Turning AI Mentions Into Traffic: Janak Sunil's Journey Building GEO Platform Bear
For years, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been one of the ways to drive organic traffic to your website. But the shift from traditional SEO to AI-powered search is reshaping how companies are thinking about traffic acquisition.
According to research by Fractl and Search Engine Land, 39% of marketers report that their website traffic has declined since Google launched AI Overviews in May 2024, a change that will likely keep progressing as AI continues to advance. In an age when AI agents increasingly make decisions for consumers, marketing to these agents will become essential.
Becoming ingrained in the world of search while building an internal search engine for GitHub with his co-founder, Siddhant Paliwal,Janak Sunil realized the future of search was moving to AI. The team set out to build Bear to help companies show up where it matters most.
Introducing Bear: Helping Companies Own Their Visibility on AI Search
Bear helps companies optimize their visibility on AI search engines through a unique focus on actionable strategies and ROI. While most solutions only focus on monitoring, Bear equips customers with practical information for improving search visibility. Including:
- Clear, prioritized content optimization steps to boost search appearances
- Data on how often your brand is mentioned and how AI platforms are describing your brand
- Automated outreach to blogs, social media creators, and other sources that influence AI search results
“People are seeing AI search as a huge pain point right now,” Janak explains. “Companies are losing 10 to 15% of traffic to LLMs." But by providing customers with actionable strategies to improve GEO outcomes, Bear has been able to help customers double their visibility on AI search engines, driving more traffic to their sites and blog posts.
As AI search continues to evolve and AI agents begin to take additional actions on behalf of users, Bear aims to help companies market to AI agents rather than directly to consumers, treating AI agents as the target audience.
Janak’s Journey to Bear
Janak began his founder journey while still in college, building UCLA’s largest apartment listing platform, BruinRent, which the university later acquired. After college, he broadened his startup experience with Product and Strategy roles at Pillow and Coinbase.
Janak first teamed up with Sid to build Supagit, a search engine for GitHub repositories. As the team became more immersed in search, they recognized that all of search was moving toward AI, and businesses would need help showing up in these new environments. The team pivoted from building a search engine to helping other companies appear on AI search engines, and were accepted to Y-Combinator’s Fall 2025 batch.
Just a few months later, Bear is serving over 70 clients, including notable brands such as Browserbase and Wispr Flow, and continuing to grow through customer referrals and social media.
Janak’s Advice for Fellow Founders
Janak’s journey to Bear has been far from straightforward. He built 14 things before Bear, and while some worked and some didn’t, he continued to learn along the way. “Getting started” is the most important step in the founder journey, he explains. “Follow your curiosity and build things.”
And as you go, Janak underlines the oft-shared Y-combinator philosophy—do things that don’t scale to get users. And then once you’ve got users, talk to them to ensure you’re solving real problems. “When you're a founder you can forget that you're building for someone else. You're building it for users and you want to talk to them and actually validate their problems before you dive deeper."
To learn more about Janak’s journey, you can follow him on LinkedIn and X, and check out usebear.ai
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