LLMs.txt Blog Let's Talk

Co-founder & CTO of Wrodium

I'm Arlen Kumar

I sold my first company before I could legally drink. Now I'm building the infrastructure for how brands get discovered in the AI era.

The GEO platform that turns your content into what ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini actually cite.

Berkeley SkyDeck '24 UC Berkeley Previous Exit: Air Quake Simulations
ChatGPT Gemini Perplexity Claude
UC Berkeley CS, Data Science, Economics
Research Under Prof. Marti Hearst
Berkeley SkyDeck Backed
Previous Exit Air Quake Simulations (acquired)

Results, not promises.

"Wrodium cut our content workload by 70%. Instead of fixing outdated pages manually, we focus on strategy. The speed and quality jump is huge—and our citations across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity rose by 20% within a week."

"If you're not optimizing for AI search, you're optimizing for yesterday. Wrodium got us cited by ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity faster than I thought possible."

Kevin Kissi
Kevin Kissi Founder & CEO, Zof AI Ex-Microsoft Principal Engineering Manager

That's not a typo. 20% more AI citations in seven days. While your competitors are still Googling "what is GEO," our clients are getting quoted.

Speaking at GEO Conference 2025

Leanid Palkhouski speaking at GEO Conference 2025

"Why Your Content Isn't Getting Picked by AI"

Leanid Palkhouski, Co-founder @ Wrodium

San Francisco · December 15, 2025

Sponsors: Google · OpenAI · Kearney · Conductor · AirOps · Yext

Google is dying. Most brands don't know it yet.

Informational search queries are migrating to AI. ChatGPT has 200M+ weekly users. Perplexity is growing 40% month-over-month. When someone asks "best CRM for startups," they're not clicking ten blue links anymore—they're reading one AI-generated answer.

Here's the thing: AI doesn't rank pages. It cites sources.

If your content isn't structured for AI to understand, verify, and trust—you don't exist. You're not on page two. You're nowhere.

That's the problem Leanid Palkhouski and I are solving at Wrodium.

200M+ ChatGPT weekly users
40% Perplexity MoM growth
Protecting AI Accuracy at Scale

The Mission

Hallucinations aren't just embarrassing—they're expensive. When AI gets your company wrong, customers leave, deals fall through, and trust evaporates.

I build systems that give LLMs perfect context: structured, verified, current. The goal isn't just to be cited—it's to be cited correctly.

AI is becoming the interface to all information. But AI is only as accurate as the content it retrieves.

Right now, most American business content is a mess—outdated pages, unstructured data, no fact-verification layer. LLMs do their best, but they hallucinate. They get pricing wrong. They cite dead products. They fabricate quotes.

That's not acceptable.

Wrodium exists to fix this. We structure content so AI can parse it. We verify claims so AI can trust them. We maintain pages so AI never retrieves stale information.

We're not an SEO tool. We're not a marketing gimmick. We're the infrastructure layer that makes American AI accurate about American businesses.

The companies that structure their content for AI will thrive. The ones that don't will be misrepresented—or invisible.

We're building for the first group.

About Me

The short version

Arlen Kumar and Leanid Palkhouski - Co-founders of Wrodium Leanid & Arlen — Co-founders of Wrodium

I'm a serial founder and researcher who's obsessed with one question: when AI becomes the interface to all information, who gets credit?

At 19, I built Air Quake Simulations—a VR flight simulator hardware company. I 3D-printed cockpit components that undercut the industry by 10x. Sold it.

Now I'm CTO of Wrodium, where my co-founder Leanid Palkhouski and I are building the picks-and-shovels for the AI search gold rush. We help brands become the sources AI engines trust, cite, and recommend—not just pages that exist somewhere on the internet.

I study how this actually works. At UC Berkeley, I run research under Professor Marti Hearst on AI citation behavior—reverse-engineering how LLMs decide which sources to quote. That research became the GEO-16 framework: 16 predictive factors that determine whether AI cites you or your competitor.

I'm not interested in "AI for AI's sake." I build systems that are auditable, explainable, and aligned with how real humans search, read, and decide. My background in digital humanities—race, gender, and bias in AI—isn't a side interest. It's why I build differently.

What we're building

Wrodium is a Generative Engine Optimization platform for brands that refuse to be invisible.

Leanid and I started it because we saw the shift coming: the companies that structure their content for AI today will own their categories tomorrow. Everyone else will wonder where their traffic went.

What Wrodium actually does:

Audits

We show you exactly how AI systems currently describe your brand. (Spoiler: it's probably wrong or incomplete.)

Optimizes

We restructure your content so AI engines can parse, verify, and cite it. Schema markup, semantic structure, fact-verification layers—the boring stuff that actually matters.

Maintains

AI changes fast. We keep your content current so you don't drift into hallucination territory.

Measures

We track AI visibility and citations so you can tie "ChatGPT mentioned us" to actual revenue.

We've built integrations for six major CMS platforms. We run experiments constantly. We know what works because we test it—not because we read a blog post about prompt engineering.

This isn't theory. This is what happens.

70% Content workload reduction Less time on manual fixes
+20% AI citation increase Across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity
1 week Time to results Not months. Days.

I don't guess. I measure.

Most "AI SEO" advice is vibes. I wanted data.

So Leanid and I ran hundreds of experiments on how AI answer engines select sources. The result: "AI Answer Engine Citation Behavior: An Empirical Analysis of the GEO-16 Framework"—a research paper identifying the 16 factors that predict whether AI cites you.

This isn't theoretical. It's built from real queries, real responses, real citation patterns across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude.

Other writing:

  • How to turn ChatGPT visibility into measurable revenue
  • Content maintenance for AI assistants (not just search crawlers)
  • Why GEO, SEO, and AEO are different games with different rules

I treat research as product development. Every insight becomes a feature. Every experiment becomes a recommendation we can actually ship.

GEO-16 Research Framework - AI Citation Behavior Analysis

What I Care About

Honest Attribution

The web has a credit problem. People who create accurate, useful content get erased when AI summarizes them into a paragraph with no link. I want to fix that—better structure, better standards, better tracking for how AI systems cite sources.

Responsibility that Ships

I've spent years studying how AI systems erase or misrepresent people. That's not just an ethical concern—it's a product concern. If your AI visibility strategy gets you cited for the wrong thing, you've made your problem worse. I build systems that optimize for accurate exposure, not just exposure.

Theory → Buttons

I like research. But I like shipping more. The best part of Wrodium is turning abstract concepts like "generative engine optimization" into dashboards, workflows, and reports that marketers and founders actually use.

Track Record

Wrodium

Current

Co-founded with Leanid Palkhouski. Berkeley SkyDeck-backed. Building the GEO platform for AI-era discovery.

UC Berkeley Research

Ongoing

Studying AI citation behavior under Prof. Marti Hearst. Developed GEO-16 predictive framework.

Catherine Manor Labradoodles

Shut down

Built a community network for Silicon Valley dog owners. Shut down during COVID. (Yes, really.)

The window is open. It won't stay open.

The brands that figure out AI visibility in 2024-2025 will own their categories for years. Everyone else will pay to catch up.

If you want to be in the first group, let's talk.

Book a Call with Me