# AEO Company Landscape A short list of the companies that lead Agent Engine Optimisation, by layer. Figures are press-reported, October 2026. ## 1 · Visibility and action platforms | Company | Base | Latest funding | Why it matters | |---|---|---|---| | **Profound** | New York | $180M Series D at $1.8B, Sept 2026 (Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins)^[https://www.tryprofound.com/newsroom/profound-raises-usd180m-series-d-at-usd1-8b-valuation-to-build-the-ai-platform-for-marketing-teams] | Category leader. Raised ~$335M in two years. Now post-trains its own models for marketing tasks. No public ARR. | | **[[Peec AI]]** | Berlin | $21M Series A, Nov 2025 (Singular); reported raise at $200M pre-money, June 2026 | Capital-efficient challenger. ~$10M ARR by May 2026. Strong with agencies and mid-market. | | **Bluefish** | New York | $43M Series B, Apr 2026 (Threshold, NEA)^[https://www.contentgrip.com/bluefish-series-b-agentic-marketing/] | Enterprise focus. About 10% of the Fortune 500. Tracks Amazon Rufus as well as chat assistants. | | **AirOps** | New York | $40M Series B, Nov 2025 (Greylock)^[https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251110823725/en/AirOps-Raises-$40M-to-Redefine-How-Brands-Compete-in-the-Era-of-AI-Search] | The "act" side. Content engineering workflows. Quill agent (May 2026) updates content to keep visibility. | | **Scrunch** | San Francisco | Acquired by Sitecore, June 2026, ~$225M (Bloomberg, unconfirmed)^[https://www.techtarget.com/enterprise-software/news/366643973/Sitecore-acquires-Scrunch-for-answer-engine-optimization] | Closest to true *agent* optimisation. Its Agent Experience Platform serves agent-readable versions of a site. | ## 2 · Incumbents that bundled it - **Adobe + Semrush.** $1.9B all-cash deal, announced Nov 2025. Brand visibility becomes part of Adobe's experience cloud.^[https://searchengineland.com/adobe-semrush-464905] - **Ahrefs Brand Radar.** Included for all Ahrefs users. Tracks AI answers, YouTube, TikTok and Reddit. - **HubSpot.** Bought XFunnel (Oct 2025, ~$30M). - Effect: basic visibility tracking is now a bundled feature. Standalone trackers must move to action or depth. ## 3 · Rails for agents | Company | Role | Signal | |---|---|---| | **Cloudflare** | Sits in front of ~20% of the web. Decides what agents can crawl, in what format, at what price. | Markdown for Agents, Web Bot Auth, pay per crawl. See [[Agent-Ready Web Stack]]. | | **Parallel Web Systems** | Web search and research APIs built for agents. Founder: Parag Agrawal. | $100M Series B at $2B, Apr 2026 (Sequoia). Clay, Harvey, Notion as customers.^[https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/29/parallel-web-systems-hits-2b-valuation-five-months-after-its-last-big-raise/] | | **Exa** | Search engine for AI agents. Cursor and Cognition use it. | $250M Series C at $2.2B, May 2026 (a16z).^[https://exa.ai/blog/announcing-series-c] | | **TollBit** | Bot analytics and content licensing for publishers. | Main source of crawl-to-referral data. | - Parallel and Exa are the "search engines" agents query. Ranking well there is a new AEO surface. No tool tracks it yet. ## 4 · Commerce rails - **Google + Shopify** (UCP), **OpenAI + Stripe** (ACP), **Visa**, **Mastercard**. See [[Agentic Commerce Protocols]]. ## Left out on purpose - Evertune, AthenaHQ, Writesonic, Azoma and many small trackers. Funding data is thin or only from competitor pages. Revisit if they show real traction. ## Read of the market - Two years from first seed to $1.8B (Profound). Hot, crowded and consolidating. - The tracker layer faces pressure from free bundled tools and from platform ads (ChatGPT Ads since Feb 2026). - The defensible positions sit where the agent runs: search APIs, CDN, payments and protocols. ---- tags: #boat #ai #investing links: [[Agent Engine Optimisation MOC]] [[Peec AI]] [[AI era Defensibility]]