Does AI even know you exist? Seattle startup Parsnipp helps brands find out, and do something about it

Seattle startup Parsnipp today launched its platform to help brands ensure that the likes of Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini know them well enough to casually drop their names in conversation.

The company, started by two veterans of e-commerce marketing platform Pixlee, is entering the fast-growing field known as Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO. As more consumers opt for AI tools over search engines, new startups and tools are emerging to help brands track and improve how they show up in AI-generated answers.

Parsnipp, founded last fall, is looking to differentiate itself by modeling how people actually use AI — with personas and multi-turn conversations rather than isolated prompts — an approach that it says produces more accurate data.

Co-founder and CEO Andrew Higgins said the opportunity mirrors one he’s seen before. At Pixlee, he watched marketers scramble to catch up after consumer behavior moved to social media. He sees the same gap now with AI.

The world is “starting to wake up to the fact that this is a real consumer channel,” he said.

Awad Sayeed, Parsnipp co-founder and CTO, previously co-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 it works: 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 an analytics dashboard with recommendations for improving visibility. Tactics could include fixing website structure and metadata, improving product feeds, creating new content targeting specific AI queries, or strengthening a brand’s presence on review sites and social media.

We ran GeekWire through the tool and received a GEO score of 207 out of a possible 851 — a result Higgins said is pretty typical. Most brands in the company’s testing, including large global ones, are scoring between 150 and 350. 

“GEO is new, and there’s still significant room for marketers to improve AI visibility,” he said. “That gap is the opportunity.”

Broader landscape: Parsnipp is entering a crowded field. Established players include Profound, which has raised $35 million from Sequoia Capital, and OtterlyAI, 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 own GEO tool.

Higgins said the market is still nascent enough that there’s room for a different approach, noting that the vast majority of marketers haven’t even begun exploring GEO tools.

GEO vs. SEO: With traditional search engine optimization (SEO), marketers were optimizing for a single algorithm: Google’s index. With GEO, the variables are much greater.

“Instead of the monolith and one algorithm we’re optimizing for, there’s dozens,” Higgins said, noting that even a single provider like OpenAI runs multiple models under the hood, each of which processes and responds to queries differently.

Longer-term: Beyond visibility tracking and improvement, Parsnipp has its eye on what Higgins believes is the bigger opportunity: agentic commerce, in which AI systems don’t just recommend products but actually buy them on behalf of consumers. 

The company plans to add tools for optimizing product catalogs for AI-powered shopping experiences, as well as an ad management system for placing ads directly inside LLM conversations. Both features are listed as “coming soon.”

Higgins compared the current moment to the early days of TikTok, when consumer usage was exploding but marketers had no analytics, no developer console, and no way to buy ads. 

Many of the capabilities he envisions supporting — paid ads inside AI conversations, direct purchasing through chatbots — haven’t been rolled out yet by the major AI labs. For now, Parsnipp is focused on the tools marketers can put to work immediately.

It’s available to try for free at parsnipp.com.