Searchable, the UK-founded AI visibility startup that opened a Salt Lake City office in August, has acquired New York's Meridian Tech in a seven-figure deal, adding Meridian's managed AEO service and client base.
London — September 21, 2026
Searchable, the UK-founded AI visibility startup that opened a Salt Lake City office last month, has acquired Meridian Tech, a New York-based AI search visibility company, in a seven-figure deal announced today.
Meridian's customers — including APL, MedCline, and VKTRY — will migrate onto Searchable's platform, and Meridian's product will be folded into Searchable's existing offering. The deal marks one of the first acquisitions between two dedicated answer engine optimization (AEO) startups, a category focused on helping brands get named and recommended inside AI-generated answers like ChatGPT and Gemini responses.
The move continues a rapid US expansion for Searchable, which launched in late 2025 and now works with more than 1,000 brands across 10 AI engines. In August, the company opened a Salt Lake City office led by two hires — Tony Posselli and Preston Boling — who joined after their previous employer, local competitor Scrunch AI, was acquired by Sitecore.
The Salt Lake City office has continued growing since then. Preston Melle joined this week as Head of Customer Success — another hire from Scrunch AI — and Skyller Whitney joined this month as US Account Executive, coming from SOCi. The additions bring the Salt Lake City team to four.
Searchable says it works with over 1,000 brands. It tracks mentions, citations and comparisons across 10 AI engines, then shows companies how to get recommended inside them. Its corpus covers more than one billion AI citations and 400 million brand mentions, according to the company. In May 2026 the company raised $14 million in seed funding led by Headline at an $85 million valuation, in a market projected by Mordor Intelligence to reach $10.7 billion by 2031.
"American brands are some of the furthest ahead in the AI visibility race," said Chris Donnelly, Searchable's co-founder and CEO. "Meridian brings us a strong base of businesses that want to push their AEO strategy even further."
Meridian sees itself as not just another self-serve tracking tool. In a LinkedIn post, Meridian co-founder and CEO Alex Dees described the company's core offering as a "done-for-you" managed service, including a human-staffed team handling strategy, content creation, PR outreach, and technical SEO on clients' behalf, positioned against AEO tools that brands sign up for but rarely use.
"We launched Meridian because it was clear just how little visibility businesses had over how people are finding them and what people are reading about them inside AI chatbots," said Dees. "Searchable's team and product will be vital in continuing to lead that mission for Meridian's customers."
Learn more at searchable.com and trymeridian.com.
TechBuzz has previously covered Searchable's Salt Lake City expansion and interviewed Boling on how the company's AI-visibility tracking works. See that article here.