Peec AI, the AI search analytics platform, today announced the research team it has assembled to answer the question every brand is now asking: why do ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Mode recommend some companies over others – and how can a brand earn its place in those answers? Former enterprise SEO leaders, an explainable-AI researcher, and the engineers behind some of the market's earliest tools are reverse-engineering AI search, feeding what they learn straight into a product built to help clients earn visibility there.
Peec AI assembles team to decode how ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode recommend brands.
Team includes former enterprise SEO leaders, explainable-AI researcher, and early AI search tool engineers.
Research team reverse-engineers AI search through controlled experiments and network traffic analysis.
Peec AI tracks Generative Share of Voice, sentiment, and citation sources across major answer engines.
Platform provides prioritized recommendations to improve AI search visibility.
Backed by Singular, 20VC, and Antler.
As AI answer engines replace the old list of blue links, the rules for which brands get recommended now sit inside models with no published rulebook — and no one outside those companies knows exactly how the choices are made. Peec AI's response: hire the people who work those rules out by experiment, pairing two decades of enterprise SEO with hands-on reverse-engineering of answer engines and machine-learning research into how models decide. Much of that work is led by Metehan Yeşilyurt and Tomek Rudzki. Yeşilyurt reverse-engineers the algorithmic behavior of AI search and answer engines without touching the underlying models' source code. Instead, he runs controlled technical experiments, analyzes API network traffic, and reads client-side configurations to infer how platforms decide which web content to surface and cite.
Yeşilyurt's findings, which he publishes openly on his own blog, have helped shape the emerging fields of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). By analyzing ChatGPT's web interface and network traffic, he decoded how the assistant decides which sources earn an inline citation. He also published a detailed breakdown of Perplexity AI, documenting more than 59 distinct ranking factors and patterns. Tomek Rudzki was a co-founder of ZipTie.dev, the first commercial tool dedicated to monitoring brand visibility in AI search engines, tracking Google AI Overviews from its earliest days under the "SGE" banner.
Built on Deep SEO Foundations
Malte Landwehr brings more than 20 years of enterprise SEO and SaaS product leadership, previously serving as VP of SEO at idealo and VP of Product at Searchmetrics. David Konitzny brings technical SEO and international search experience from both agency and in-house roles at Peak Ace and Raisin. Konitzny uses browser developer tools and other hands-on methods to read the signals that reveal how LLM systems behave under the hood.
Translating those discoveries into working software falls to Dr. Melissa Fasol, who earned a PhD in computational neuroscience specializing in Explainable AI, signal processing, and machine learning. Before Peec AI, she founded Tulia AI, a startup that helps brands understand why LLMs recommend certain companies, work for which she was shortlisted for the Investec Early Stage Entrepreneur of the Year Award. At Peec, she helps turn the team's collective research into the platform's Actions module — ranked, opportunity-scored recommendations on what a brand should do next to improve its AI search presence.
Malte Landwehr, Chief Product Officer of Peec AI, stated: "Anyone can measure brand visibility. The hard part is giving recommendations that actually move the needle and can be scaled in a sustainable way. Many tactics that currently work well for short-term gains in AI visibility will stop working in a year. Some even put your whole SEO visibility at risk! To avoid that, you need people with deep SEO experience who are also able to deconstruct how LLMs work."
About Peec AI
Peec AI is an AI search analytics platform that helps marketing teams and agencies monitor, benchmark, and improve how their brands appear across AI answer engines. With comprehensive coverage of LLM platforms — including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Claude. Founded in January 2025 by Marius Meiners, Daniel Drabo, and Tobias Siwonia, Peec AI is backed by Singular, 20VC, and Antler.
