raised a comparatively modest $40 million from investors including Singular, 20VC and Antler, but Meiners says its strategy of targeting a broader customer base is paying off.
"Profound, of course, [is] larger and also [has] raised more capital. But they really went super enterprise, so they wanted to work with the Fortune 100, and we really said, okay, let's focus on everybody below that," he said. "That has so far served us really well, and we're on a very, very strong trajectory to catch up and compete for the category leadership."
He says Peec now has more than 4,000 customers across 80 countries, including Siemens, Hugo Boss, Sky, Mindshare and Seer Interactive. Its customers collectively run more than 100 million LLM chats and analyse over 80 million web pages monthly through its platform.
The company reached $10 million ARR in May 2026 before doubling that figure to $20 million in just six months, less than two years after its founding.
Peec operates a subscription model, starting at $99 per month but increasingly targeting large enterprises.
"We really started as a self-service SMB player, and then we slowly developed towards more of a full enterprise platform throughout this year," Meiners said. "We have very small tiers that start on $99 a month, and then we have an enterprise segment that goes way beyond that. We have $100,000, $200,000, $300,000 contracts."
He said the company's enterprise customers now include Chanel, Mercedes-Benz, TUI and Booking.com.
From search results to agentic purchasing
GEO has emerged as a potential successor to traditional search engine optimisation (SEO), as consumers increasingly ask AI chatbots for recommendations rather than ponderously navigating through lists of links on a search engine.
"Search is changing a lot. It's changing away from just a pure navigation system towards a recommendation system," Meiners said.
"In the Google days, people just used to navigate from website to website and find keywords and then read through articles themselves. Now it's really changing towards a system where people use it more like a personal advisor, in that they ask direct questions and they also ask for products and services and then recommendations for those products and services."
But unlike traditional SEO, where businesses compete for clicks, Meiners believes GEO will increasingly determine which companies actually win customers.
"I think GEO is very different from SEO for a couple of reasons. The first reason being that it's much, much closer to a purchasing decision. With Google, again, it was really about optimising for clicks on a website, and with GEO, it's really about being the brand that gets recommended by these AI models."
The next shift, he argues, will be AI agents choosing products and services without humans making the final decision.
For example, he points to AI coding platforms such as Lovable, where autonomous agents can already select services such as payment providers while building applications.
"If you're vibe coding something in Lovable, and you tell the agent in Lovable to implement payments so you can get paid for your app, then it will either choose Stripe or any other provider, but it won't even ask you anymore."
That means GEO is going to switch from being a chatbot's response for a human, to influencing purchasing decisions made by software agents.
He says the company has expanded its product beyond monitoring brand mentions to include brand perception analysis, AI shopping visibility, recommendations for improving search performance and a natural-language AI agent connected to more than 25 external tools through MCP.
The competitive threat, however, extends beyond the startups that survived the GEO gold rush.
Adobe completed its $1.87 billion acquisition of SEO giant Semrush in April, bringing AI search optimisation into its marketing software business. Ahrefs and Similarweb have also launched AI search intelligence products.
But Meiners argues established SEO companies have been too slow to respond.
"The good thing is, I think these players in our space are very, very slow-moving. All the incumbents are just taking a lot of time to really develop features and products. So we were always able to iterate quicker and stay closer to what the customer actually wants."
Peec now employs more than 100 people, primarily in Berlin, and has opened a New York office to expand its US presence. Meiners says the company is aiming to roughly double its New York team to 30 by the end of the year.
