Czech startup Ranketta has secured €1 million in pre-seed funding to build what it calls an “AI visibility” layer for brands, a toolset designed to show marketers how often, and in what context, their products are mentioned inside AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.

The round is led by Lighthouse Ventures and will fund expansion across Europe and the United States, along with new product integrations for online retailers.

Ranketta: From classic SEO to “AI discovery”

For years, marketing teams have optimised for one dominant gateway: the search engine results page. But as large language models and AI assistants begin to answer more product queries directly, Ranketta argues that a parallel discovery layer is emerging and that most brands are flying blind in it.

The company positions itself squarely in this gap between traditional search engine optimisation and AI-driven recommendation. Its platform is built to understand and improve how a brand appears when a consumer asks an AI assistant for suggestions, whether that is a B2B software tool, a direct-to-consumer product or an e-commerce brand.

According to figures cited by Ranketta, spending influenced by AI search is projected to reach $750 billion by 2028. Despite that, only a small share of companies have meaningfully adapted their marketing strategies for AI-generated answers, reinforcing the demand for specialised tools that can measure performance in this new channel.

What Ranketta actually measures?

At the core of Ranketta’s product is measurement: the platform tracks how often a brand or product is mentioned in answers produced by major AI models and how those mentions compare with competitors’. Today, it already monitors responses in systems such as ChatGPT and Gemini, providing marketers with a consolidated view of where they stand in AI-driven search.

The company says it is focused on three customer groups:

• D2C brands, which rely heavily on discovery and recommendation;
• E-commerce players, who need visibility as shoppers ask AI tools for product suggestions before clicking through to stores;
• B2B companies, whose software or services may be recommended inside long, conversational AI answers rather than on a classic search-results page.

Beyond raw tracking, Ranketta offers what it describes as actionable insight. Using an in-built AI “copilot”, the platform evaluates a brand’s existing data and suggests specific content to create or improve, as well as opportunities to build citations that can strengthen how the brand is referenced by AI assistants. This is intended to give marketers a practical playbook rather than just a dashboard.

“AI shopping as an acquisition channel”

Ranketta’s chief executive and founder, Vojtěch Oravec, frames the mission in simple terms: to turn AI-driven shopping and product discovery into a measurable acquisition channel.

The company says its technology gives businesses “a detailed view of their performance and competitive positioning in AI search”, allowing marketing teams to move from passive observation to active optimisation. In Oravec’s words, Ranketta aims to turn AI shopping into a real acquisition channel that companies can monitor, improve and grow, and to ensure that every brand has a fair chance to compete in the AI-driven discovery landscape.

That fairness argument goes beyond rhetoric. If AI systems increasingly recommend a short list of brands in response to a single prompt, the distance between being named and being omitted can be commercially significant. Ranketta’s proposition is that brands should at least be able to see how often they appear in those answers and what they can change to improve that frequency.

Founder’s background in AI research and industry

Oravec brings a blend of academic AI experience and commercial exposure to the challenge. Before launching Ranketta, he worked with the Tomáš Mikolov group, a research team associated with advances in neural language modelling. He also spent time at Henry Schein, a global distributor of healthcare products and services.

Ranketta’s pitch to investors links that technical grounding with a practical, market-facing product: a tool that translates complex AI behaviour into simple metrics and recommendations that marketers can act on.

Early traction and plans for expansion

Although still at the pre-seed stage, Ranketta already supports more than 20 European brands on its platform. The new funding is intended to help the company deepen its presence in Europe and push into the U.S. market, where AI-driven shopping and recommendation tools are gaining ground among both consumers and enterprises.

On the product side, Ranketta is preparing integrations with e-commerce platforms such as Shopify. By plugging directly into these systems, the startup aims to make it easier for merchants to connect their catalogues, monitor how individual products surface in AI answers and adjust their content or campaigns accordingly.

The team also plans to use the capital to advance its underlying technology, refining how it collects and interprets data from multiple AI models as those models evolve.

Significance For Marketers

The premise behind Ranketta is that AI assistants are not just another user interface; they represent a structural shift in how people ask questions and receive recommendations. In a traditional search engine, users might scroll through many links. In a conversational interface, they may simply accept one or two named options.

For marketers, that dynamic raises difficult questions:

• Are our products being mentioned at all when people ask AI agents for recommendations in our category?
• If they are, how often and in which contexts?
• If they are not, what can we change in our content, data or broader digital footprint to alter that?

Ranketta’s answer is to provide independent measurement and a feedback loop, rather than leaving brands to infer their standing indirectly. Whether this approach becomes a standard part of the marketing stack will depend on how quickly AI assistants become embedded in everyday buying journeys and whether companies decide they need a dedicated tool to track those mentions.

A new layer on top of SEO, not a replacement

Crucially, Ranketta does not present itself as a replacement for search-engine optimisation but as a complementary layer. The startup’s narrative recognises that conventional SEO and paid search will continue to matter, even as AI-assisted discovery grows. Brands, in other words, may have to optimise for both the open web and the closed but powerful environment of AI models.

With €1 million in fresh capital and backing from Lighthouse Ventures, Ranketta now has the runway to test that thesis at scale. If its bet is right, “AI visibility” could become a new metric that marketers track alongside search rankings and social engagement and one that determines who is, and who is not, visible when consumers turn to AI for advice.

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