Map the SERP and AI search visibility (AEO/GEO) market as of Q3 2026 across 11 layers — from Google SERP APIs and AI search APIs to rank trackers, AEO monitoring, agencies and proxy infrastructure. For each company corroborated by at least two independent sources: what it sells, where results come from, tracked AI engines, HQ, funding, pricing and acquisition status, with a source for every money figure. Separately list acquisitions, $10M+ rounds and shutdowns since January 2025, and conclude where Keenable — a web search API with its own index — fits.
A point-in-time Q3-2026 scan: 193 records built from pages where at least two independent hosts describe a company in a layer — 154 company-layer records across all 11 requested layers, plus 39 deduplicated acquisition, funding, shutdown and API-retirement events dated January 2025 through September 2026. A blank cell means the datum was not resolved from the corroborating pages, not zero. This is best-effort exhaustive, not a census of every vendor that exists.
| Company | Layer | Sells | Results from | AI engines tracked | HQ / founded | Funding / valuation | Cheapest paid | Acquired | Hosts | Source |
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Crowding. Five layers are crowded: SEO and AEO suites (35 vendors), proxy and IP infrastructure (29), AEO/GEO visibility and monitoring (28), SEO and GEO agencies (20) and rank trackers (18). The thin layers are AI search and answer APIs (9), data/media intelligence (6), core Google SERP APIs (4), and structured/vertical SERP data, multi-engine SERP APIs and GEO/AEO technical tools (1–2 each).
Who buys whom. Consolidation is strategic, not financial: Adobe–Semrush joins creative/CX software with search visibility; Sitecore–Scrunch AI joins a DXP with AI-discovery monitoring; Nebius–Tavily joins an AI cloud with agentic search; Oxylabs–ScrapingBee rolls scraping-API capability into proxy infrastructure; Elastic picked up Jina AI. Buyers are vertically integrating their search-data supply.
Where the money goes. Capital concentrates in AEO visibility (Profound at a reported $1B valuation, Peec AI's $21M Series A, AirOps' $40M Series B) and in search/web-data infrastructure (Exa.ai's $250M Series C at $2.2B, Oxylabs' $130M at $3.6B). Meanwhile the official supply of independent search data is closing: Microsoft retired the Bing Search APIs in 2025, its most-corroborated event here, and Google tightened SERP access.
Keenable's position. Keenable sits in the scarcest, most strategically exposed layer: web search APIs with their own index. Unlike the Google/Bing scrapers that dominate the SERP-API layers, it controls its retrieval supply; unlike synthesized-answer APIs, it can return neutral ranked web results for agents, applications and downstream AEO measurement. As official APIs retire and acquirers lock up search-data assets, independent own-index retrieval becomes more valuable, not less.
Method: point-in-time Q3-2026 market scan. 193 records — 154 company-layer records (each described by at least two independent web hosts) across 11 layers, plus 39 deduplicated acquisition, funding (≥$10M), shutdown and API-retirement events dated 2025-01-01 to 2026-09-30. Circle area and the "hosts" column measure independent corroborating hosts, a confidence proxy, not market share. Money figures are as reported by the linked source; blank cells mean the datum was not resolved from the corroborating pages. Long source lists are cut to one representative link per record for space.