James Cadwallader presents Profound, a platform that tracks how often brands appear in AI-generated answers from ChatGPT and Perplexia. He shows how AI answer engines are replacing direct website visits, demonstrates real-time tracking of brand mentions, and shares a case study where Profound increased one company's AI visibility seven-fold.
Chapters
So traditional search was a two-sided marketplace. Consumers would go to websites and trawl through the content, consume the content themselves. AI answers change everything. I'm talking about products like ChatGPT, Perplexity, as the consumer no longer visits a website. Instead, an agent goes on the user's behalf, and instead of just browsing the content, the agent will actually serve up the information for the end user and give it as a ready-made cohesive answer. And sure, the agent will tell the user where the content came from, but frankly, who cares where it came from if it tastes good? For the last 25 years, brands have enjoyed a direct relationship with the end user, and this is a huge paradigm shift as answer engines steal that relationship from every brand on the planet. The end consumer will eventually only interact with an answer engine, and a brand or a publisher will only interact with AI agents. Every brand on the planet, including Brex, who is a customer of ours, has a VIP new customer in town. And these agents will become first-class citizens of the internet. Soon they'll transact on the user's behalf as well. Akarpathy puts it perfectly when he says that 95% of attention will soon be LLM attention on the internet. And this is what we're building for with Profound. We think that AI visibility is the new category of marketing, and we're building a platform to help every brand on the planet understand and control their AI visibility. I'm going to do the quickest product demo I've ever done right now. This is Profound. What we do is we send hundreds of thousands of queries to the major answer engines and ask them lots of questions about corporate credit cards. We see all the answers that they spit out, and then we extract the brands as they're mentioned. And then we get this brand visibility score and we can see how it changes over time, which brands are mentioned. We can see the visibility score change. We can see the sentiment as well. Here you can see these are the, these are the websites ChatGPT uses to answer the questions. These are the platforms that Perplexity uses to answer the questions. And on top of that, now we're building this copilot that will actually interpret all of these swaths of data and generate recommendations and eventually draft content that will improve your AI visibility. This is gonna be a real-time demo on a website called FlightMapper where you type in, tell me about FlightMapper, then you come back to Profound, and then using network logs, we can see the agent visit the website, boom, in real time. So, that's Profound. Back to the deck. So, yeah, we increased VAMP's visibility 7x. This is a recent case study we just published. Having all that said, we just launched on August 17th, so it's like 7 and a half months old, our business. My co-founder Dylan was at Uber. I'm a serial founder. We, yeah, we are in office 6 days a week. So that's, that's, I've kind of made that clear up front. It's really intense. We're going really hard. We're at war with bayonets right now. Our ARR has doubled in the last 40 days. But the big vision here is to build a platform that every marketer will rely on for the generative internet. And yeah, we're hiring across all roles. I think the prerequisite is just, yeah, if you're hardcore and you want to come and do something really hard and work your ass off and do your career's best work. I'll be standing in the middle there. Yeah.
