Preston Melle joins Searchable as Head of Customer Success. Searchable has appointed Preston Melle as Head of Customer Success, adding a new leadership role focused on customer relationships and experience as the company continues to operate in the evolving search and AI visibility landscape. In his new role, Melle will oversee customer success activities, with a focus on supporting customers throughout their relationship with Searchable. The position places customer engagement, retention, and the ongoing delivery of value at the center of his responsibilities. The appointment comes as the role of customer success continues to evolve within technology companies. For businesses operating in areas such as search, SEO, and AI-driven discovery, customers increasingly need ongoing guidance as platforms, search behavior, and measurement approaches change. Customer success teams are consequently taking on responsibilities that extend beyond traditional support. They often work closely with customers to understand changing requirements, identify challenges, coordinate with internal product and service teams, and ensure that technology is being applied effectively to business objectives. Melle's appointment comes against this broader shift. As marketers adapt to changes in how audiences discover information through search engines and AI-powered platforms, organizations are also evaluating how their digital presence performs across these emerging environments. Search visibility has become increasingly complex as traditional search engine optimization intersects with generative AI, answer engines, and changing user behavior. This creates an ongoing need for companies to monitor performance and adjust their strategies rather than treating search as a one-time marketing activity. For Searchable, Melle's new position places customer success within this evolving environment, with responsibility for maintaining customer relationships and supporting their ongoing needs. The appointment adds customer-focused leadership to Searchable as the company continues to work in a market where SEO, AI visibility, and digital discovery are becoming increasingly interconnected. Melle's move marks the start of his new role as Head of Customer Success, with his focus now centered on customer relationships and success at Searchable.

Searchable opens Salt Lake City office and hires two from Scrunch. Valued at $85 million after a $14 million raise in May, the UK's largest answer engine optimization (AEO) startup adds a Utah base and two hires from Scrunch AI. Searchable // Aug 28, 2026 SALT LAKE CITY - Searchable, an AI visibility and Agentic Marketing platform, has opened an office in Salt Lake City and hired two staff from local competitor Scrunch AI. Tony Posselli joins as head of sales and Preston Boling as a founding GTM hire after their previous employer Scrunch was sold to Sitecore for a reported $225 million. Both will lead Searchable's US go-to-market from the new office, which opened in August at The Gateway in downtown Salt Lake City. This is Searchable's second US office opening in seven months, following the launch of its New York base in January. Salt Lake City is one of the few US cities where AI visibility already folds into a thriving local tech scene. Searchable's expansion here adds to a market that CBRE ranks 16th among North American tech hubs in its 2025 Scoring Tech Talent report. Searchable launched in December 2025 and now works with over 1,000 brands. It tracks mentions, citations and comparisons across 10 AI engines, then advises companies on how to get named and recommended inside AI-generated answers. Its corpus covers close to 1 billion AI citations and more than 400 million brand mentions. In May 2026 the company raised $14 million led by Headline at an $85 million valuation, in a market projected to reach $10.7 billion by 2031. "Salt Lake City has built a real cluster around AI search, and we're delighted to hire into this talent pool," said Chris Donnelly, co-founder and CEO of Searchable. "Tony and Preston know how valuable AI visibility tracking is to American brands, with two years of experience in an industry that's barely older than that." "AI visibility tools have grown enormously in their capabilities," said Tony Posselli. "Working at Searchable means I can provide companies with their own customized agent and clear workflows on top of deep AI analytics." "Every business I talk to about AI wants the same thing, which is to see what AI says about them before their customers do," said Preston Boling. "That's a much easier conversation to have with Searchable's data behind it." About Searchable: Founded in London and New York in late 2025 by British entrepreneur Chris Donnelly alongside American co-founders Sam Hogan and Arya Nagabhyru, Searchable is an AI performance platform that helps brands understand, track and improve how they appear across AI-led search.

Searchable raises $14M to capture the AI search opportunity. May 18, 2026 Anna Wood is the Editor of Startups Magazine. She joined... Searchable, a platform that helps businesses optimise their presence in AI-driven search, has raised $14 million in a funding round led by Headline, valuing the company at $85 million. The raise follows a $4 million round led by Freestyle in December 2025 and brings total funding to $18 million. The investment comes at a moment of significant structural change in how consumers find products online. AI-generated overviews now appear in nearly half of all Google searches, 65% of searches end without a click, and AI-enabled search is projected to reach roughly 70% penetration by 2027. For founders who have built customer acquisition strategies around organic search, those trends have direct implications for growth. What Searchable does. Where traditional SEO platforms focus on Google's link-based results, Searchable targets the answers generated by AI systems such as ChatGPT and Claude. AI engines draw on a broader and less transparent set of signals than conventional search algorithms, making visibility harder to diagnose and fix without dedicated tooling. The platform automates audits, content optimisation, and technical fixes across multiple AI search platforms. According to the company's own data, customers arriving via LLMs convert at three times the rate of those arriving through traditional search. Enterprise customers report a 22% average increase in AI-driven traffic within their first 60 days on the platform. Traction and backers. In the 60 days prior to the announcement, Searchable onboarded more than 500 paying customers, converted five enterprise clients from incumbent SEO platforms, and crossed $100,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Annual recurring revenue now stands at $2.6 million. Current clients include American Express, KPMG, Siemens, Pfizer, Tencent, Boston Consulting Group, VaynerMedia and Havas. Headline, whose portfolio includes Bumble, Farfetch, and Sonos, has prior form in this category. The firm backed Semrush early - the SEO software group Adobe acquired for $1.9 billion - and partner Dominic R. Wilhelm has drawn an explicit comparison between that investment and this one. "We backed Semrush early as the category leader and exited following its IPO at around a $2 billion market cap," Wilhelm said. "Now we see a new generation of businesses coming up, and Searchable is primed to win this market." The founder's background. Chris Donnelly founded Searchable after selling SEO agency Verb for $25 million and scaling care marketplace Lottie.Org to a nine-figure valuation. He argues that the shift to AI search represents a compressing window for brands - and for the tools that serve them. "For more than a decade, SEO has been labour intensive and expensive," Donnelly said. "Over the next two years, a large share of that work becomes automatable. Our goal is to give companies an execution layer for AI search that cuts operational SEO costs by up to 40% while growing high-intent traffic." The funding will be used to accelerate product development and expand Searchable's presence in the US and UK markets. What this means for the market. Industry observers expect AI search software to divide between monitoring tools - which track brand mentions across AI engines - and execution platforms, which automate the underlying work required to improve visibility. Searchable is positioning itself in the latter category, on the basis that tracking without fixing has limited commercial value. Donnelly is forecasting three structural shifts over the next two years: the automation of repetitive SEO tasks through agentic AI systems; the rise of AI commerce as a standalone optimisation layer; and the convergence of paid and organic AI visibility into unified attribution models. How quickly those shifts materialise will depend in part on the pace at which AI search displaces conventional search traffic - and how urgently brands treat the transition as a growth problem rather than a technical one.