Toronto startup helps brands get mentioned by Claude, ChatGPT, and other chatbots.
As AI chatbots eat up website traffic, a Toronto startup is offering a tailored service for companies to boost their visibility to consumer chatbots.
The news: Toronto-based ChatFeatured, an AI search optimization platform, announced on Wednesday that it had raised an oversubscribed, $2-million USD ($2.8-million CAD) equity pre-seed round, led by Toronto’s Storytime Capital and with participation from Garage Capital and BY Venture Partners. The startup plans to use the funding for product development, go-to-market efforts, and growing its five-person team.
ChatFeatured’s AI product aims to identify how companies are being mentioned by the world’s major chatbots, then generates a strategy to help these companies increase their visibility to consumers.
From the source: CEO Farris Nasr believes ChatFeatured could level the playing field for smaller brands as AI chatbots become a preferred search tool for many consumers.
“It used to be a David versus Goliath thing for these small businesses, and it’s almost like David and Goliath now,” Nasr told BetaKit. “We’re allowing the smaller businesses to compete more effectively against much bigger brands with the technology.”
Following the thread: At the beginning of 2025, a study by SEO marketing agency Eight Oh Two found that 37 percent of consumers used AI tools to begin a web search rather than a traditional search engine. Introducing AI into search has changed consumer behaviour, too—people were less likely to click on links mentioned in Google’s AI overviews, according to the Pew Research Center.
At the same time, more LLMs and bots may be viewing webpages than ever before. As of May 2025, more than half of the internet’s traffic came from bots, rather than humans, according to Calgary’s Koat.ai. ChatFeatured’s product helps generate content and LLM-friendly website fixes that make a brand’s web footprint as easy as possible for chatbots to pull from.
Final thought: Not all LLMs are created equal in terms of their consumer reach. Depending on the sector, some client companies will want their visibility boosted in some AI models more than others, ChatFeatured CTO Nithiiyan Skhanthan said. For example, Anthropic’s Claude is the most popular by far, especially for SaaS businesses—so much so that ChatFeatured charges an additional fee to track a company’s visibility in Claude.
Feature image courtesy ChatFeatured.