Profound

The answer engine optimization platform for AI-era brand visibility

Profound is a New York-based AI visibility and optimization platform built for the category it helped define: Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), or the practice of ensuring brands appear prominently and accurately in AI-generated answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Mode, and similar platforms. Founded in 2024 by James Cadwallader and Gary Fishkin, Profound raised $155M+ across four rounds in 18 months — seed through Series C (Lightspeed, Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins) — reaching unicorn status with a $1B valuation at its February 2026 Series C. Its Profound Index, built from 400M+ anonymized real user conversations with answer engines, gives brands factual data on actual consumer AI prompts rather than hypothetical keyword lists. The company reports 700+ enterprise customers including Target, Walmart, and Ramp, and $6.8M in 2025 revenue at a pace that reflects early-stage hypergrowth rather than maturity.

Compliance

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Key Features

Answer Engine Insights: Tracks how a brand is cited, positioned, and described across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and others — measuring share of voice, citation rate, and sentiment per platform and topic cluster.
Prompt Volumes: Measures AI prompts and answers from real user conversations with answer engines, allowing teams to understand what consumers actually ask AI (not Google), with data from hundreds of millions of prompts per month — a dataset that no traditional SEO keyword tool contains.
Profound Index: A weekly-updated brand ranking built from real AI conversations across 12+ industries, showing where a brand stands relative to competitors in AI-generated answers on the topics that drive commercial decisions.
Profound Agents: Autonomous marketing workers with native integrations for WordPress, Sanity, and Slack that can publish, update, and coordinate content work to improve how customers find the brand across AI search — moving the platform from analytics to execution.
Workflows (content operations automation): An automation layer for marketing teams that streamlines content auditing, analysis, and optimization workflows at scale using Profound’s AEO data.
Competitive benchmarking: Tracks competitor citation rates and positioning across AI platforms, identifying gaps and opportunities in a brand’s AI presence before they manifest as lost pipeline.

Use Cases

For enterprise CMOs benchmarking AI visibility: A marketing leader at a Fortune 500 uses Profound to understand whether the brand is cited in AI answers for its most commercially important topics — and how that share of voice compares to competitors.
For content teams optimizing for AI citation: A content strategy team uses Profound’s Prompt Volumes data to identify the specific questions real consumers ask AI in their category, then restructures content to address those prompts rather than traditional search queries.
For brands managing reputation in AI answers: A company whose products are frequently mentioned in AI recommendations uses Profound to monitor how AI models frame those mentions (sentiment, accuracy, context) and to correct inaccuracies.

Pricing MODELS

Saas subscription

Pricing Summary

SaaS subscription with custom enterprise pricing. Starter-tier pricing has been referenced in third-party coverage at around $99–$499/month for self-serve access; enterprise pricing (which unlocks more AI platforms, including Google AI Mode and Gemini) is custom-quoted. Contact sales for current pricing.