17-06-2025
The Wild West Of AI Search And How One Startup Is Helping Brands Navigate The Post-Google Era
Athena founders
The death of Google search as we know it may be greatly exaggerated, but the writing is on the wall. As millions of users increasingly turn to ChatGPT and other AI assistants for everything from restaurant recommendations to product research, a fundamental shift is underway in how consumers discover and evaluate brands. For companies that have spent decades mastering the art of Google SEO, this transition represents both an existential threat and an unprecedented opportunity.
Enter Athena, a five-person startup that claims to have cracked the code on what founder and CEO Andrew Yan calls "Gen AI Engine Optimization" – essentially SEO for the age of artificial intelligence. Athena has raised 2.2 million dollars from Y Combinator, FCVC, Red Bike Capital, Amino Capital, and various search and SEO industry angels. The company currently serves over 90 customers across retail, e-commerce, and B2B SaaS sectors has emerged from stealth just months ago.
Yan's journey to founding Athena began during his tenure on Google's search information acquisition team, where he witnessed firsthand the tectonic shifts reshaping how people find information. "I realized that search and shopping and how people are discovering products is about to massively change and do this 180-degree turn," he explains. "People are using ChatGPT like a personal assistant, and they're trusting it more than Google – it's becoming more persuasive, and people are relying on it even more to make decisions."
This insight led Yan to a sobering realization: hundreds of billions of dollars in brand value that companies have built through traditional Google advertising and SEO could be at risk. "It's no longer just informational – it's actually going down into the decision-making layer," he says of AI-powered search. "Right now, it's kind of this wild west where there are hundreds of billions of brand dollars worth of brand value at stake."
What sets Athena apart in this emerging market isn't just its technology, but its execution speed. While established SEO platforms like Ahrefs and SEMrush attempt to adapt their traditional tools to the AI era, and newer competitors like Orderly race to build similar solutions, Athena has focused on delivering what Yan calls "the fastest time to value" – customers can sign up and receive actionable insights within minutes.
The company's approach centers on four key pillars: Gen AI monitoring, Gen AI insights, actionable recommendations, and attribution of impact. This last component may be the most crucial differentiator. "We had a customer who used our tool to help them beat out much bigger competitors who are 20 to 30 times as big," Andrew notes. "Using Athena, they're able to beat them on Gen AI search, which is indicative of this wild west – how the right company with the right tool in this space can actually have an outsized presence."
Athena platfrom
Perhaps more intriguing than Athena's technology is its business model innovation. Rather than following the traditional SaaS playbook of flat monthly fees, the company has adopted a credit-based system that scales with customer success. Users pay a platform fee and receive an initial bucket of credits, but can purchase additional credits as they see value and want to expand their AI search optimization efforts.
"This allows us to align our incentives with our customers," Yan explains. "We win when our customers win and they see value in the data and want to buy more credits." The model also provides flexibility – companies can choose to track many prompts with shallow data or focus deeply on fewer search queries, depending on their needs.
This approach reflects a broader trend in AI-powered software toward outcome-based pricing models, though it requires educating both customers and investors accustomed to predictable monthly recurring revenue. "Obviously, investors are used to the traditional monthly SaaS fee," Andrew acknowledges. "But when I speak to them about the credit-based system, they get that we want to be able to align our incentives with our customers."
Athena's rapid growth exemplifies what Yan sees as a fundamental shift in startup dynamics. The company has achieved its traction with just five employees, all based in San Francisco, leveraging AI tools like Cursor, Windsurf, and Claude to punch above their weight class. "We had our first line of code in February, and now we're almost 100 customers, with revenue growing, doubling consistently month-on-month," he says. "This wouldn't be possible without these tools."
This efficiency reflects what some observers call "vibe coding" – the ability of small teams to achieve outsized impact through AI-powered development tools. Andrew frames it differently: "AI is giving people leverage. Whereas before it might take three software engineers, now you only need one, and if they're using the right tools the right way, then a smaller company can compete."
The implications extend beyond Athena's own operations. Y Combinator companies, Andrew suggests, are growing faster than ever before, with smaller team sizes achieving rapid scaling that would have required much larger organizations in the pre-AI era.
For all the talk of AI transformation, Athena's value proposition comes down to concrete, actionable insights. Take a Fortune 500 company like Adobe (used here as a hypothetical example): the company might discover through Athena's analysis that certain content assets are performing poorly in AI search results, presenting an opportunity to refresh existing content rather than creating new material from scratch.
"Here are your top-performing Gen AI content pieces, and here are your worst-performing ones," Yan explains the typical customer interaction. "The worst-performing ones are where you have the most opportunity to refresh, improve, and increase the performance of these content pieces for Gen AI search."
This granular approach to optimization reflects the challenge facing brands in the AI era: unlike traditional Google search, where ranking factors are well-understood (if constantly evolving), AI search optimization requires entirely new strategies and metrics.
While Athena's growth metrics are impressive – the company reports mid-six-figure revenue and expects to reach several million dollars in annual recurring revenue by year-end – the broader AI software market faces a critical challenge: customer loyalty. Unlike traditional SaaS products that become deeply embedded in business processes, many AI tools remain experimental, leading to higher churn rates and making it harder to build sustainable businesses.
This dynamic has raised the bar for AI startups seeking venture capital. Where once a YC demo day company might attract Sand Hill Road attention with modest traction, observers now suggest AI companies need closer to one million dollars in annual recurring revenue to be taken seriously by top-tier VCs.
Yan seems confident Athena can clear this hurdle, but the broader question remains: as AI search continues to evolve rapidly, will specialized optimization tools like Athena become essential business infrastructure, or will they remain nice-to-have experiments that companies abandon when budgets tighten?
Whether Athena succeeds or fails, the company represents a bet on an inevitable transition. As AI assistants become more sophisticated and users grow more comfortable relying on them for high-stakes decisions, the ability to influence these systems will become increasingly valuable. The question isn't whether this transformation will happen – it's who will emerge as the winners when the dust settles.
For brands, the choice is becoming clear: adapt to the new reality of AI-mediated discovery, or risk becoming invisible to a generation of consumers who see ChatGPT, not Google, as their primary research tool. Companies like Athena are betting that this transition creates a multi-billion-dollar market opportunity. Time will tell if they're right – but in the wild west of AI search, the early movers may have the best chance of staking their claim to valuable territory.
