QueryLift Inc., a Tokyo-based company focused on generative engine optimization, has secured 100 million yen in seed funding through a third-party allotment to JAFCO and Z Venture Capital. The company announced that the capital will accelerate research and development in natural language processing and information retrieval while strengthening sales and implementation support for large enterprises. QueryLift operates a platform that helps businesses understand and improve how generative AI services such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Overviews describe, cite, compare, and recommend their brands.
Monitoring a New Information Landscape
Consumers increasingly ask AI tools to compare products, verify corporate credibility, and support decisions before visiting individual websites. This shift means corporate information is no longer only read directly by people but is also interpreted and delivered by AI systems. Generative AI combines official sites, third-party media, and older information, which can blend facts and inaccuracies in its responses.
How QueryLift Works
Traditional search engine optimization cannot fully address this challenge because it focuses on rankings among blue links rather than on how answers are generated and sourced. QueryLift designs important questions users may ask generative AI and continuously observes responses across major models. It analyzes when a company appears as a candidate, what sources are cited, how competitors are compared, and how brand context evolves.
Research-Backed Product Development
The platform integrates the entire GEO workflow from question design to performance measurement in a single product, automating observation and accumulating large volumes of response data. Its research team monitors domestic and international GEO studies and conducts original research on how generative AI selects sources and structures answers. One of its research outcomes was accepted at CIKM 2026, a leading international conference in information retrieval and knowledge management, and these insights are fed back into the product for Japanese enterprises.
Demonstrated Impact
QueryLift reports an early result with Japan's Liberal Democratic Party, where the official website citation rate in generative AI answers increased 2.7 times over four months. The project focused on making accurate official party information the basis for AI-generated policy explanations rather than third-party or social media content. This outcome highlights how GEO can support public information beyond commercial use cases.
Future Plans
Looking ahead, QueryLift plans to clarify relationships among GEO metrics such as citation ranking, share of voice, and information reflection rates. The company aims to build a decision-making framework that helps organizations choose the right indicators and strategies based on their goals. It also plans to develop a GEO agent that autonomously advances analysis, improvement, and verification after a customer sets its desired state.
Investor Support and Market Outlook
JAFCO associate Shiori Taneichi said generative AI will become the main arena for information search, making it essential for companies to be both visible and accurately cited in AI responses. Z Venture Capital partner Masaki Yuda emphasized that as AI takes part in product discovery and selection, companies need to observe and improve how they appear to AI systems. Both investors pointed to the startup's research team and the chief executive officer's background at Yahoo! JAPAN as strengths for building an industry standard.
The seed funding marks a step toward building infrastructure that helps organizations adapt as AI becomes a primary gateway to information. QueryLift's focus on continuous observation, research, and automated improvement addresses a growing need across industries from finance to consumer brands. The company intends to use the investment to accelerate product development and help enterprises ensure their information is accurately understood and recommended in generative AI environments.