People are increasingly asking artificial intelligence, not Google, for help in product discovery. Recent shopping According to the report, Americans are most definitely to turn to large language models this holiday season to find gifts, deals and sales, relatively than traditional search.
The report shows that in 2025, retailers could see a 520% increase in traffic generated by chatbots and AI suggestions compared to 2024. For brands, this implies quickly finding a way to appear in AI-generated recommendations.
The reason is the rapid increase in AI-powered traffic Prompting Companya YC-backed startup that helps product mentions appear in AI applications through GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), a strategy designed for a future where AI agents browse the web on behalf of users.
A four-month-old startup, founded by Kevin Chandra, Michelle Marcelline AND Albert Punamahas raised $6.5 million in seed funding and already counts Rippling, Rho, Motion, Vapi, Fondo, Kernel and Traceloop among its clients.
“Over the past year, most of the website growth has come from AI bots, not humans,” co-founder and CEO Chandra told TechCrunch. “We are already seeing developers asking AI tools for product recommendations as part of their workflows, and we believe that over time, humans will become less engaged with particular elements of the purchase journey.”
As artificial intelligence becomes the first point of contact in product discovery and agents ultimately make transactions on the user’s behalf, The Prompting Company believes that brands must learn to promote each agents and people.
According to Chandra, this implies brands will need an AI-enabled website, a version of a website built for agents without the navigation bars, pop-ups and marketing gibberish. “Most companies still design websites solely for people,” Chandra told TechCrunch. “But the fastest-growing segment of Internet users today are AI agents, who need a completely different interface.”
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Here’s how the platform works: First, it identifies and analyzes questions asked by AI agents, examining models to discover specific purchase intent queries. It then creates structured content that answers these questions and robotically directs AI agents to “AI-optimized pages.”
The Launch powered by Y Combinator helps firms publish hundreds of AI-friendly pages so LLMs can get their answers cited even if they do not rank in traditional search engine optimization. (YC has supported similar startups including Relixir, Writesonic and Bear.)
While search engine optimization still matters, Chandra says GEO is quickly becoming a priority for brands. In GEO, product results appear organically based on relevance to the conversation, not paid keywords or search rankings.
This change might also change the way people buy products. Emerging protocols, including Google’s Agent-to-Agent platform and OpenAI’s partnership with Stripe, could further speed up adoption by enabling AI agents to review and fulfill purchases on behalf of users, taking them from discovery to transaction.
“Imagine you run a large e-commerce store. Users can purchase products, make returns, compare products or search for promotions. We help our customers share these actions with AI agents. Currently, these agents do not yet click on these options or access APIs directly, but we expect this to change in the coming months,” said Chandra. “When this becomes widespread and attribution improves, we will see a path towards more ad- or conversion-based models. For now, our focus is on helping businesses discover and recommend businesses through AI.”
To date, The Prompting Company primarily serves clients in the fintech, software tools, and SaaS enterprise industries. The team says its product is also used by Fortune 10 firms, for which it currently powers about half a million web sites.
Overall, traffic to client sites is in the double-digit tens of millions per thirty days. Prompting Company uses a subscription model, charging customers based on the variety of prompts tracked and pages hosted.
The company’s founders, Indonesian immigrants who met in their first yr, had previously built a YC-backed company Written dream (YC W20), a startup that enabled users to create and launch web sites in minutes using artificial intelligence, before Lovable and recent entrants took off (beehiiv acquired Typedream last June). The founders also built Cotter, a passwordless authentication SDK that was acquired by Stytch.
With The Prompting Company, they are trying to change the way people discover and buy products in the age of artificial intelligence. The seed funding raised from Peak XV Partners, Base10, Y Combinator, Firedrop and angels including Logan Kilpatrick will help the company scale its platform and partnerships as AI-powered discovery becomes a recent distribution channel. The startup is also working with NVIDIA to search for next-generation artificial intelligence.
“If your product is not discovered or cited on ChatGPT, it means you are,” said Arnav Sahu, partner at Peak XV Partners. “We are thrilled to support The Prompting Company as they build the foundational infrastructure for product discovery – already powering Fortune 10 companies and high-growth startups. Kevin, Michelle and Albert are multiple YC founders and they are amazing.”