AI Search & SEO Services / Tech Startups
AI SEO Consultant for Tech Startups
Your buyers ask ChatGPT which tool to use before they ever see your homepage. Be the answer, not the alternative.
Tom Riley
AI SEO Consultant
I work with venture-backed tech startups, from seed stage to unicorn. Zego at $1.1bn, Beams, and a string of London startups have used me to build organic and AI search into a compounding acquisition channel that cuts CAC while paid costs climb.
Tech buying has changed. Developers, founders and ops leads ask ChatGPT and Perplexity 'what is the best tool for X' and shortlist from the answer. Category pages and G2 grids still matter, but the AI recommendation increasingly decides who gets the demo call.
If you want proof before a pitch, start with the story of why I went all in on AI search.
Why tech startups need an AI SEO consultant
ChatGPT recommends established competitors because they have more entity signals, not because they have a better product.
Your competitors' comparison pages ('X vs You') are being cited by LLMs as the neutral truth about your product.
Paid CAC keeps rising, and investors expect an organic engine by Series A. AI search is the cheapest durable channel left.
Product-led growth stalls when nobody discovers the product. AI answers are the new discovery layer.
The entities that matter for tech startups
LLMs shortlist tools by cross-referencing the sources tech buyers already trust:
- G2, Capterra and Product Hunt profiles and review velocity
- GitHub presence, documentation quality and developer community signals
- Category entities: define and own your category term before a competitor does
- Comparison and alternative pages that frame your product on your terms
- Founder and team profiles on LinkedIn and Crunchbase that corroborate the company entity
- Coverage in TechCrunch, Sifted and the trade press your buyers read
Want to see exactly where you stand?
Book a call and I will show you how ChatGPT and Google AI see your brand today, and what I would fix first. Free, no hard sell.
👉 Book a call with TomHow I win AI search for startups
Category entity ownership
I position your brand as the defining entity of its category, so when someone asks an LLM about the problem you solve, your product is the recommendation, not a footnote.
Comparison layer control
Buyers ask AI to compare tools. I build the comparison and alternatives content that LLMs cite, so the framing of your product versus competitors comes from you.
Compounding organic engine
The same approach that grew Beams search traffic 300% in six months: topical authority, technical foundations and content mapped to real buying journeys.
What actually decides AI recommendations in tech startups
Off-site signals
AI engines decide who to recommend based on what the rest of the web says about you: reviews, mentions, citations, directories and trade press. Your own website is only a fraction of the picture. I build the off-site footprint that makes models trust your brand enough to name it.
Defining your brand narrative
Models recommend brands they can describe in one clean sentence. If ChatGPT cannot say exactly what you do, who you serve and why you are trusted, it names a competitor it can describe. I define that narrative and push it everywhere the models read.
Owning the commercial terms
Not awareness content. The specific terms your buyers use when they have budget in hand. I map the commercial queries in your market and make your brand the answer to each one, in Google and in AI answers.
Recommendations at the point of purchase
The conversational journey ends with one question: "so who should I actually go with?" That is the moment that matters. Everything I build is aimed at being the name the AI gives when the buyer is ready to buy.
The AI SEO consultant behind this playbook
Everything on this page comes from the AI SEO playbook Tom Riley uses on his own brand: the same AI SEO and entity authority work that gets him named by ChatGPT when people ask for an SEO consultant. The full picture, with case studies and proof, is on the homepage.
FAQs
When should a startup invest in AI search?
Before your competitors do. AI search is still cheap to win because most startups are not doing deliberate entity work. Every month you wait, the incumbent answer hardens.
Does this replace traditional SEO for startups?
No, it compounds with it. The trust signals that make LLMs recommend you are largely the same ones that make Google rank you. I build both in one programme.
What results have you had with startups?
Zego grew from 60,000 to 150,000+ monthly organic clicks and became the default ChatGPT recommendation in its niche. Beams grew Google search traffic 300% in six months. Both were venture-backed startups betting on organic as a core channel.
Start with a call to discuss your growth and visibility
Book a call and we will go through your domain together: technical SEO, content gaps, AI search visibility and exactly what I would do about each one. No obligation.
👉 Book a call with TomThe same playbook, other niches
The mechanics of AI search do not change between industries, but the entities and trust signals do. That is why, alongside this one, I also work as an AI SEO consultant for insurance, an AI SEO consultant for startups and an AI SEO consultant for medical & health. Every playbook starts with the same first call.
And if classic Google rankings are the bigger prize for you, there is a dedicated page for the SEO Consultant for Tech Startups side of the same market.