$14M Series A, $85M Valuation

Searchable, a London-based AI performance marketing platform, has raised €11.9M ($14M) in Series A funding led by Headline, valuing the company at €72.1M ($85M). The round comes just five months after Searchable's €3.4M ($4M) pre-seed, more than doubling its valuation in under half a year.

From SEO to "AI Search"

Searchable helps brands track and improve how they show up inside AI-generated answers, the responses ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity give instead of a page of blue links. The platform pulls in data from tools like Google Analytics and Search Console, monitors visibility across multiple AI engines, and uses AI agents to act on the gaps it finds.

Founder Chris Donnelly knows the old game well. He previously built and sold SEO agency Verb for $25M. His read on where search is heading is blunt: traditional optimisation is becoming labour-intensive and expensive, and a large share of that manual SEO work is about to become automatable.

The traction backs up the thesis. Searchable reached $2M in revenue in around four and a half months and has onboarded close to 1,000 customers.

A Signal From the Investor, Not Just the Founder

Headline led this round. Headline also backed Semrush, one of the most successful SEO software companies ever built. The same investor that bet on the old search optimisation world is now backing what looks like its replacement, and Searchable's valuation jump, from $40M to $85M in five months, suggests the market agrees.

What It Means for Marketing

92% of brands are reportedly invisible to ChatGPT when categories get searched, not ranked poorly, just absent. That is a different failure mode than a bad Google position, and it is one most marketing teams aren't yet measuring, let alone fixing.

Searchable's raise is another data point that AI search visibility (AEO/GEO) is moving from niche experiment to a funded, VC-backed category with its own tooling, agencies and playbooks. For marketers, the practical takeaway isn't to abandon SEO. It's to start testing whether AI models recommend you at all, because the channel that used to reward ranking is starting to reward being the answer.