Hello and welcome back to Equity Tech French's flagship podcast about the business of startups.

I'm Rebecca Boulon, and this is the episode where we bring on industry experts to help us explore a trend in the tech world and dive deep.

Search as we know it is getting a serious makeover. Google I.O. made it official last week, putting AI-generated answers front and center.

Brands have almost no visibility now into how AI is describing them to their customers,

so SEO needs its own makeover in response.

Startup Scrunch is positioning itself at the center of this shift,

trying to monitor and optimize how brands appear in AI platforms.

Today we're joined by Matt Thompson, the VP of Partnerships and Channels at Scrunch.

Matt, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Rebecca.

I'm excited to be here with you.

Yeah, excited to hear your perspective because it feels like your whole startup has been preparing for this moment.

For the moment that search really changes.

I mean, it's been changing as we've had AI throughout different platforms, not just Google, obviously, chat GPT, perplexity, take over different parts of search.

But I'm wondering if you can just give our readers, anyone who's been under a rock for the last week, a little bit of an overview

of like what was announced at I.O. and why it matters. Yeah, sure. And I was out there for Google I.O.

And for Google Marketing Live, the buzz was pretty palpable. There were a lot of things that were

released. There were updates around egentic commerce. There were updates

around Google's new TPUs. There were updates around Google glasses. But the notable one is that

Google is going all in on AI search, which is funny because a lot of people may say, well,

of course, it's Google. Of course they're going all in on AI search.

But 18 months ago, this whole AI search space was a bit of an existential threat for Google.

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