For two decades, the digital world operated under a singular, golden rule: “Content is King.” But in a sleek, fast-paced office in London’s tech corridor, Chris Donnelly is drafting a new constitution.
Donnelly, a serial entrepreneur whose previous exits in luxury marketing and health-tech have already cemented his status as a British tech heavyweight. His newest venture, Searchable, is the first major defensive play for brands in the zero-click era. As AI answer engines such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity increasingly synthesize the web into single, conversational paragraphs, the traditional SEO industry is facing an existential crisis. If a user gets their answer directly from an AI bot and never clicks a link, the $680 billion search economy as we know it evaporates.
Searchable isn’t just another marketing tool; it is an AI visibility and optimisation engine for a world where search results are no longer a list, but a conversation. Founded in July 2025 by Donnelly alongside AI engineers Arya Nagabhyru and Sam Hogan, the company moved with a velocity that has startled the industry, going from prototype to a £40 million valuation in a matter of months.
The team brings a special forces pedigree to the problem. Nagabhyru is an AI engineer with a background in Y Combinator-backed ventures, while Hogan is a veteran of agent-based search systems. Together, they have built a platform that treats a brand’s online presence not as a collection of pages, but as a data source for Large Language Models (LLMs).
The platform’s core functionality, known as Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), allows marketing teams to see inside the black box of AI. Currently, if you ask an AI model for the “best sustainable running shoes,” the model pulls from a massive, often opaque training set. If your brand isn’t mentioned, or worse, if the AI cites a three-year-old Reddit thread criticizing your quality, you have a perception drift problem.
Searchable’s suite of tools allows companies to:
- Audit AI Mentions: Track exactly how often and in what context a brand is cited across various LLMs.
- Identify Citation Sources: Pinpoint which specific articles or data points the AI is using to form its opinions.
- Optimize for “Machine Readability”: Use AI agents to develop strategies, rewrite site copy and produce schema markup so that it is more likely to be ingested and recommended by AI bots.
The founders believe that if your brand narrative isn’t legible to AI, you simply don’t exist in the modern funnel. The market has responded to their effort with uncharacteristic speed. In late 2025, Searchable closed a £3.4 million (around $4 million) seed round led by Freestyle VC.
Industry analysts suggest that by 2028, AI-driven answer traffic could surpass traditional search queries. For the “mega-brands” that Donnelly says are already quietly using Searchable, the stakes are existential.
Searchable represents more than just a clever software play; it is a harbinger of the next epoch of the internet. As we move from an internet of “searching” to an internet of “finding,” the power shifts from those who host the most links to those who provide the most consumable truths.
While some critics argue that AEO might further prioritize big-budget brands that can afford to game the AI, Donnelly views it as a necessary evolution. In the battle for the future of information, Searchable has built the first high-powered radar for the invisible war of the bots. For CMOs around the globe, the message is clear: the machines are reading. It’s time to make sure they like what they see.
