Pepper crosses $11 million ARR as SEO and GEO pivot pays off, eyes $30 million in 12 months

Content and organic growth company, Pepper, says it has crossed $11 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and is targeting $30 million over the next 12 months. The company says it is already profitable and expects to exit March 2027 at an annualised run rate of about $16 million.

The growth has come from a deliberate shift away from selling content towards selling discoverability. Pepper's SEO and generative engine optimisation (GEO) business barely existed 18 months ago. Co-founder Anirudh Singla says it is now expected to cross $10 million ARR on its own shortly. Overall, the company claims it has grown by over 300% in the last 18 months.

Rethinking the business after generative AI


When generative AI took off, Singla says the obvious question was why companies would keep paying for content that a model could produce in seconds.

"If your business is simply producing words, AI is going to have a huge impact on it. There is no point pretending otherwise," he said. "But when we looked at it honestly, customers were never paying us for words. They wanted to get discovered, build authority, bring in traffic and eventually generate business."

That realisation pushed Pepper deeper into SEO, organic growth and, more recently, GEO, which focuses on how brands appear in answers generated by tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. Singla says this shift is "probably the biggest reason for our growth."

The nature of client conversations has changed with it. He adds that earlier, a client might ask for 100 articles. Now, Singla says, the question is how the brand shows up when someone searches its category on Google, ChatGPT or Gemini, and what it should do to improve that.

Bigger customers, bigger contracts

The shift has moved Pepper up the customer ladder. The company now has over 40 customers paying over $100,000 a year, over 10 paying over $200,000 and three paying over $400,000. It works with over 250 enterprises globally. Brands it has spoken about publicly include Amazon, Instacart, General Mills, Unilever, Mutual of Omaha, Coca-Cola, Central Garden and Pet and PepsiCo.

He adds that enterprises are tired of tools. "Large companies don't need another dashboard telling them they have a problem. Most of them already have too many dashboards. They want outcomes."

The growth engine

The US has become Pepper's biggest growth market, accounting for around 80% of current growth. For Singla, this is also personal. "There is no reason why a company built in India cannot sell to some of the world's largest enterprises and build a substantial global business from here," he said.

Budgets, he says, are not yet neatly labelled. Do not expect a "GEO" line in every CMO's plan. Money is flowing from SEO, content, organic growth and demand generation budgets, and in some cases from new AI allocations. What has changed is the question clients ask. "Six months ago, it was, 'How often does my company appear on ChatGPT?' Now it is, 'Why is my competitor appearing instead of me, and what can I do about it?' That is when a category starts becoming real."

Pepper's technology play is Atlas, a platform that began as an internal tool. The company says it has run more than 10 million prompt checks through the system, which helped it identify patterns in what actually changes AI visibility. Agent Atlas brings together GEO data, Search Console, analytics and CMS information, then helps prioritise and execute the changes needed.

Singla is candid that the underlying models are not the moat. "We don't have access to an AI model nobody else has. Everyone can use OpenAI, Anthropic or Google," he said. "The difference is what you build around those models and what you learn from running programmes at scale."

Pepper says it is already profitable. For the full financial year, it is targeting revenue of about Rs 120 crore and EBITDA of around Rs 20 crore, a margin of roughly 16 to 17%. The company plans to exit March at around a $16 million annualised run rate and build towards $30 million ARR over the following 12 months.