The traditional playbook for getting noticed online—stuff keywords into web pages, build backlinks, watch the Google rankings climb—may not be dead. But it's certainly feeling ill.
Petra Labs, a New York startup that launched last year, is betting that enterprises will pay handsomely for help navigating what comes next: a world where ChatGPT and Perplexity don't just point users to websites, but answer questions directly, often leaving traditional search results on the cutting room floor. On July 22, 2026, the company announced it had raised $5.2 million in seed funding led by Work-Bench, with Afore and Pathlight joining the round alongside a handful of strategic angels.
The funding values the company's proposition that brands now need something beyond traditional search engine optimization. Call it answer engine optimization, or AEO in the parlance Petra Labs is pushing. The idea? Get your product mentioned inside the AI-generated responses that increasingly dominate the top of search results—or replace them entirely on platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity.
It's not a cheap service. Pricing lands in the low-to-mid five figures monthly, scaled to match brand complexity and how much attribution detail a client demands.
Software That Doesn't Stop at Charts
What Petra Labs calls itself—"an AI search team" for enterprises—hints at how it differentiates from the usual SaaS suspects. The platform tracks where and how often brands surface in AI-generated answers across different models. It analyzes query patterns to spot demand. And it attempts something trickier: tying AI search exposure back to actual pipeline through custom attribution models.
That's the measurement layer. But here's where Petra diverges from tools like Semrush or BrightEdge, which have scrambled to add AI visibility dashboards of their own. Petra doesn't hand you a report and wish you luck. The company embeds its own specialists—what it calls "AEO experts"—who handle content optimization, technical audits, and even earned media placements meant to boost AI citations. Execution, not just insights.
Whether that bundled model scales profitably remains to be seen. But it speaks to a deeper shift in how visibility works when links matter less.
The Zero-Click Problem
Consider the numbers. By June 2026, Pew Research found that 60% of U.S. adults were regularly reading AI-generated summaries atop their search results. Earlier studies had shown what comes next: when those summaries appear, users click through to actual websites far less often. The so-called "zero-click search" was already a thorn in publishers' sides before ChatGPT arrived. Now it's metastasizing.
Google's AI Overviews, rolled out broadly in May 2024, turned search result pages into something fundamentally different. Gartner predicted in early 2024 that traditional search volume would crater by 25% within two years as users leaned into chatbots. McKinsey's consumer research from June 2026 backed that up, particularly among younger buyers who now treat AI as a shopping companion.
For brands, the math is uncomfortable. If your ideal customer never clicks through to your website—never even sees it listed—how do you get noticed at all?
Early Customers and Real Traction
Petra counts Zapier and Rippling among its clients, according to the company's LinkedIn posts in late June. The Zapier engagement, as described, involved deploying Petra's specialists alongside the automation company's in-house SEO team, weaving platform data into existing workflows. Both brands appeared in Petra's LinkedIn posts in late June.
That's notable traction for a company founded in 2025, though the client list remains short enough that each logo still matters. The founding team brings adjacent experience: CEO Sami Akkawi spent five years at Strategy& advising private equity firms on marketing acquisitions. CTO Rishi Penmetcha built large-scale data systems and AI agents at Traba, a workforce platform. COO Ramie Khoury led growth at the same company.
It's a team steeped in systems-thinking and B2B motion, which makes sense given the enterprise pricing and bundled service model. Less clear is how many specialists Petra can afford to embed with clients as it scales, and whether that "full-stack execution" promise eventually butts up against unit economics.
The Incumbent Response
Petra isn't operating in a vacuum. Legacy SEO platforms saw the writing on the wall—or at least the AI Overviews cluttering their customers' search results—and moved quickly. Semrush, Similarweb, BrightEdge, and Conductor all updated their products through mid-2026 to track AI citations and chatbot mentions.
But measurement is table stakes now, Petra argues. The pitch is that brands need someone to own outcomes, not just deliver dashboards. That means doing the content work, securing the placements, adjusting the technical infrastructure—essentially serving as an outsourced AI visibility team. Whether enterprises buy that pitch, or decide to build the capability in-house, will determine whether Petra's model holds.
The seed round supports a team of approximately 11 to 50 employees, all based in New York. The company didn't disclose valuation or how it plans to allocate the capital, though hiring specialists and building out attribution tooling would seem like obvious bets.
As search continues fracturing across platforms and AI models, Petra Labs is wagering that brands will pay a premium for someone to keep their names in circulation—even when the circulation no longer involves links, rankings, or much of what SEO once meant. The old playbook is fading. The new one, apparently, comes with a monthly retainer.
