Z Venture Capital (“ZVC”) has invested in the seed round of QueryLift, a GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) platform that helps companies understand and improve how their brands and products are represented by generative AI.

The history of the internet has been shaped by changes in how people discover information. Portals became the gateway to the web, search engines organized information, and social media shifted discovery into feeds.

Now, generative AI is emerging as the next gateway.

What matters about this shift is not simply that the search box is becoming a chat box. The bigger change is that AI is increasingly explaining companies and products to users before those companies ever have a chance to speak for themselves.

As more people ask questions like “Which service should I use?”, “How is Company A different from Company B?”, or “Which one is better for my needs?”, AI is becoming a new layer between companies and their customers.

Before a user even visits a website, AI may already have created a shortlist, compared the options, or excluded certain companies altogether. In the search era, one of the most important questions for companies was where they ranked. In the AI era, the questions are different: How does AI understand our company? For which queries are we being recommended? How are we described relative to competitors? And which sources are shaping those answers? If generative AI becomes a primary gateway to information, companies will need a way to monitor and improve how they are represented within it.

We believe this shift will create an entirely new market, and that is the opportunity QueryLift is going after.

QueryLift continuously monitors how generative AI responds to the questions that matter most to a company. It tracks when a brand appears in an answer, which sources are cited, how it is compared with competitors, when it is recommended, and the context in which it is discussed. The platform then helps identify what content should be improved, generates recommendations, and measures the impact of those changes after publication.

GEO also goes beyond marketing. It can apply to product information, corporate reputation, recruiting, public policy, investor relations, brand positioning, and virtually any information an organization communicates externally. Over time, understanding how AI perceives and represents a company could become an increasingly important source of business intelligence.

At the same time, this is still a market without an established playbook. AI models are evolving quickly, search capabilities continue to change, and the way information is sourced and cited is constantly shifting. In this environment, the real advantage is not simply knowing what works today, but being able to continuously discover what works next.

QueryLift has been conducting proprietary research into the sources generative AI systems rely on and how they construct their answers. One outcome of this work was accepted to CIKM 2026, a leading international conference in information retrieval and knowledge management. The company is also building a tight feedback loop between research and product, incorporating research insights into the platform while feeding learnings from customer usage back into its research.

QueryLift’s CEO, Souta Noguchi, previously worked at Yahoo! JAPAN, where he analyzed large-scale datasets related to search algorithms and search queries. Search has long served as infrastructure connecting people with information across the web. Now, a team with deep experience in that world is building a company at a moment when the way people access information is being fundamentally redefined.

We were also strongly drawn to the story of a team with roots in Yahoo! JAPAN and LY Corporation building for the next evolution of search. As a fellow Yahoo! JAPAN alumnus, I am personally very excited to support Souta and the QueryLift team on this journey.