How to actually rank in AI search
Plus: Is internal marketing the real GTM moat
· 525 words
Christian Woese & Melanie Gabriel
May 19, 2026 • Read time: 3 minutes
Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,
H Company's last operational cofounder stepped down as CTO this week, two years after the €220m seed that was supposed to make Paris a frontier AI capital. At the same time, DeepMind spinout Isomorphic Labs raised $2.1bn to keep cracking drug discovery. One way or the other, Europe’s AI map is cooking. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.
PS: Has this e-mail been forwarded to you? Sign up here.
Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party
Fractile lands $220m to take on Nvidia, from London
UK chip startup Fractile raised $220m, with Accel and Peter Thiel's Founders Fund leading. The company is building inference silicon optimised to run large models locally, ~100x cheaper.
What do you meme?
Food for thought
Is internal marketing the real GTM moat?
Davide Grieco, Head of Growth at Clay, argues that GTM teams obsess over tools and AI when they should obsess over customer experience first. His sharper claim: internal marketing, the work of aligning your own sales team around the story, drives more than 50% of the success of a sales-led growth campaign. Clay's own "How Clay Uses Clay" series works because it talks about outcomes, not features.
Is the "AI honeymoon" already over?
Linear CEO Karri Saarinen offers a six-month reality check: the binary hype-vs-doom framing is over, and what's left is the unglamorous middle. Teams are not 10x faster, they are differently constrained. The bottleneck moved from typing to thinking, and most orgs haven't redesigned around that yet.
YC’s wishlist for the next decade
Y Combinator's Summer 2026 Requests for Startups opens with a single line: "AI has stopped being a feature and started being the foundation." The 16 categories that follow are not subtle. AI-native service companies replacing accounting and insurance. Counter-swarm drone defence. Inference chips for agent workflows. Industrial capabilities in space. What are you building?
Smart hack
From our Partners
Turn Google Ads into predictable customer acquisition
Echelonn manages over $15M/mo in Google and YouTube Ads for 300+ ecommerce brands. One vertical. One channel. Total focus. If you're not confident your account is performing the way it should, book a free audit.
From us
Everyone is selling you a hack for ranking in AI answers. Google just quietly published their first official AI optimization guide, its key points:
SEO is still the foundation. AI Overviews and Gemini retrieve from the same index as classic search. No separate AI ranking system.
Skip the LLM hacks. Don't write llms.txt, don't chunk content for bots, don't rewrite for crawlers. Google's words: people-first content.
Commodity content is dead. Generic "7 Tips for X" pages are precisely what AI replaces in the answer. Replace them with first-hand expertise, case studies, unique viewpoints.
"Inauthentic mentions" are the new link scheme. Paid reciprocal brand mentions now fall under Google's spam policy for AI features.
Stop optimising for the bot. Start being the thing it has to cite.