Searchable raises $14M to capture the AI search opportunity
Searchable, a platform that helps businesses optimise their presence in AI-driven search, has raised $14 million in a funding round led by Headline, valuing the company at $85 million. The raise follows a $4 million round led by Freestyle in December 2025 and brings total funding to $18 million.
The investment comes at a moment of significant structural change in how consumers find products online. AI-generated overviews now appear in nearly half of all Google searches, 65% of searches end without a click, and AI-enabled search is projected to reach roughly 70% penetration by 2027. For founders who have built customer acquisition strategies around organic search, those trends have direct implications for growth.
What Searchable does
Where traditional SEO platforms focus on Google’s link-based results, Searchable targets the answers generated by AI systems such as ChatGPT and Claude. AI engines draw on a broader and less transparent set of signals than conventional search algorithms, making visibility harder to diagnose and fix without dedicated tooling.
The platform automates audits, content optimisation, and technical fixes across multiple AI search platforms. According to the company’s own data, customers arriving via LLMs convert at three times the rate of those arriving through traditional search. Enterprise customers report a 22% average increase in AI-driven traffic within their first 60 days on the platform.
Traction and backers
In the 60 days prior to the announcement, Searchable onboarded more than 500 paying customers, converted five enterprise clients from incumbent SEO platforms, and crossed $100,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Annual recurring revenue now stands at $2.6 million. Current clients include American Express, KPMG, Siemens, Pfizer, Tencent, Boston Consulting Group, VaynerMedia and Havas.
Headline, whose portfolio includes Bumble, Farfetch, and Sonos, has prior form in this category. The firm backed Semrush early – the SEO software group Adobe acquired for $1.9 billion – and partner Dominic R. Wilhelm has drawn an explicit comparison between that investment and this one.
“We backed Semrush early as the category leader and exited following its IPO at around a $2 billion market cap,” Wilhelm said. “Now we see a new generation of businesses coming up, and Searchable is primed to win this market.”
The founder’s background
Chris Donnelly founded Searchable after selling SEO agency Verb for $25 million and scaling care marketplace Lottie.Org to a nine-figure valuation. He argues that the shift to AI search represents a compressing window for brands – and for the tools that serve them.
“For more than a decade, SEO has been labour intensive and expensive,” Donnelly said. “Over the next two years, a large share of that work becomes automatable. Our goal is to give companies an execution layer for AI search that cuts operational SEO costs by up to 40% while growing high-intent traffic.”
The funding will be used to accelerate product development and expand Searchable’s presence in the US and UK markets.
What this means for the market
Industry observers expect AI search software to divide between monitoring tools – which track brand mentions across AI engines – and execution platforms, which automate the underlying work required to improve visibility. Searchable is positioning itself in the latter category, on the basis that tracking without fixing has limited commercial value.
Donnelly is forecasting three structural shifts over the next two years: the automation of repetitive SEO tasks through agentic AI systems; the rise of AI commerce as a standalone optimisation layer; and the convergence of paid and organic AI visibility into unified attribution models. How quickly those shifts materialise will depend in part on the pace at which AI search displaces conventional search traffic – and how urgently brands treat the transition as a growth problem rather than a technical one.
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