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Founded by a former employee of Atlassian and Dovetail, Sydney-based startup Hall has raised $2 million in a pre-seed round for its analytics technology that measures how brands appear on AI platforms as consumers drift away from using traditional Google search.
Hall launched its free self-serve platform in April and has already attracted hundreds of signups from search engine optimisation (SEO) agencies, in-house marketing teams and brands looking to maximise their impact in AI conversations.
Kai Forsyth founded Hall amidst drastic change within the $80 billion-plus SEO industry, as people increasingly turn to AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot for answers - platforms that are all covered by the startup's technology.
"When someone asks ChatGPT for restaurant recommendations or software comparisons, they're bypassing Google entirely," says Forsyth, the startup's CEO.
"The move away from 10 blue links to instant, personalized answers represents Google’s first genuine threat in decades and creates an entirely new marketing channel for businesses."
Currently helping companies track how AI conversations translate to business outcomes, the ultimate vision for Hall is to become a go-to operational platform that businesses rely on to manage their entire AI channel strategy.
"Traditional SEO tools become irrelevant when discovery shifts from page rankings to AI model responses," Forsyth adds.
"Companies are asking urgent questions: ‘How often does ChatGPT mention our brand?’ ‘Why are we getting referral visits from ChatGPT?’ ‘What can we do to improve how AI systems represent us?’”
The $2 million pre-seed funding from Blackbird Ventures will be used to accelerate product development and expand the engineering team as Hall builds out its marketing platform and grows its customer base.
The company already includes experienced product engineers from marketing technology and data analytics companies such as Rokt, Dataro and Displayr, with expertise in building scalable data infrastructure and performance marketing platforms.
"Every transformative technology creates new channels for businesses to reach customer," says Blackbird Ventures partner Nick Crocker.
"Email enabled direct marketing platforms, the App Store created mobile discovery, and social media platforms shaped what performance marketing looks like today. Conversational AI represents the next chapter, and Hall is building the foundational infrastructure for this new channel."
A few months ago conducted by tech news site The Information found 77 per cent of its subscribers - a very specific but influential sample - were using AI search engines instead of Google.
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