For marketers, search engine optimizers, and yes, lowly journalists, the sky is falling down. All conventional wisdom on how to win traffic from Google is crumbling, with the new black box of chatbots emerging in its stead. And while there are plenty of tools that can tell you how badly you’re performing in ChatGPT or Anthropic searches, there are few options that give concrete feedback on how to improve—and hopefully survive to write content for another day.
The New York and San Francisco-based startup AirOps is hoping to change that, and it has a brand-new $225 million valuation, with $40 million in funding led by Greylock, to bring marketers into the promised new land of AI.
“The shift in discovery and consideration from traditional search to LLMs is a hair-on-fire problem for CMOs,” Greylock partner Mike Duboe said in an email. “The entire marketing industry is having to re-learn how to influence organic growth.”
AirOps CEO Alex Halliday founded the company in early 2022 after leading product at other fast-growing startups like Teespring and MasterClass. This was nearly a year before the public launch of ChatGPT, and AirOps did not initially have an AI focus, instead helping non-technical employees at companies get access to data. As large language models became more readily available and they began incorporating AI into the product, AirOps realized that marketers were becoming their key users, using the data to either create or refresh content for their companies.
AirOps’ core product allows marketers to analyze and track all of the public information associated with their companies—whether on blog posts, customer testimonials, or even Reddit posts and news articles—and figure out how to keep it fresh. It’s used by the likes of Monday.com, Webflow, and Ramp. The workflow itself resembles the kind of esoteric tools of SaaS offerings that should probably require an advanced degree, and I won’t try to describe in great detail, but the real takeaway is the changing role of marketers.
According to Halliday, the pillar of driving growth in the era of SEO was recycling, or repackaging content that already existed on the web. Now, he says that AI agents starve for novel data or opinions that haven’t already been published. That means that marketers can’t rely on the same, tired listicles or tired bullet-point articles of days gone by, but instead need to generate original ideas—a much more energy-intensive task that, optimistically, makes their roles not only more valuable, but more interesting.
We seem to be walking a tight-rope. On either side is peril—AI-generated slop, and the death of media as we know it, with LLMs swallowing any last dollars of Web 2.0. But Halliday insists that we’re entering a “golden age of quality content,” where AI agents reward brands (and publications like Fortune) that put out the best quality information. His company, rather than helping marketers press a single button and receive enough terrible content to last a lifetime, is aimed at helping them “add to the conversation” by creating unique content in a data-rich way.
I was heartened to hear that in this new future, it’s even more important for companies to get their ideas placed in outlets like Fortune (It’s probably why my pitch count only seems to increase every week.) And while the business model for marketers is uncertain—will chatbots reliably direct readers to their websites and products?—it’s even murkier for news outlets, which theoretically have never held as much domain authority.
If anyone has an idea of how to create the AirOps for media, I’m all ears. And on that note, I’m headed out on paternity leave through the end of the year. I hope you’ve figured it all out by the time I get back.
Leo Schwartz
X: @leomschwartz
Email: leo.schwartz@fortune.com
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VENTURE DEALS
– Fastbreak AI, a Charlotte, N.C.-based AI-powered sports operations software company, raised $40 million in Series A funding from Greycroft, GTMfund, and others.
– Onchilles Pharma, a San Diego, Calif.-based developer of cytotoxic therapeutics, raised $25 million in Series A1 funding from Invivium Capital, Kennedy Lewis Investment Management, and others.
– Terranova, a San Francisco-based developer of terraforming robotics, raised $7 million in seed funding. Outlander and Congruent Ventures led the round and was joined by GoAhead Ventures, Gothams, and Ponderosa.
– Avallon, a New York City-based developer of agentic AI technology designed to automate insurance claims tasks, raised $4.6 million in seed funding. Frontline Ventures led the round and was joined by Y Combinator, 1984, and others.
PRIVATE EQUITY
– Hexaware, backed by Private Equity, acquired CyberSolve, a Sterling, Va.-based identity and access management solutions company. Financial terms were not disclosed.
