Artificial intelligence is changing the online search and marketing landscape and a marketing startup, hoping to ride the new wave for small business has raised a $2 million pre-Seed round.
Hall, founded in 2023, is the brainchild of former Dovetail and Atlassian designer Kai Forsyth. The raise was backed by Blackbird.
The martech startup is focused on how businesses and their products and services are found in AI chatbots such as Open AI’s ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude.
Recent analysis by the Pew Research Centre of Google user behaviour in the AI-generated search era has found that people are now less likely to click on sources cited in AI summaries, leading to less organic search traffic in what’s been dubbed The Great Decoupling, and the decline of the $80-plus billion SEO industry optimising search rankings. Google Search Console remains the current go to, but Forsyth is hoping to
The $2 million is for Hall to build infrastructure for businesses to manage their marketing as AI platforms become the primary interface for customer discovery.
Forsyth argues that when someone asks an AI for restaurant recommendations or software comparisons, they’re bypassing traditional search entirely. Yet businesses have no visibility into how they’re represented across those AI platforms, and when an AI recommends a competitor or describes a product incorrectly, companies lack the tools to understand why or how to improve their presence.
He describes Hall as foundational infrastructure to help companies understand how they appear across AI platforms, track how AI conversations translate to business outcomes, and optimise their presence in AI-generated responses.
“The shift from centralised search to distributed AI discovery is just beginning. This creates an entirely new performance marketing channel with different rules, different optimisation strategies, and different success metrics,” Forsyth said.
Hall is building the platform that every business will need to succeed in this AI-first world.
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