People are increasingly asking AI, not Google, to help them discover products. A recent shopping report says Americans this holiday season will likely turn to large language models to find gifts, deals, and sales instead of traditional search. Retailers could see up to a 520 percent increase in traffic from chatbots and AI prompts in 2025 compared to 2024, according to the report. For brands, that means figuring out how to show up in AI-generated recommendations, and fast.
This surge in AI-driven traffic is the bet behind The Prompting Company, a Y Combinator-backed startup helping products get mentioned in AI apps through generative engine optimization, a strategy designed for a future where AI agents browse the internet on users’ behalf. The four-month-old startup, founded by Kevin Chandra, Michelle Marcelline, and Albert Punama, has raised six and a half million dollars in seed funding and already counts Rippling, Rho, Motion, Vapi, Fondo, Kernel, and Traceloop as customers.
Over the past year, most of the growth on websites has come from AI bots, not people, according to co-founder and CEO Kevin Chandra. He stated that developers are already asking AI tools for product recommendations inside their workflows, and that people, over time, will be less involved in parts of the purchasing funnel. As AI becomes the first touchpoint for product discovery and agents eventually transact on a user’s behalf, The Prompting Company believes brands must learn how to market to agents as well as humans.
What that means, according to Chandra, is that brands will need an AI-facing website, a version of their site made for agents without navigation bars, pop-ups, or marketing fluff. Most businesses still design websites only for humans, but the fastest-growing segment of users on the internet today is AI agents and they need a completely different interface.
Here is how the platform works. First, it identifies and analyzes the questions AI agents are asking by probing models to uncover specific purchase-intent queries. It then creates structured content that answers those questions and automatically routes AI agents to AI-optimized pages. The Y Combinator-backed startup helps companies publish thousands of AI-friendly pages so large language models can cite their answers even when they do not rank in traditional search engine optimization.
While search engine optimization still matters, Chandra argues that generative engine optimization is quickly becoming the priority for brands. In generative engine optimization, product results surface organically based on relevance to the conversation, not paid keywords or search rankings. This shift may also change how people buy products. Emerging protocols, including Google’s Agent-to-Agent framework and OpenAI’s partnership with Stripe, could further accelerate adoption by allowing AI agents to browse and complete purchases on behalf of users, moving them from discovery to transaction.
Imagine you are a large e-commerce store. Users can buy items, make returns, compare products, or search for promotions. The Prompting Company helps its customers expose those actions to AI agents. Right now, these agents are not yet clicking those options or accessing application programming interfaces directly, but that is expected to change in the coming months. Once that becomes widespread and attribution improves, the company sees a path toward more advertising or conversion-driven models. For now, it is focused on helping companies get discovered and recommended by AI.
So far, The Prompting Company serves mostly fintech, developer tools, and enterprise software as a service customers. The team says a Fortune 10 company is also using its product, for which it currently hosts about half a million pages. Overall, traffic driven to client sites is in the double-digit millions per month. The Prompting Company uses a subscription model, charging customers based on the number of prompts tracked and pages hosted.
The company’s founders, Indonesian immigrants who met as freshmen, previously built Y Combinator-backed Typedream, a startup that allowed users to build and launch websites in minutes with artificial intelligence. They also built Cotter, a passwordless authentication software development kit that was acquired by Stytch. With The Prompting Company, they are trying to change how people discover and purchase products in the AI era. The seed money, 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 the new distribution channel. The startup is also collaborating with NVIDIA on next-generation AI search.
If your product is not discovered or cited in ChatGPT, you are not going to make it, said Arnav Sahu, partner at Peak XV Partners. The firm is thrilled to back The Prompting Company as they build the core infrastructure for product discovery, already powering Fortune 10 companies and fast-growing startups. Kevin, Michelle, and Albert are repeat Y Combinator founders, and they are awesome.