Search has gotten a lot more complicated. A person looking for a local repairman might turn to Google…or they might open up ChatGPT, Claude, or another AI-powered search tools to get the name of a company.
For small and medium-sized businesses, that fragmentation creates a real problem. How do you show up everywhere your customers might be looking?
The Atlanta-based team behind Searchbird is building a fix.
Building a Better Web Presence
Searchbird works as a website development and marketing platform purpose-built for the AI age. Its audit services analyze a company’s current website and marketing services, identifying opportunities and challenges. Then it can build, redesign, and optimize website and online content. The company’s core differentiation is speed and quality. Searchbird doesn’t slap AI features onto standard WordPress templates. Instead, the team custom-codes sites from the ground up, delivering what co-founder Sam Lukens calls “enterprise-level, highly architected websites” to businesses that have traditionally been priced out of that tier.
Searchbird’s platform is built around both SEO (search engine optimization) and GEO (generative engine optimization). According to Lukens, both are governed by three core pillars: trust, strong web vitals, and unique content. The stakes for each have only grown in importance for businesses looking to get in front of new customers online.
“We view SEO and GEO as a long-term game focused on building brand value,” Lukens said. “No cheap tricks, but executing the fundamentals well and staying ahead of the latest requirements to maintain visibility over the long-term.”
Searchbird also addresses a risk that co-founder Reeves Kissel sees in the AI Age. While it’s now possible to prompt ChatGPT or Claude into generating a website in minutes, Kissel says there are limits, given that users can place significant trust in AI-generated builds without fully understanding the underlying architecture.
Searchbird’s model is designed as a counterweight to that.
“Our approach combines AI-driven efficiency with strong human oversight,” Lukens added.
Companies in industries ranging from home services, real estate, healthcare, and other local services are Searchbird’s target audience. Its largest customer to date has been a private equity firm that rolls up dozens of professional services companies.
A Search Story
Lukens and Kissel are not first-time founders. The two previously co-founded Hatched, an Atlanta-based dating app. Before Hatched, Kissel had worked as a software engineer at VMware, and Lukens had held roles at Samsara and Gather.
It was while scaling Hatched that the pair ran headfirst into the pain points of organic growth. They found that the SEO solutions they were being sold weren’t delivering results they could trust and they believed they could build something better.
The idea for Searchbird started taking shape roughly a year and a half ago.
The SMB market, Kissel has noted, is particularly motivating because the impact of the work is immediate and tangible. The changes Searchbird makes tend to have outsized effects on businesses where online visibility can directly determine revenue.
Entrepreneurial Lessons
Moving from building a consumer mobile app to a B2B platform was not necessarily a linear path.
“I am not sure you could pick two more different products,” Lukens said. “But there are a lot of lessons we took from that experience, even if we did not fully realize it at the time.”
He said one big lesson was around customer needs.
“Your customers, not market analysis, should drive your day to day work. Market analysis still matters a ton, but it belongs in your long term planning,” he added. “Feedback loops are everything, especially now that AI allows you to build and ship faster than ever. We do not build everything a customer asks for, but we move quickly on patterns we see across our customer base that clearly impact both our customers’ success and our business. With AI, you do not need to predict the market perfectly. You need to solve real problems and grow alongside your customers. For most SMBs, one constant remains: if a partner can complete a task faster and more cost-effectively, thereby giving the SMB time back to operate, that partner will remain long-term. AI or not. We believe that as AI commoditizes software, a company’s advantage comes from how it treats its customers, the problems it solves, and the efficiency and business friendly economics it can deliver. That becomes the real superpower.”
Another key lesson, Lukens said, was around startup spend.
“Profitability comes first and accumulating small expenses can crush your company even though “one hundred dollars here and one hundred there” does not seem like a lot at the time. Searchbird is already profitable at an early stage, and we are very intentional about that. Since growth spending does not always translate into revenue or profit, we focus just as much on our P&L as we do on growth.”
