Search is getting an AI overhaul. This startup says it can help e-commerce brands keep up.

• SEO has undergone an AI makeover as traditional search engines are being challenged by LLMs.
• Lantern, which launched as a loyalty marketing startup for e-commerce brands, is taking note.
• Founder Andrew Lissimore pivoted his business to AI search optimization. Read its pitch deck.

Andrew Lissimore grew his e-commerce business, Headphones.com, by cracking search engine optimization (SEO).

When ChatGPT emerged on the market, Lissimore prompted the LLM to see how the chatbot ranked his website's audio equipment.

"It didn't reference us," Lissimore told Business Insider.

Search results for e-commerce brands, like his own, are a cornerstone for discovery, customer acquisition, and sales. Now, AI is changing how consumers seek product recommendations, from the rise of agentic commerce to how search engines like Google fundamentally work.

"It's the most important transition since search," Lissimore said, which is why his new startup, Lantern, is doubling down on AI optimization for e-commerce brands. "I thought: people are going to be stuck grasping at straws, trying to figure out how to deal with this."

In 2024, Lissimore launched Lantern to help e-commerce brands strategize around customer loyalty. Lantern raised $3.1 million in seed funding in 2025, led by Salesforce Ventures.

Since then, Lantern has refocused the company on tools that advise brands on how to get their products recommended more by LLMs. Lissimore also hired ex-Amazon engineers to redirect the company's product. Lantern is raising more capital to expand its technical talent, bankroll tokens, and get its product out there.

Lantern's team trained an internal model that predicts how a brand's products could appear in an AI-powered query, and what that brand could do to improve that visibility. The tools cost $99 a month, and for enterprise clients, that cost is customized.

As new terms like GEO (generative engine optimization) and AEO (answer engine optimization) take over, startups are rushing to the scene, offering tools to help brands optimize for AI.

Jasper AI, for instance, raised over a hundred million at the start of the AI craze and has zeroed in on marketing tools. It recently launched a new automated GEO tool and offers several search-optimization features. Daydream, an SEO agency, raised a $15 million Series A funding round this year to scale its agentic SEO tools and hire humans who train it.

To differentiate Lantern from the growing pool of AI-era marketing tools, Lissimore said the company is "focused purely on e-commerce."

While other products might help brands with "overall visibility," Lissimore said, that matters less to niche e-commerce sellers. Instead, Lantern's target client is concerned with individual products and how those perform relative to niche competitors.

Lissimore knows he's entering a potentially crowded market.

"It looks like a lot of companies are bumping up against each other," he said. "But, I think this space is going to be so huge and important that there will be a lot of companies, niches, and problems to solve that aren't being solved yet."

Read the pitch deck that Lantern is using to sell its pivot as it raises more capital.

Note: Some details have been redacted.