By Stan Chang, Head of Product

I'm excited to share that Gumshoe has secured $2 million in pre-seed funding to accelerate our mission of helping marketers understand how AI search tools recommend products and discuss brands.

Why We Built Gumshoe

As someone who's spent years building products across fast-growing businesses, I've witnessed firsthand how technology shifts can transform entire industries. Today, we're seeing a similar transformation in marketing and search.

Tools like ChatGPT and Claude are fundamentally changing how people discover products and information. Instead of sending users to a list of links, AI can now recommend and even help buy specific products. This shift has profound implications for marketers who have spent decades optimizing for traditional search engines.

Our CEO Todd Sawicki puts it best: "Every marketer is just freaking out about what's going on with this new world." And he should know, having led revenue at companies like Cheezburger and Fantastic.

What We've Built

From a product perspective, we've focused on creating analytics that give unprecedented visibility into how AI models discuss brands. Our platform generates thousands of conversations with AI models, allowing marketers to:

• See exactly how their brands are being presented and what sources are cited
• Compare how they stack up against competitors in AI-generated answers
• Track their "share of LLM" — a metric we've developed to measure how often brands are mentioned
• Identify which content types AI models prefer (we've found they increasingly cite business and product pages, with a preference for recent content)

Our Team

I'm fortunate to work alongside an incredible team of Seattle startup veterans. Our founders Todd Sawicki and Patrick O'Donnell bring complementary expertise — Todd previously served as CEO of content marketing platform Zemanta, while Patrick co-founded Urbanspoon, MightyAI, and Fresh Chalk. Our CRO Jim Watson brings invaluable experience from his time as a senior vice president at Foursquare and Placed.

What's Next for Our Product

We're currently in public beta with hundreds of companies using our platform, and their feedback has been instrumental in shaping our roadmap. This summer, we'll be implementing our commercial model.

Looking ahead, I'm particularly excited about expanding our capabilities to help companies not just understand AI search but optimize for it. We're working on tools to help develop content such as FAQs specifically designed for AI crawlers.

The distinction between traditional search and AI search will only grow more pronounced. As a product person, it's thrilling to be building at the forefront of this shift, creating tools that didn't exist before because the problem itself is so new.

If you're a marketer grappling with these changes, we'd love to have you join our beta program. Please reach out to us at hello@gumshoe.ai

Your insights help us build a better product. Onwards and upwards.