Does AI even know you exist? Seattle startup Parsnipp helps brands discover, and act on – GeekWire
Seattle startup Parsnipp today launched its platform to help brands make sure the likes of Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini know them well enough to stop just dropping their names in a conversation.
The company, started by two veterans of the e-commerce marketing platform Pixlee, is entering the fast-growing field known as Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO. As more consumers choose AI tools over search engines, new startups and tools are emerging to help companies track and improve how they appear in AI-generated responses.
Parsnipp, founded last fall, is looking to differentiate itself by modeling how people actually use AI — with people and dynamic conversations rather than isolated alerts — a method it says produces more accurate data.
Founder and CEO Andrew Higgins said the opportunity was unlike any he had seen before. At Pixlee, he watched marketers struggle to find answers after consumer behavior shifted to social media. You see the same gap now with AI.
The country is “starting to wake up to the fact that this is a real consumer channel,” he said.
Awad Sayeed, Parsnipp’s founder and CTO, previously founded Pixlee and built its original technology, spending 11 years at the company before it was acquired by Emplifi in 2022.
Parsnipp has raised about $500,000 in a pre-seed round from a mix of angel investors and venture scout funds, and has three full-time employees. It plans to raise a larger round later this year.
How does this work: The platform is free to try, with paid plans starting at $39.99 per month. Users set up their brand, model customer personas, choose conversation topics to track, and identify competitors.
Parsnipp then simulates thousands of interactions across multiple LLMs and aggregates the results into a statistical dashboard with recommendations to improve visibility. Tactics can include tweaking website design and metadata, improving product placement, creating new content targeting specific AI questions, or strengthening the brand’s presence on review sites and social media.
We ran GeekWire with the tool and got a GEO score of 207 out of 851 — a result that Higgins said was pretty typical. Most brands in the company’s test, including the world’s largest, score between 150 and 350.
“GEO is new, and there is still significant room for marketers to improve AI visibility,” he said. “That gap is an opportunity.”
Broad landscape: Parsnipp enters the crowded arena. Established players include Profound, which raised $35 million in Sequoia Capital, and OtterlyAI, which was named a Gartner Cool Vendor. SEO companies like Semrush and Ahrefs have added GEO features to their platforms. Closer to home, Seattle-based Gradial raised $35 million in December and launched its GEO tool.
Higgins said the market is still growing enough that there’s room for a different approach, noting that most marketers haven’t started exploring GEO tools yet.
GEO versus SEO: With traditional search engine optimization (SEO), marketers have been optimizing for one algorithm: Google’s index. With GEO, the variables are much greater.
“Instead of a monolith and one algorithm that we’re optimizing, there’s a bunch,” Higgins said, noting that even a single provider like OpenAI uses multiple models under the hood, each of which generates and answers questions differently.
Long term: Beyond tracking and visibility development, Parsnipp has its eye on what Higgins believes is a huge opportunity: agency commerce, where AI systems not only recommend products but actually buy them on behalf of consumers.
The company plans to add tools to improve the product catalog for an AI-powered shopping experience, and an ad management system to place ads directly within LLM conversations. Both features are listed as “coming soon.”
Higgins compared the current era to the early days of TikTok, when consumer usage was exploding but advertisers had no analytics, no developer console, and no way to buy ads.
Many of the capabilities they think support them – paid ads in AI chats, direct purchases with chatbots – have yet to be rolled out by the big AI labs. For now, Parsnipp is focusing on tools that marketers can use immediately.
It’s available to try for free at parsnipp.com.
