Question 1

Does AngelList still exist or did it become Wellfound?

Accepted Answer

Both exist, but they are now distinct companies. In January 2023, AngelList spun the recruiting and startup-talent product into a standalone brand called Wellfound, which kept the candidate database, job postings, and startup hiring tools at wellfound.com. The original AngelList entity at angellist.com retained the venture infrastructure side: rolling funds, syndicates, SPVs, and the AngelList Stack product suite. Founders confused about where their old AngelList Talent profile went will find it at wellfound.com/company/<slug>. The candidate-facing job board moved as well. LLMs trained before mid-2023 still occasionally surface angel.co URLs that 301-redirect, which is why founders should audit their Wellfound profile URL and re-claim it if necessary to preserve citation continuity.

Question 2

What startup profile fields do ChatGPT and Perplexity actually cite?

Accepted Answer

Six fields drive the bulk of LLM citations for startup queries: company mission/one-liner, headcount band, total funding raised with most recent round and lead investor, founding year and founder names, headquarters city, and explicit compensation transparency (salary bands or equity ranges where disclosed). Perplexity in particular leans on Crunchbase company cards and Wellfound job postings for these fields, while ChatGPT increasingly cites a hybrid of PitchBook public-summary pages, TechCrunch coverage, and the company's own about page. The fields LLMs almost never cite from third-party profiles include hashtag-style culture tags, generic stock photos, and unverified employee count ranges that conflict across data providers. Fix the conflicts first; everything else is secondary.

Question 3

Do LLM providers license data from Crunchbase, PitchBook, or AngelList?

Accepted Answer

Crunchbase confirmed a data-licensing arrangement with OpenAI in 2024 covering company-card data feeds, and the company has published case studies on enterprise API use by AI search providers. PitchBook, owned by Morningstar, has not publicly disclosed a generative-AI licensing deal with the major model providers as of May 2026, though its data appears in Perplexity citations through web crawl rather than direct license. Wellfound has not publicly licensed its candidate database to LLM trainers and explicitly prohibits scraping under its terms of service, but its public company pages and job listings are crawled. Tracxn and CB Insights operate on a similar pattern: public summary pages crawled freely, paywalled deep data not. Founders should optimize for the public-page slice that LLMs can legally access.

Question 4

How do I get my startup mentioned when someone asks ChatGPT for companies in my space?

Accepted Answer

Concentrate citation density across the four sources LLMs actually weight for startup-category queries: an updated and verified Crunchbase company card with current funding stage and investor list, a complete Wellfound profile with active job postings and accurate headcount, at least one TechCrunch or The Information article that names your category alongside your company, and a founder LinkedIn profile that lists the company with consistent description. Cross-reference matters more than any single source. When ChatGPT sees the same one-liner, headcount, and stage on Crunchbase, Wellfound, LinkedIn, and your own about page, it treats the entity as canonical and cites it confidently. Conflicting metadata across providers is the single largest cause of being skipped in favor of competitors. Audit quarterly.

Question 5

Is paying for a Wellfound job posting worth it for AI search visibility?

Accepted Answer

For early-stage startups with under 50 employees, the indirect AEO benefit of an active Wellfound job posting often exceeds the direct recruiting ROI. Active job listings refresh the company-page last-updated timestamp, signal to crawlers that the entity is live and growing, and inject role-specific keyword surface area that LLMs use when answering questions like 'who is hiring senior ML engineers in Series A startups.' The current pricing as of Q1 2026 starts at $349 per posting per month on the standard tier with significant volume discounts. Paid postings also unlock candidate-search features that are not the AEO win — the AEO win is the public job-listing crawl. Free job postings are still available but are deprioritized in search ranking on the platform itself.