For many businesses, Google used to be core to their strategy to get in front of potential customers. They’d use search engine optimization tactics to make sure they’re one of the treasured few links that show up when you search for something.
Those days are numbered, thanks to AI. Search traffic for businesses like travel site Kayak and edtech company Chegg is dropping, in part because 60% of searches on sites like Google aren’t leading people to click any links, per one study — they just read the AI summary at the top. An executive at a cybersecurity company told Forbes search traffic to its website has gone down 10% this year. “The industry is really turned on its head because traditional ways of eventually SEO just don’t work anymore,” he said.
Now, instead of ginning up content to rank higher in traditional search engines, businesses are increasingly trying to grok how their brands show up in answers generated by AI search engines like Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity and ChatGPT, and create new content designed to be picked up by bots — and a new crop of startups has sprung up to help them.
“This is a true Game of Thrones power shift that is upon us here,” said James Cadwallader, the cofounder and CEO of Profound, which helps more than 100 customers like U.S. Bank, Docusign and Indeed understand how their brands appear in AI responses. “We’re entering this inflection point where humans no longer need to visit websites on the internet….These systems are hijacking that relationship with the end user entirely.”
It’s a “hair on fire” problem for companies, said Kleiner Perkins partner Ilya Fushman who led a $20 million funding round into the startup, which is less than a year old. Nvidia and Khosla also participated in the round, which valued Profound at over $100 million.
To tackle it, Profound generates thousands of synthetic prompts like “cheap football cleats” or “best phone for a teenager” and sends them to AI search engines to get an overall idea of which brands most frequently come up in different responses. The software is plugged into the brand’s website to observe, in real time, which specific pages are being crawled the most.
Profound then tracks “sentiment” to gauge a brand’s reputation within AI search by capturing phrases that could have negative connotations. Based on these metrics, it makes recommendations (as a traditional marketing agency would) like suggesting keywords, formatting style and layout and adding metadata to make pages easier to scrape by AI search engines. In some cases, it’s also using AI models to generate content that’s custom made to be crawled by AI search engines.
It’s early days for this new burgeoning field, known as Generative Engine Optimization. For the cybersecurity company that’s seen its search traffic dip by 10%, Profound is helping it track how competitors are performing in AI search results and produce new content to keep up with them. And an SEO specialist at a large job search company told Forbes he turned to Profound because the company had a “blind spot” in terms of how the business’ content was being featured on AI search engines a few months ago. “We were completely in the dark,” he said. With Profound, he’s able to find popular prompts and learn how the company’s blogs and data shows up in AI-generated answers. Even though traffic from tools like ChatGPT is less than 1% for the site, influencing how AI talks about the brand is where the market is headed, he said.
But influencing AI search engines’ answers is no easy task. The models underlying them are constantly changing—and along with them AI’s responses. AI search engines answer the same question differently each time, depending on how and when they are prompted and who is writing the prompt. “That’s why there’s such value in being able to distill, disambiguate and communicate how things like ChatGPT are surfacing information to real people” said Keith Rabois, a partner at Khosla Ventures who has backed Profound. “It’s personally impossible to track on your own company’s behalf.”
Profound isn’t the only game in town. New York-based Bluefish AI, which has raised $5 million in seed funding from backers like Crane Ventures and Laconia, is helping companies in industries like travel, pharmaceutical and retail track how they appear on Gemini, Perplexity and ChatGPT. Big tech companies like Amazon, Meta and Microsoft are becoming AI companies, and as their tools attract hundreds of millions of users, it has been a “wake up call” for the marketing industry, CEO Alex Sherman said.
While most websites are designed for human readers, they will have to be optimized to be crawled by large language models if businesses want to be featured in AI responses and reach customers directly. In March, OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy said on X that “99.9% of attention is about to be LLM attention.”
With a birds-eye view into AI responses, Bluefish is able to observe which sources of data are influencing brands’ perception within AI responses. “Some of the highest ranked third party sources that Bluefish sees across its customers are platforms like Reddit,” he said.
Another player is Athena, cofounded by Andrew Yan, who formerly worked at Google Deepmind’s generative media team, which uses its own AI search model that’s trained on millions of prompts and data points to create a dashboard of different AI metrics like sources, mentions and referral rates. Yan said AI search has widened the scope for marketing as it draws from more sources than Google, where the top three linked websites are often the most viewed.
Profound’s Cadwallader is optimistic that AI search engines will create a new, and improved, way for people to discover new products and make informed purchasing decisions that are best catered to their preferences. As AI systems surf the internet on behalf of shoppers, scrape data from hundreds of websites and deliver AI-generated responses to them, businesses are realizing they need to command the attention of a new type of “VIP customer”— bots.
“Eventually we believe in the zero click future where consumers will only interact with the answer engine and agents will be the primary visitor of websites and it’ll be a good thing,” he said.
