David Mühlenweg is the founder and CEO of Finseo, the AI visibility platform used by more than 500 marketing teams to measure and improve how brands appear inside AI answers.

He has worked in search for seven years, first in classic SEO and since 2024 almost entirely in generative and answer engine optimization. In that time he has run senior SEO and GEO consulting for brands including Panasonic, Kellogg's, Lidl and Otto, alongside a long tail of mid-market brands and agencies across the DACH region.

Finseo grew out of that consulting work. The questions clients kept asking, whether AI answers mention us, which sources those answers cite, and what any of it is worth in revenue, had no product behind them.

He came to search from engineering rather than from marketing. A B.Eng. in mechatronics at Westfälische Hochschule, a master's degree at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, and several years as an engineer at Mercedes-Benz before that. It is a fair description of how he approaches search: as a system to be measured before it is argued about.

He writes here about what Finseo's own tracking shows across nine answer engines, and about the studies worth taking seriously in a field where most claims come from a sample of one.