Google optimization was the foundation of internet marketing for twenty years. Now the ground is shifting beneath everyone feet.

When was the last time you typed a question into Google instead of asking ChatGPT? For a growing number of people, the answer is: almost never. And that behavior shift is creating an entirely new industry almost overnight.

Gushwork, a startup based in Delaware with an office in Bengaluru, just raised $9 million to help businesses get found in this new world. The pitch is simple: traditional SEO does not work when people ask AI for recommendations instead of typing keywords into search bars.

"We were focused on helping businesses outsource faster and outsource better," founder Nayrhit Bhattacharya told TechCrunch. "But the pull around search from customers became increasingly hard to ignore."

What he means: businesses noticed their customers were asking AI for product recommendations. And those AI answers had to come from somewhere.

The company uses AI agents to do what used to require an entire marketing department. They generate optimized content. They build backlinks through hundreds of partner sites. They track leads through integrated systems.

The results are turning heads.

About 20% of client traffic now comes from AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. But here is the number that matters: those AI referrals convert at double the rate of traditional search traffic.

One professional services company using the platform closed $200,000 to $350,000 in contracts from AI referrals alone.

Gushwork now has 300 paying customers and $1.5 million in annual revenue. They are growing 50% to 80% month over month. Eight hundred more companies are on a waitlist.

The funding round was led by Susquehanna Asia VC and Lightspeed, with participation from B Capital, Seaborne Capital, Beenext, Sparrow Capital, and 2.2 Capital. Post-money valuation: $33 million.

The timing matters because the underlying behavior is shifting fast.

ChatGPT now handles 2.5 billion prompts every day. Perplexity processes millions of queries. Google has rolled out AI overviews but users are increasingly bypassing traditional search entirely.

For businesses, this is terrifying. Everything they learned about SEO — keywords, backlinks, meta tags — becomes irrelevant when an AI decides what to recommend. The AI does not click links. It does not evaluate page rankings. It picks what it thinks the user needs.

That is the gap Gushwork is trying to fill. They help businesses understand how AI thinks, then optimize for those patterns.

The company is still small — about 70 employees in India plus contractors. But the waitlist suggests the market is waking up to a problem that most businesses did not know they had.

The next time someone asks AI for a recommendation, the answer will come from somewhere. The businesses that figured out how to be that somewhere will have an advantage that traditional marketing cannot buy.

Everyone else will be invisible.

Sources

• TechCrunch: Gushwork bets on AI search for customer leads (February 25, 2026) by Jagmeet Singh
• YourStory: Gushwork AI raises $9M seed (February 2026)
• Moneycontrol: Gushwork funding (February 26, 2026)