New York-based marketing platform Zeta is looking to boost its in-house generative engine optimization (GEO) capabilities by acquiring Toronto-based Senso.
The news: Zeta Global announced on Monday that it has agreed to acquire Senso. The deal will bring Senso’s technology, which had been powering Zeta’s GEO offering, in-house. The company will also bring in the Senso team, including co-founder and CEO Saroop Bharwani, giving Zeta additional AI engineering talent, the company said in a statement. The purchase price was not disclosed.
The marketing platform said Senso will help advance its AI trust and discoverability offerings as AI assistants become an increasingly important form of customer discovery, including how brands appear in AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Google AI overviews.
From the source: “Together with Zeta, we can combine Senso’s AI capabilities with Zeta’s proprietary data and customer intelligence to help businesses understand who AI is reaching, improve how they appear in AI-generated answers, and connect those insights to measurable outcomes,” Bharwani said in a statement.
The context: Founded in 2017 by Bharwani and CTO Thomas Nelson, Senso got its start providing financial institutions, particularly credit unions, with predictive intelligence tools meant to help with customer retention.
By 2022, Bharwani wasn’t sure the company would last, he said in a LinkedIn post following the Zeta deal. In 2024, Senso joined the famed Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator, and less than a year later unveiled a GEO tool to help credit unions become more visible and evaluate how information about them appears on AI-powered search platforms.
Final thought: As more consumers turn to AI chatbots over conventional search engines, GEO and AI-powered search optimization have replaced the once-dominant search engine optimization (SEO) for marketers. A study by SEO marketing agency Eight Oh Two earlier this year found that 37 percent of consumers used AI tools to begin a web search rather than a traditional search engine, while 47 percent of consumers used AI to help make a purchase decision.
Feature image courtesy Senso on LinkedIn.