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Profound
SEO for the AI age
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Thinking a lot recently about traditional tech being rethought in the age of AI. In that sense, Profound’s relevance is very timely. Many people default to ChatGPT when asking questions over Google. So why doesn’t it make sense to have a “Search Console” equivalent for AI search?
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As consumer discovery shifts from search engines to AI assistants, brands lose the ability to shape their own messaging. Profound is a marketing data and distribution platform that helps brands control how they are represented across AI search and conversational interfaces. It provides tools to structure brand and product data in a machine-readable format and synchronize that information across the AI ecosystem, ensuring consistent and accurate representation in “zero-click” environments.
Check it out: tryprofound.com
Profound operates a B2B SaaS model with pricing that scales by plan tier and usage limits, including the number of AI surfaces supported and the volume of responses analyzed.
Raised Series B funding from Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures, Saga Ventures, and NVentures (NVIDIA)
Achieved early adoption among dozens of consumer and enterprise brands, including Ramp, Plaid, and Indeed
Monitoring 27 million+ citations and 3 million+ AI prompts daily
Supporting users across 18 countries and six languages
47 open positions across engineering, design, product, partnerships, and go-to-market
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The realization behind Profound clicked in early 2024 when James Cadwallader became deeply interested in using AI answer engines like Perplexity as his primary way of searching the internet. Cadwallader’s previous experience co-founding KYRA, an AI-powered influencer marketing platform, and working closely with large brands helped him recognize quickly that AI answers would become a boardroom-level problem for marketing teams. What initially felt like a better search experience soon revealed that beyond just search changing, the interface to the internet itself was shifting from indexed resources to personalized responses.
As Cadwallader and his cofounder Dylan Babbs explored this dynamic, they realized it would create a new kind of problem for brands. In a world where AI systems generate recommendations directly, brands lose visibility into how they are being described and compared. Cadwallader kept returning to a simple example from his prior work with large brands.
If someone asks ChatGPT for a running shoe, it may return four or five recommendations. Even a brand like Nike, despite spending billions on marketing, has no guarantee it would appear in that list. Brand identity was now being mediated by probabilistic systems outside a company’s control. That mismatch made the problem urgent.
Babbs brings a complementary perspective from his time at Uber, where he worked on the geospatial data and navigation systems that determine how the world is represented and how people move through it. Just as maps and navigation depend on trusted, structured data to function, AI systems need authoritative sources to accurately represent brands.
Together, they founded Profound with the goal of ensuring that as the internet shifts from links to answers, brands retain authorship over how they are perceived.
Profound is operating at a fundamental inflection point in digital discovery. As users move from clicking search results to asking AI systems directly for recommendations, the core problem changes from how brands rank to how they are represented. The solution requires a new category of infrastructure where brand data must be verified, continuously updated, and machine-readable.
The size of the opportunity is massive. Every touchpoint where AI generates language becomes part of the addressable market, including search, chat, shopping, voice, and in-product experiences. And as adoption grows, the surface area where brands must be represented expands alongside it.
A look into Profound’s dashboard
Profound has a credible path to becoming the system of record for brand identity in AI environments. In the same way that Shopify became the canonical source for product catalogs, and Stripe became the canonical layer for payments, Profound can define how brands are represented by AI systems. Far from a mere replacement for SEO, which saw brands optimizing blogs and flatpages for keywords, Profound is enabling what it calls AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization. Once a company integrates its brand identity and product data into this layer, switching costs become high and governance becomes ongoing (rather than campaign-based).
What strengthens this case is the alignment of incentives across the ecosystem. CMOs are already reallocating budgets toward high-intent discovery surfaces where outcomes can be measured. At the same time, AI platforms need authoritative brand data to reduce hallucinations, inconsistencies, liability, and more. Profound sits at the intersection of these needs, serving both sides of the market.
Profound has a strong path to unicorn scale because it owns a new control point in distribution. Brands cannot afford to be misrepresented or missing from recommendations. Profound is building the monitoring layer, plus the action layer, that turns insights into changes, and it compounds as brands expand usage across teams and surfaces.
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