Searchable raises £10.3 million as AI search visibility gains traction

Searchable has raised £10.3 million, putting fresh capital behind a simple but increasingly expensive idea: AI search visibility is becoming its own layer of the marketing stack, not just a bolt-on for SEO teams. Headline led the round at a £62.9 million valuation, a sign that investors are backing the companies trying to own how brands show up inside AI answers, assistant results, and other discovery surfaces.

The London-based startup was founded in 2025 by Chris Donnelly and launched in January 2026, yet it has already moved fast. Searchable said it passed £1.4 million in annual recurring revenue in under 4.5 months and reached about £2 million by mid-May, with nearly 1,000 customers on the platform. Its client list already includes American Express, KPMG, Pfizer, Siemens, Tencent, Boston Consulting Group, DigitalOcean, VaynerMedia, and Havas, plus five enterprise migrations away from legacy SEO tools.

That kind of traction matters because Searchable is not positioning itself as a dashboard alone. The company describes itself as an AI-powered performance marketing platform that helps brands audit, optimize, and execute SEO and answer-engine-optimization work directly. In practice, that means it is trying to solve the problem buyers now feel most sharply: they can see traffic patterns shifting into AI interfaces, but they still lack a clean way to measure visibility, compare against competitors, and act on the gap quickly enough to matter.

The timing of the raise fits a broader market change. Adobe completed its acquisition of Semrush on April 28, 2026, and said AI interfaces and agents are becoming a primary way customers discover, evaluate, and engage brands. Adobe also said AI traffic to U.S. retail sites rose 269% year over year in March 2026. Other reporting has put AI-generated overviews in nearly half of Google searches and said 65% of searches now end without a click. Those numbers are not just reshaping SEO theory; they are pushing budgets toward tools that can influence discovery before the click disappears.

Headline’s involvement sharpens the signal. The firm’s portfolio includes Semrush, Bumble, Farfetch, and Sonos, and its bet on Searchable suggests it sees AI discovery as a category with room for infrastructure, workflow replacement, and eventually distribution economics. Dominic R. Wilhelm has framed the opportunity as a race to avoid invisibility in the new discovery layer, where brands that do not show up inside AI answers risk losing demand before a website visit ever happens.

Donnelly brings the kind of operating history that makes that pitch easier to believe. He previously sold the SEO agency Verb for between £18.5 million and £25 million, depending on the source, and helped scale Lottie to a nine-figure valuation. Searchable now sits at the point where classic SEO discipline is meeting AI-era procurement, and the money says investors think that shift has only just begun.