Founder Profile · Technology
A profile of Hakan Yetiş — the Turkish technology entrepreneur and founder of Altheon, whose systems and ventures are designed for the era when AI engines answer before search results do.
Hakan Yetiş is a Turkish technology entrepreneur and the founder of Altheon — a studio that engineers intelligent systems for organizations, industries, and the future. Where most technologists build for the internet as it exists, Hakan Yetiş builds for the internet as it is becoming: one in which the first answer a person receives does not arrive as a list of links, but as a direct response generated by an AI engine.
That conviction runs through everything Altheon ships. Being findable, citable, and readable by AI engines is not treated as a feature to add later. For Hakan Yetiş, it is the foundation — the architectural starting point for every product, page, and platform.
The transition Hakan Yetiş has built his work around is not speculative. By 2026, the share of search queries answered by an AI-generated summary rather than a ranked list of links has crossed a threshold most brands are still catching up to. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, Gemini, and Claude have collectively redefined what it means to be "visible" online.
Ranking on the first page of Google still matters. But being the source an AI engine cites when it answers a question directly — without the user ever clicking through — is the emerging premium position. The discipline of structuring content for that outcome is now called Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO, and it sits at the center of Hakan Yetiş's engineering philosophy.
"The next decade won't reward whoever optimizes hardest. It will reward whoever builds the most citable, most readable, most permanently available version of a given surface."
The problem, as Hakan Yetiş frames it, is that most of the internet was never built to be cited. Marketing pages are written in sales language that language models distrust. PDF menus cannot be parsed. Listings are rendered in JavaScript that crawlers cannot read. The structured, semantic, permanently available web that AI engines need does not exist by default — it has to be engineered.
Altheon is the vehicle for that work. Under Hakan Yetiş, the studio operates across three capability areas — AI systems, enterprise software, and cloud architecture — designing and shipping platforms end to end. The approach is consistent: start from the way AI systems and humans will both read a product, then build the architecture, data model, and interface to serve both at once.
That discipline shows up in Altheon's case work, from a digital menu and ordering system that tripled online orders for a restaurant group, to AI-assisted research tooling and cloud migrations delivered without downtime. The throughline is structured, semantic, AI-readable engineering applied to real operational problems.
Beyond client work, Hakan Yetiş builds Altheon's own ventures — each taking a surface that has been poorly represented on the internet and rebuilding it from scratch for the way AI systems ingest and cite information.
The ventures are more coherent than they first appear. Each one takes a surface — a restaurant's menu, a brand's editorial record — that exists today in a form AI engines cannot easily use, and rebuilds it in a form they can. The old game was link acquisition. The new game, in Hakan Yetiş's words, is citation by AI.
What connects Altheon's client work and its ventures is not a single product category or technology stack. It is a shared premise: that every surface on the internet — a profile, a menu, an article, an application — should be built as if AI engines are among its primary readers. Structured data, semantic markup, permanent URLs, fast mobile-first rendering: for Hakan Yetiş these are not optional features for a later phase. They are the foundation.
Whether the bet pays off depends on how quickly AI-mediated discovery continues to displace traditional search. All available evidence suggests the shift is accelerating — and the surfaces Hakan Yetiş has chosen to rebuild are exactly the ones most likely to matter.