The moment Mack McConnell knew everything about search had changed came last summer at the Paris Olympics. His parents, independently and without prompting, had both turned to ChatGPT to plan their day’s activities in the French capital. The AI recommended specific tour companies, restaurants, and attractions — businesses that had won a new kind of visibility lottery.”It was almost like this intuitive interface that older people were as comfortable with using as younger people,” McConnell recalled in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. “I could just see the businesses were now being recommended.”That observation has now become the foundation of Geostar, a Pear VC-backed startup that’s racing to help businesses navigate what may be the most significant shift in online discovery since Google’s founding. The company, which recently emerged from stealth with impressive early customer traction, is betting that the rise of AI-powered search represents a significant opportunity to reinvent how companies get found online. The global AI search engine market alone is projected to grow from $43.63 billion in 2025 to $108.88 billion by 2032.Already the fastest-growing company in PearX’s latest cohort, Geostar is fast approaching $1 million in annual recurring revenue in just four months — with only two founders and no employees.Why Gartner predicts traditional search volume will decline 25% by 2026The numbers tell a stark story of disruption. Gartner predicts that traditional search engine volume will decline by 25% by 2026, largely due to the rise of AI chatbots. Google’s AI Overviews now appear on billions of searches monthly. Princeton University researchers have found that optimizing for these new AI systems can increase visibility by up to 40%.”Search used to mean that you had to make Google happy,” McConnell explained. “But now you have to optimize for four different Google interfaces — traditional search, AI Mode, Gemini, and AI Overviews — each with different criteria. And then ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity each work differently on top of that.”This …
