Getting found
How people find your startup in 2026: 9 channels and 10 tools, compared
The nine ways people actually discover a company now, the tools and services that cover each one, and what all of it costs. With sources and current prices.
Last updated 31 July 2026
Every founder eventually asks a version of the same question. Somebody has the problem we solve, they open a laptop, and then what? How do they end up on our site rather than a competitor’s?
There are about nine routes. They cost wildly different amounts, they pay off on wildly different timelines, and most of the advice you will read about them is written by whoever sells one.
So here is the version with the prices in it.
Quick summary
Nine channels bring people to a startup in 2026: organic search, AI assistants, directories and review sites, communities, founder social, referrals, paid ads, PR, and outbound. Search is still the largest at roughly 80 percent of queries. AI assistants are the fastest growing and the hardest to influence directly.
Covering them costs one of three ways. Buy data and do the work yourself, from $49 to $400 a month. Pay someone to do the work, from $1,500 to $5,000 a month. Or automate the recurring part, which is the middle ground that barely existed two years ago.
If you want the shortlist:
| Pick | Best for | Price |
|---|---|---|
| WhoTheyFind | Founders who want the recurring search and AI visibility work done rather than reported, with every change approved and reversible | $99 a month |
| Ahrefs or Semrush | Teams with someone who will actually use the data | $99 to $179 a month |
| An SEO agency | Companies with budget and a strategic question a tool cannot answer | $1,500 to $5,000 a month |
One category is missing from that shortlist on purpose. The AI visibility trackers, Profound and Peec AI among them, are good at what they do and what they do is watch. They will tell you that ChatGPT is not mentioning you. They will not change a single page on your site. For a marketing team that has to report upward, that is the product. For a founder who wanted the problem gone, it is a monthly subscription to bad news.
The rest of this piece is the reasoning, the nine channels in detail, and a fair look at every tool in that table plus six more.
The nine channels at a glance
| Channel | Best for | Time to first result | Ongoing cost | Suits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Organic search | Compounding demand you did not pay for | 3 to 6 months | $99 to $400 a month in tools, or $1,500 to $5,000 for an agency | Anyone with a problem people already search for |
| AI assistants | Being the name that gets said | Weeks, unpredictable | $29 to $499 a month just to measure it | Categories where people ask for recommendations |
| Directories and review sites | High intent buyers comparing options | Days to weeks | Free to list, thousands for premium placement | B2B software, marketplaces |
| Communities | Honest early signal and first users | Same day | Free, but your hours | Developer and niche audiences |
| Founder social | Trust that transfers to the company | Weeks to months | Free, but near daily | Founders who can write |
| Referrals | The best conversion rate you will ever see | Months | Free | Products people actually like |
| Paid search and social | Testing demand before you commit | Same day | $1,000 a month minimum to learn anything | Funded teams with a clear offer |
| PR, podcasts, newsletters | Credibility and one good spike | Weeks to months | Free to $5,000 a month | Companies with a real story |
| Outbound email | Control over exactly who hears about you | Days | $100 to $500 a month in tooling | High contract values |
Organic search
Still the largest single source of intent, and still the slowest to start. Someone types the problem, you are on the page, they arrive already knowing what they want. Nothing else has that quality at that volume.
It breaks in two ways. The first is time: three to six months is normal before anything steady arrives, and on a new domain in a crowded category it is longer. The second is that it is never finished. Pages go stale, competitors publish, structure rots, links break. The work is not a project with an end date, it is a chore with a frequency, which is why so many founders start it and quietly stop.
AI assistants
New, noisy, and impossible to submit to. There is no form. Assistants assemble answers from pages they can reach and from what other sites say about you, so the work is mostly upstream: be crawlable, be specific, and be mentioned somewhere the model is likely to quote.
Be careful here, because this is where the most confident nonsense is being sold. In May 2026 Google published its first dedicated guide to generative AI search and said plainly that structured data is not required for AI Overviews or AI Mode, and that there is no special schema you need to add. Its mythbusting section named llms.txt files and content chunking as unnecessary. A separate study reported in May 2026 found that adding JSON-LD schema did not measurably increase AI citations for pages already appearing in AI Overviews.
What did show an effect, in the Princeton work that started this whole field, was duller: pages that cite real sources inline, that carry actual statistics, and that answer the question in specific language got quoted more often. It turns out the way to be summarized well is to be worth summarizing.
Directories and review sites
G2, Capterra, Product Hunt, and whatever the equivalent is in your niche. Underrated, because the traffic is small but the intent is enormous. Someone browsing a category page has already decided to buy something.
They also feed the previous two channels, since these are exactly the pages that get cited when somebody asks for the best tool for a job. The catch is that the good spots are increasingly paid, and a Product Hunt launch is one day of attention followed by a very quiet Wednesday.
Communities
Reddit, Hacker News, niche Slack and Discord groups. The fastest honest feedback available and the only channel that will tell you your positioning is wrong within an hour.
It does not scale and it punishes marketing. You cannot delegate it, you cannot automate it, and if you post like a brand you will be ignored or worse. Treat it as research that occasionally produces customers.
Founder social
Audiences now often meet the founder before the company. A year of consistent posting builds something no ad account can buy, and it transfers: people who trust you will try the product on that basis alone.
The cost is that it is you, most days, indefinitely. And it is not transferable. If you stop, it stops.
Referrals
The highest converting channel and the least controllable. It grows when the product is good and the first customers are the right ones. There is no lever here, only a lagging indicator of whether you built the right thing.
Paid search and social
The only channel that answers a question in 48 hours: will anyone pay attention to this offer at all? That is worth real money as research, separate from whatever it returns as acquisition.
Below about a thousand a month you will not gather enough data to learn anything, and the moment you stop paying, it stops. You are renting the channel, and the rent never stops.
PR, podcasts and newsletters
One good placement can do more for you than three months of blog posts. It is also lumpy, hard to repeat, and easy to overpay for. Newsletters in your niche tend to beat general press for anything technical, and cost a tenth as much.
Outbound
Complete control over who hears about you, no dependence on an algorithm. Worth it when a customer is worth thousands. Below that the arithmetic collapses, and deliverability rules have made the sloppy version actively harmful.
What changed in 2026
Two numbers explain most of the shift.
The first: search did not die. First Page Sage estimated in Q2 2026 that Google still takes around 80 percent of digital queries, ChatGPT about 17 percent, and everything else roughly 3 percent. Anyone telling you Google is finished is selling something.
The second: the traffic that does come from assistants behaves oddly. Outbound referrals from ChatGPT were up 206 percent year on year, and about six in ten of those referred visits land on a homepage rather than a specific page. People are not being handed a deep link to your pricing comparison. They are being told your name and going to look you up.
That second number changes what you optimize for. If most of your AI referred visitors arrive at the front door, the front door has to answer the question they arrived with.
The assistant market itself is also less settled than the headlines suggest. ChatGPT’s share of generative AI web traffic slid from roughly 76 percent a year ago to around 53 percent. In B2B referrals specifically, one measurement of March and April 2026 put ChatGPT at 62.6 percent, Claude at 18.5, Gemini at 10.6 and Perplexity at 7.3. Different methodologies produce wildly different figures, which is itself the lesson: be careful with anyone quoting a single confident percentage.
The part every channel depends on
Look at that table again and notice what the top four have in common.
Search sends people to a page. Assistants read pages to decide what to say about you. Directory listings link to a page. Community threads and founder posts do too. Every route eventually resolves to your own site, and if the page it lands on is slow, thin, unclear about what you do, or invisible to a crawler, all the upstream work is spent moving people toward a bad answer.
This is the least glamorous finding in the whole exercise and the one with the best return. Before spending on ads or a PR retainer, it is worth knowing whether the pages people already reach can be read, indexed, and understood well enough to be quoted.
The problem is that checking this properly is not a one off. Titles drift, pages get added without internal links, a robots rule blocks a crawler, a fix works and then regresses two months later. It is a weekly chore, and weekly chores are exactly the thing founders drop.
Which is what the rest of this article is about: who you can pay to stop that happening, and what they charge.
The 10 options, compared
| Option | Best for | What it does | Price | Who does the work |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| WhoTheyFind | Founders without hours or a retainer | Measures, finds problems, writes and publishes the fix, verifies it | $99 a month | All of it, with your approval |
| Ahrefs | The best raw data | Backlinks, keywords, site audits, Brand Radar for AI mentions | From $99, Brand Radar $699+ | You |
| Semrush | Breadth in one subscription | SEO, ads, social, plus an AI visibility toolkit | From $139, $199 with AI tools | You |
| Surfer SEO | Writing pages that rank | Content scoring and briefs | From €49 | You |
| Profound | Reporting AI visibility upward | Watches and reports. Changes nothing | From $499 | You |
| Peec AI | Reporting AI visibility on a budget | Watches and reports. Changes nothing | €89 to €199 | You |
| Otterly.ai | Finding out whether you have a problem | Watches and reports. Changes nothing | From $29 | You |
| SEO agency | Strategy plus execution | Audits, fixes, content, reporting, a human to ask | $1,500 to $5,000, averaging $3,209 | Them |
| Freelancer | A specific project | Whatever you scope | $500 to $2,000 | Them, sometimes |
| Doing it yourself | Pre revenue and time rich | Everything | Free, plus 20 hours a month | You |
Read the last column before anything else. Six of these ten sell you information and hand the work back, and the AI trackers are the purest version: you pay monthly for a clearer description of a problem you still have to fix yourself. The only options where somebody else does the work are the agency, the freelancer and us, and two of those cost more than a thousand a month.
That is the whole map. Everything below is detail.
1. WhoTheyFind
Best for founders who accept that this work needs doing every week and know they will not do it.
It measures your site the way search engines and AI assistants read it, finds the specific things holding it back, writes the fix, publishes it through whatever already runs your site, and then checks whether the fix worked. Nine connectors cover the usual suspects including WordPress, Webflow, Shopify, Framer and Ghost. Nothing publishes without your approval unless you turn that on for routine low risk changes, and every change can be undone.
Price: $99 a month for one site, $399 for up to five, free during early access while we onboard the first properties. There is a $2,000 done for you tier where we operate it and review the queue for you.
Where it falls short: it is new, and it is deliberately narrow. It will not run your ads, manage a backlink campaign, or tell you what to build. If what you want is a strategist to argue with, hire one. If you want ten years of backlink history to explore, Ahrefs has it and we do not.
2. Ahrefs
Best for teams with someone who enjoys this work and will log in weekly.
The backlink index is still the best in the business and the site audit is genuinely good at finding technical problems. Brand Radar extends it into tracking AI mentions.
Price: from $99 a month for Lite, $179 Standard, $399 Advanced. Brand Radar adds $699 and up. Note that Ahrefs moved to per seat pricing in March 2026, which took a five person team on Standard from roughly $249 to $447 a month.
Where it falls short: it tells you, it does not fix. Every finding is a task for someone, and the tool is priced as though that someone exists.
3. Semrush
Best for teams who want one subscription to cover search, ads and social.
Broader than Ahrefs and shallower in each direction, with an AI visibility toolkit added in the last year. If you are running paid campaigns alongside organic, the overlap is worth something real.
Price: from $139 a month for SEO, around $199 once you want the AI visibility tools, $99 for the AI toolkit as an add on.
Where it falls short: same as above, plus the interface has accumulated a decade of features and it shows.
4. Surfer SEO
Best for people actively writing pages and wanting them to compete.
Content scoring against what already ranks, with briefs and an editor. Narrow and good at the narrow thing.
Price: from €49 a month, €299 for the mid tier, €999 enterprise.
Where it falls short: it only helps with the page you are writing. It has nothing to say about the other four hundred pages on your site or whether an assistant can read any of them.
5. Profound
Best for enterprise teams who have to report AI visibility upward.
The most serious pure play in the category, with source level citation tracking, SOC 2 compliance and the scale that large companies need. It raised around $155 million and reached a billion dollar valuation in early 2026, which tells you who it is priced for. The dashboards are excellent.
Price: from $499 a month.
Where it falls short: it is a measurement product, and measurement is not the hard part. At $499 a month it will show you, in considerable detail, that ChatGPT recommends your competitor. Then it stops, because changing that is outside what it does. Every finding lands back on your desk as a task, and if you had time for those tasks you would not have needed the dashboard. Fine if you have a marketing team to act on the reports. An expensive way to be informed if you do not.
6. Peec AI
Best for mid market marketing teams and agencies.
The best depth to price ratio in AI visibility tracking, which is why it grew past $4 million in revenue in its first ten months. If tracking is genuinely what you want, this is the sensible place to buy it.
Price: €89 to €199 a month.
Where it falls short: the same limit as Profound at a fifth of the price. It watches. It reports. Nothing on your site changes because you subscribed. Founders tend to buy a tracker expecting the problem to shrink, and what actually arrives is a weekly email describing the problem more precisely.
7. Otterly.ai
Best for finding out whether any of this matters to you before spending real money.
The cheapest genuine entry point into assistant tracking.
Price: from $29 a month.
Where it falls short: it is basic, and you will outgrow it if the answer turns out to be yes.
8. An SEO agency
Best for companies with budget and a real strategic question.
An agency does things software cannot: argue with your positioning, run outreach, decide what not to do. If you have product market fit and money, this is often the fastest route.
Price: $1,500 to $5,000 a month is where 48 percent of agencies sit, according to responses from more than 300 agencies collected in April and May 2026. An Ahrefs survey of 439 SEO professionals put the average retainer at $3,209. Note that 56.2 percent raised their rates going into 2026.
Where it falls short: the price, the ramp, and the fact that quality varies more than in any other line of this table.
9. A freelancer
Best for one specific job with a clear end.
Cheaper than an agency and often better, if you find the right person.
Price: $500 to $2,000 a month.
Where it falls short: bus factor of one, and you are now managing someone.
10. Doing it yourself
Best for pre revenue founders with more time than money.
You can do this by hand, and nothing on the list is beyond a smart founder. What the option really costs is not the learning. It is that the work never finishes: the same checks, refreshes, fixes and submissions come due again every week, and they only pay off when they happen on schedule, whether or not you shipped that week.
Price: free, plus twenty hours a month, every month, indefinitely.
Where it falls short: the calendar. Visibility work loses to the roadmap the first time something urgent ships, and a channel that compounds when you feed it stalls when you stop. The repetitive weekly part of this job is exactly the part software should be doing, which is what WhoTheyFind is: the same recurring work, done on schedule, for $99 a month.
Why founders pick one of these over the others
From the conversations we have had while building this, the decision usually comes down to three questions, and almost never to features.
The first is whether you will actually do the work. Founders who buy Ahrefs and use it are thrilled with it. Founders who buy Ahrefs and open it twice have bought a $99 monthly reminder that they are behind. Be honest about which one you are before you compare feature lists, because the same $99 buys either a very good description of the problem or somebody handling it, and only one of those helps when you are busy.
The second is whether you can afford to be wrong for six months. Agencies cost enough that a bad fit hurts twice, once in fees and once in the quarter you lost. Cheaper options are easier to abandon.
The third is who gets the blame. This sounds cynical and is not. When something needs doing every week forever, it needs an owner, and if the owner is a busy founder then the honest answer is that it will not happen. That is the entire reason this category exists.
Nobody we spoke to chose based on which tool had more integrations.
If we were starting on Monday
Week one, go where the intent already is. List everywhere in your category that maintains a directory, and answer the questions people are already asking in two or three communities. Both are free and both produce signal immediately.
Week two, fix the front door. Make sure the pages people land on load fast, say plainly what you do, and can be read by a crawler. This is where the assistant referrals arrive and where every other channel points.
Month two, pick one compounding channel and stay with it. Search or founder posting, not both. Doing one properly for six months beats doing three badly.
Month three, buy information with ads. A small budget, run as an experiment, to find out which message people respond to before you build content around the wrong one.
And then keep the front door in good repair, forever, because that is the part that decays. Whether you do that yourself, pay an agency, or automate it is the only real decision in this article.
Common questions
How do people find a startup they have never heard of?
Search, directories and review sites, communities, founder posts, and increasingly by asking an assistant for a recommendation. Search remains the biggest single route at roughly 80 percent of queries, but it is no longer the only one worth measuring.
What is the best tool for getting a startup found?
If you want data and will use it, Ahrefs. If you want breadth, Semrush. If you have to report AI visibility to a board, Profound or Peec will do that and only that. If you want the recurring work done rather than reported, that is the gap WhoTheyFind was built for, at $99 a month.
How long does SEO take?
Three to six months before it produces anything steady, longer on a new domain in a competitive category. If you need customers this month, run ads or go to where people are already talking.
How do I get ChatGPT to recommend my product?
You cannot submit to it. Make your pages reachable and specific, then earn mentions on the sites and threads that get quoted. Ignore anyone selling you a file to upload; Google said in May 2026 that llms.txt is unnecessary and no special schema is required for its AI surfaces.
Is any of this worth it before product market fit?
The directories and the communities are, because they double as research. The rest can wait until you know who you are for.
Sources
Prices were checked against vendor pricing pages in July 2026. Figures come from: First Page Sage Q2 2026 query share estimates; Similarweb and Previsible AI traffic reporting for 2026; a March to April 2026 B2B AI referral breakdown; Google’s generative AI search documentation published 15 May 2026, including its mythbusting section; a May 2026 study on schema and AI citations reported by Search Engine Journal; the Princeton generative engine optimization study; an Ahrefs survey of 439 SEO professionals on retainer pricing; a survey of more than 300 agencies conducted in April and May 2026; and published 2026 pricing from Ahrefs, Semrush, Surfer, Otterly, Peec and Profound.
Prices move. Check them before you sign anything.