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Forget SEO. Generative engine optimization—or GEO—is currently top of mind for brands looking to keep up and stay relevant in the rapidly changing world of online search. As part of the shift in how people find information online, a startup called The Prompting Company just raised $6.5 million to help businesses get their websites and products in AI search results, such as on apps like ChatGPT. “The way that [younger generations] interact with the web is just going to be very different. ChatGPT would probably be the main interface,” says The Prompting Company CEO and co-founder Kevin Chandra. “It’s going to be the place where you do your work, your shopping, everything else.” Only 4 months old, The Prompting Company was part of the Summer 2025 Y Combinator cohort. It helps optimize websites for generative AI by creating an AI-facing site for a business. Today, most companies have websites that are designed for humans, complete with thoughtful design elements and what Chandra describes as “marketing copy.” When an AI agent with a specific user inquiry arrives at a website designed for humans, Chandra says it typically combs through every page of the site in an effort to “synthesize” an answer. Featured Video An Inc.com Featured Presentation But that’s changing. “In this new world, there has to be an AI-facing website and a human-facing website,” Chandra says. “We provide an LLM-facing website.” Chandra says these AI-specific domains are set up a bit differently than a human-facing site would be. They provide a directory from which LLMs can choose specific pages to visit to address a particular question, so that they “don’t have to go through the entire website.” The sites that The Prompting Company sets up for its clients are autonomous, meaning they automatically update based on how the types of prompts coming from LLMs change over time. The Prompting Company already has a roster of businesses it serves, including companies that Chandra says are in the top 100 of the Fortune 500. It also lists companies such as Rho, Rippling, and Motion on its website. Customers pay a monthly subscription fee for The Prompting Company’s GEO services. Chandra, 28, co-founded The Prompting Company alongside Michelle Marcelline, 27, and Albert Purnama, 28, in June. In spite of their youth, the three are already serial founders. They were part of the teams behind AI website builder Typedream, which Beehiiv acquired last year, and Cotter, which authentication startup Stytch acquired in 2021. Chandra says the expertise the team developed at Typedream was actually in part what inspired The Prompting Company. As they were building websites, they started to notice an acceleration in traffic to sites from LLMs directly, as well as from users who were referred by LLMs to websites. “The sites that we were making were for humans, they had a lot of design and had a lot of animation like that. But for LLMs, it was really, really hard for them to understand what’s going on on the page,” he says. “So we thought to ourselves, ‘Okay, we have been making websites for humans, let’s give it a go for agents.’” There’s always an inherent risk when building a business or catering to an ever-changing technology. It’s a lesson that numerous publishers learned the hard way with Meta and its algorithms. But Chandra says The Prompting Company is built to exactly counter those often inscrutable changes. “It’s through tools like ours that you can see those changes. We are tracking those changes,” he says. “That’s our job to help people understand how these LLMs work.” Of course there are ways that businesses can amp up GEO without signing up for services from a provider like The Prompting Company. Chandra advises entrepreneurs and leaders to do the legwork: check how much traffic a website is receiving and where on the site LLMs are visiting, “then try to discover what questions are your users asking via these LLMs, and try to intercept the intent.”
