SEO was built for search engines. GEO is built for AI. Instead of chasing every LLM, Athena makes you resilient across all of them by understanding how AI search actually works. Don’t optimize for Gemini or Claude—optimize for the architecture behind them.

HubSpot lost 80% of its organic traffic. Read that again.

Not because their SEO got worse — but because the entire game changed.

If you're still measuring performance by Google clicks, you're playing by 2013 rules. The buyer journey has already moved upstream to AI.

Adapt or disappear.

Manis exploded during its launch week—but buried in the headline? It was running on Browserbase’s open source engine. That single credit line sent our GitHub into the stratosphere. Open distribution isn't just about community points. It's a growth weapon.

140 investor meetings in 7 days. $17M raised off a scheduling hack and raw momentum. This is how Browseruse turned YC demo week into a feeding frenzy—and got uncapped SAFEs before even taking meetings. Insane level of demand.

SEO changed the way brands got discovered on the internet. But AI changed search itself.

Athena HQ just introduced GEO: generative engine optimization.

Why? Because people no longer ask Google. They ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude. The internet’s front door isn’t a browser—it’s an LLM prompt.

The new challenge: How do you get discovered when the algorithm is opaque, the interface has no links, and answers are generated, not fetched?

Athena isn’t chasing specific models. We’re model-agnostic because models will come and go. We focus on the architecture underneath them all—the systems shaping which answers get generated and by whom.

Ranking in generative search isn’t a marketing tactic. It’s foundation-level infrastructure for any company that wants to matter in the next era of the internet.

HubSpot lost 80% of its organic search traffic. That’s not a typo. That’s the reality of legacy SEO models in the age of AI-native search.

Marketers need to understand what’s really happening here. Google search isn’t disappearing—it’s being displaced. Buyers are using ChatGPT and Perplexity as research assistants. That traffic you’re daydreaming about? It’s visiting upstream.

The rules changed. Visibility now means showing up in chatbot recommendations. Influence means optimizing for prompts, not keywords. If you're still measuring traffic the old way, you’re already behind.

Athena helps companies understand HOW people are researching in this new landscape. Not just what they type into Google, but what they ask their AI. Because that’s the new battleground.

There are two kinds of companies in 2025: those building a GEO strategy—and those watching their organic traffic vanish.

There’s a new generation of AI models launching every few weeks. Grok is the latest name on everyone’s radar this month. It won’t be the last.

Most companies are betting on the wrong thing: the models themselves.

At Athena, we’re not building for a world where GPT-4 has a permanent lead. We’re building for drift. Shifting model performance. Constant change.

That means staying model-agnostic and instead investing in understanding the architecture that underpins AI search itself. We help brands rank across AI systems—even the ones that don’t exist yet.

Adaptability, not allegiance, is the strategy.

Most open-source projects don’t explode overnight. Browserbase did.

They shipped a scrappy prototype in five days. Dropped it on Hacker News. Built just enough documentation and clarity for others to try it. Made it stupidly simple to install. Sparked curiosity with small demos that actually did something—and let users remix them.

Then the agents came. One hit project built on top of them (Manis) credited Browserbase during its massive breakout moment. That shout-out? Instantly multiplied Browserbase’s visibility and reach.

What you’re seeing isn’t just product-market fit. It’s distribution-model fit. Lean, open, purposeful technology that other builders can pick up and amplify.

Turns out GTM can start with a single post and a GitHub repo that works on command.

140 investor meetings in a single week. That’s how Browseruse closed a $17M seed round.

This wasn’t about luck. It was about leverage.

The founders batched all investor interest into one tight window around YC Demo Day. The result? FOMO drove some firms to send uncapped SAFEs without a meeting. All that momentum built before Day 1 of fundraising even began.

A powerful reminder: in early-stage fundraising, sequencing is everything. Compress the timeline, escalate demand, and create urgency. The product still has to be strong—but strategy wins rooms.

For two decades, SEO dictated how businesses created content, built websites, and captured traffic. It was the gateway to visibility. But user expectations have changed. AI-first users don’t want a list of links—they want answers, context, synthesis. And the traditional search stack is struggling to keep up.

Enter GEO: Generative Engine Optimization.

GEO isn't a rebranding. It's a ground truth shift. AI search models—from ChatGPT to Gemini to DeepSeek—are refactoring the structure of the web in real time. GEO helps companies build content and systems that are model-resilient, meaning they show up correctly and consistently in AI-native results no matter which tool the user is querying from. It’s not enough to just optimize for yesterday’s algorithmic crawlers; you have to design for today’s probabilistic responders.

Athena HQ isn’t playing favorites. We’re model-agnostic because the crowned champion changes weekly. Instead, we map how prompt engineering, model training data, and architecture shifts affect what users see—and how your brand gets summarized in that.

Think of GEO as an operating system layer above traditional SEO: it tracks presence across LLMs, diagnoses gaps in visibility, and helps brands systematically adapt to the future of search, which is summarization-driven, query-personalized, and increasingly multimodal.

Search has fragmented. GEO glues it back together.

The SEO-era titans are starting to fall. HubSpot lost 80% of its organic traffic last year. Chegg shed over $14 billion in market cap. The causes aren’t mysterious—they’re structural. AI search is rewriting how consumer attention flows, and traditional SEO-built strategies aren’t enough to survive the rerouting. What once fueled massive lead-gen flywheels is now being bypassed by tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. We’re watching the buyer’s journey get uprooted in real time.

The questions marketers need to ask now aren’t about rankings—they’re about relevance within AI-native search workflows. Where and how are buying decisions being influenced? Not on your landing page. Not at the top of Google. But inside conversations with language models. At AthenaHQ, we track 1% of query traffic across ChatGPT and Perplexity to identify exactly where product considerations are emerging. That’s millions of signals informing what content wins in AI environments—before a user ever visits your site.

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) isn’t a buzzword or a side tactic. It’s a strategic foundation for any brand that expects to exist five years from now. AI search isn’t complementary to SEO—it’s replacing it. If you're still optimizing only for Google SERPs, you’re preparing for a world that already disappeared.

A startup wins or dies based on how fast it adapts. That’s never been more true than in today’s AI landscape, where new frontier models like Grok, Gemini, and DeepSeek are shipping weekly. What makes Athena HQ defensible isn’t betting on the hottest model of the moment — it’s building model-agnostic infrastructure that helps companies stay discoverable across every AI system, as they rise and fall. We’ve built tech that works regardless of who’s in the lead this week.

Most AI SEO tactics today are glorified guesswork aimed at whatever OpenAI or Google just launched. That’s not a strategy. Athena HQ helps companies future-proof their visibility by anchoring to the architecture behind AI retrieval systems themselves — not the short-term quirks of individual models. We’re not running prompts, we’re optimizing structured data, story clarity, and source freshness to ensure your brand shows up in whatever model your customer is using, today or in 6 months.

The stakes are higher than people think. A new product that isn't showing up in Grok because your docs are outdated? That’s lost revenue. A hallucinated pricing page in Gemini because old pages are still live? That’s churn. We’re helping companies avoid both. And just like in the early days of Google, those who invest first will win on permanence.

AI-native search is now a distribution channel. Treat it like one.

In the high-stakes world of AI infrastructure, raising capital is a game of speed, conviction, and clarity. Browseruse’s $17 million seed round didn’t come together over months—it closed after 140 investor meetings in a single week. That’s not a typo.

The founder stacked every meeting pre and post-YC Demo Day, all crammed into one dense stretch. The result? Outsize FOMO. Investors skipped meetings and sent uncapped SAFE offers just to stay in the game. No deck. No pitch. Just momentum.

This post breaks down how that velocity was possible: the open-source traction that made investors swarm, how the team structured the round to maximize leverage, and what other technical founders can learn from compressing their raise into a high-pressure window. It also unwraps why infrastructure for hosted browsers + LLMs, and tools for healing flaky automation scripts with agents, is suddenly irresistible.

The lesson: in AI infra, the strongest signal isn’t the tech—it’s how fast the right people believe in it.

In late 2023, a five-day prototype launched a browser automation library that would quietly become one of the most important infrastructure layers for agentic systems. The project, known as browseruse, didn’t come from a product launch or a marketing plan. It came from a Hacker News post, two easy setup commands, and the right kind of demo: one that showed real autonomy in action.

At first, the tool just let you prompt an AI to take actions on the web—clicking, typing, selecting—from natural language, using a combination of DOM parsing and visual analysis to map a webpage into something machine-operable. But then something unexpected happened. Open source agents like Manis started using browseruse as a control layer, effectively embedding its capabilities into their stacks. And to their credit, they gave attribution. That single mention unlocked an entirely new arc of visibility.

Over the next several months, browseruse growth didn’t trickle in. It exploded. Hundreds of GitHub stars became thousands, then tens of thousands. The team rode the wave with deliberate calculation, plugging into the momentum of projects like Operatoor, DeepSeek, and MLC, attaching their utility to the broader narrative of open autonomous agents.

Open source is full of technically impressive tools that never break past niche adoption. browseruse did, and the reason is refreshingly simple: it worked, it was easy to run, and people saw it do something real. In a space flooded with chatbots pretending to be agents, this one could actually control a website.

The future of agents doesn’t live inside a single framework or foundation model. It lives in interoperable pieces that do one thing exceptionally well—and scale only when the community recognizes them as indispensable. browseruse is on its way to becoming one of those pieces.

Ranking on Google isn't enough anymore. Athena HQ is pioneering GEO—Generative Engine Optimization—to help brands show up where AI actually surfaces information. Forget betting on ChatGPT or Gemini. This is about building visibility that survives the race between models. A new kind of search needs a new playbook.

This isn’t just a dip in traffic. HubSpot lost 80% of its organic search. If the SEO giants aren’t safe, what does that say about the future? Start with this moment and let it hit. The sudden stat drop, then the realization: AI search is rewriting the buyer’s journey. No one’s coming to your site unless you show up where they’re already asking. This isn’t a trend. It’s a shift. If you’re not rethinking your strategy for a world of chat-first decisions, you're already behind.

Every week, there’s a new AI model. Grok today. Gemini yesterday. Something else tomorrow. While the rest of the internet scrambles to catch up, we’re already ready. AthenaHQ doesn’t just keep up with AI—we make sure your brand thrives no matter which model is trending. That’s the difference between adapting and leading.

140 investor meetings in 7 days. That’s not hustle porn. That’s a founder who scheduled every call back-to-back, then watched FOMO take over. Uncapped SAFEs. No meetings. Just wire the cash. If you’ve ever wondered how momentum actually looks in fundraising, this is it.

Everybody’s chasing the newest AI model. But Athena HQ says forget the race—focus on the track. Models rise and fall, but the architecture of AI search is the constant. That’s where visibility is won.

When a company built on content loses 80% of its organic traffic, that's not a dip. That's a collapse. HubSpot, once the poster child for SEO mastery, just gave us all a wake-up call. AI search is rewriting the buyer journey, and if you're measuring content by clicks from Google, you're already behind. The next wave of winners? They’ll be the ones building for how people actually make decisions in 2025: inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, and tools we haven’t even seen yet.

Most companies panic when a new AI model hits the market. At Athena, we treat it like just another Tuesday. Whether it's Grok, Gemini, or whatever's next, our system adapts by design. We don’t pick winners. We make our customers win no matter who's ahead.

A Chinese AI project launched—and accidentally supercharged an open source underdog. Browserbase dropped a 5-day prototype, posted to Hacker News, and exploded. How? Their core tech got picked up by Manis, who credited them—and just like that, the snowball started. This is what it looks like when timing, community, and a ridiculously simple install collide.

140 investor meetings in one week. One founder. $17 million raised. This is what happens when open-source momentum meets investor FOMO. Keep watching to see how uncapped SAFEs rolled in before a single pitch meeting even started.

Most AI agents are just fancy chatbots. This open-source project turned them into real actors online. The founders built a demo in 5 days, dropped it on Hacker News, and watched it explode. Then something bigger happened: a leading Chinese AI project used their code. That moment put them on the global map. In this clip, we walk through how their GitHub stars skyrocketed, how they fueled it with bold demos, and how strategic credit from Manis turbocharged their reach.

AI search isn’t a trend. It’s the new front page of the internet. While everyone’s still chasing Google rankings, the smart teams are asking: how do we show up in ChatGPT? Gemini? Claude? Athena HQ is betting on something bigger than any single model. They're building tools that help companies stay visible no matter who’s winning the AI arms race. It’s not SEO anymore. It’s GEO. And it’s not optional.

HubSpot lost 80% of its organic search traffic. Not clickbait. Real numbers. And it's not just them. CHEG lost $14B in market cap because AI search changed the rules. The way people buy is shifting. They're not clicking links on Google. They're asking ChatGPT. If you're still optimizing for SEO and not GEO, you're playing last season's game. Here's why the marketers who win in the next 5 years will build for AI search from day one.

Brands are scrambling to keep up with every new AI model: ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok. Each one surfaces different content. Athena doesn’t bet on any single one—we help companies show up no matter which AI is trending. That means when Grok blows up, our clients are already there. AI search isn't about chasing hype. It's about building adaptability into your content strategy.

140 investor meetings in 7 days. That’s not hustle culture, that’s controlled chaos—but it worked. This founder scheduled every single meeting back-to-back in one week, then watched as FOMO kicked in and investors started begging to wire money before they even met. Uncapped SAFEs, no valuation, no pitch—just vibes. It’s what happens when product + momentum + timing hit at once.