Your buyers now get an AI-generated positioning statement every time they ask ChatGPT whether you or a competitor is the better fit. You didn't write it; it may be months out of date, and yet, in this new reality, it carries undeniable weight. In G2's survey of 1,076 B2B software buyers, AI chatbots were the top source shaping shortlists, ahead of review sites, analysts, and vendor websites. 85% said they think more highly of a vendor when AI includes it in an answer.

The engines build that description from pages you can find and influence, like your own site, review sites, comparison articles, and Reddit threads. As chapter two of our AEO Guide puts it, the identity that shapes your AI presence is "the one you've made available to the internet." For product marketing, those answers are a bigger and more current read on how the market sees you than any win-loss program, and keeping up with them is a lot of new work.

The best AEO platforms can now take on that work. These platforms often sit with your SEO, AEO, or content team, but the data in them answers product marketing's questions too, and working in the same place means your positioning and their pages draw on the same facts.

Profound runs its Agents on the data it collects: more than 2 billion real prompts people have put to answer engines, the pages each engine cites in reply, and how each describes you and your competitors. You can build your own agents in a drag-and-drop builder or start from Profound's library of templates.

Below, we walk through five jobs most product marketers own, and the agents that take each one on.

See how the engines describe you next to your competitors

Your view of competitors probably comes from a mix of sources, like win-loss interviews, sales feedback, analyst briefings, and their own websites. Each one gives you a snapshot, and a competitor can change its story between snapshots without you noticing.

Tracking AI answers closes that gap. Buyers ask engines questions like "What are the pros and cons of [your product]?" and "Should a 50-person team choose [you] or [competitor]?" The answers show, in the words a buyer will read, how each engine describes you next to your competitors. Each answer also cites its sources, so you can see which reviews, comparison articles, or competitor pages shaped that description. Chapter three of our AEO Guide calls these sentiment and competitor prompts, and walks through how to write them so they're worth tracking.

As for how Profound can help here, you have several options:

  • Sentiment pulls out the claims engines make about you, groups them into themes, ties each theme to the citations behind it, and shows how every theme performs for you and your competitors in one view. If the engines keep calling a competitor "enterprise-ready" and you "easy to set up," you see both themes side by side, along with the pages that put them there.
  • The Top Sentiment Themes Report agent scores the themes in how engines describe you on a topic, and reports your strongest and weakest themes over a period you choose.
  • The Customer Question Miner agent pulls recent AI answers for one of your Profound topics, along with the searches the engines ran to write them. It reports the questions buyers ask most, the intent behind them, and the questions nobody answers well yet, which gives you the buyer's vocabulary as well as the engine's.

Answer Engine Insights also shows the topics and prompts where competitors get more visibility and citations than you, which is often the first sign that a rival's message is landing where yours isn't.

Rob Dougherty, who leads search content at Kiteworks, uses Profound every day to track how answer engines present Kiteworks next to direct and peripheral competitors, so he sees the brand's story the way buyers do. That view decides which content the team builds next, and Kiteworks' aggregate AI visibility on its key compliance and security topics reached about 50%, ahead of Microsoft, Box, and Dropbox.

Check whether your launch messaging landed

AI answers give you an early read on how your launch messaging lands because of how engines pick up new information. They only change how they describe you once they find pages that say something new.

A launch message shows up on your own pages first, then in coverage, reviews, and threads, and only then in the answers. If the engines still describe you the old way three weeks after launch, the message probably hasn't spread beyond your own site.

Plan the launch around the questions buyers will ask

The Pre-Launch AEO Strategy Playbook agent builds a plan for a new product, category, or campaign. It maps the competitive landscape, groups the questions buyers will ask into clusters, lists the pages you'll need live on launch day, and lays out a plan for earning citations, a technical checklist, and a 90-day roadmap.

Before launch day, add prompts that test the new message to your tracking. In our AEO Guide, you’ll find these described as validation prompts, like "Does X offer Y?", and they tell you whether an engine even knows you have the new capability. Record how the engines answer them, and the sentiment themes on the launch topic, so you have a baseline.

Compare before and after

In Answer Engine Insights, set a date range after launch and compare it with the period before. Look for changes in visibility on the launch topic, in the themes attached to you, and in which pages the engines cite. Run the Top Sentiment Themes Report for the weeks after launch and compare it with a report from the weeks before. New themes that match your messaging are the signal you're looking for.

You can also build your own agent for this. Have it pull the sentiment themes on your launch topic for the four weeks before launch and the weeks since, then write a short comparison of which themes appeared, which faded, and which pages introduced them. The pages are the useful part. They tell you whether the message spread through your own content, through coverage, or through reviews, and that shapes where you put effort for the next launch.

Find every place your old pricing and claims are still published

Every pricing change, renamed plan, and retired feature leaves a trail. There's the comparison article that quotes your old pricing page, the review that mentions the plan you discontinued, and the Reddit thread repeating last year's usage limits. Nobody goes looking for them until a customer or a lawyer finds one. The engines read all of it, and when they can't tell which version is current, buyers get the old one.

FactCheck extracts the factual claims engines make about your brand, checks each one against the product facts you've given Profound, and traces every wrong claim back to the page it came from. Four agents act on what it finds:

Some claims are accurate and still hurt you, like a review that calls your product "powerful but hard to learn" two releases after you fixed onboarding. The Sentiment Action - Draft Outreach agent starts from a third-party page that talks about you negatively, isolates the negative claims, and drafts a short, factual email to the publisher. On your own site, the Sentiment Action - Update Content agent rewrites a page that engines cite with negative sentiment so it addresses those claims directly.

Turn your sales calls into a positioning update

Sales calls are the best positioning research you have, because buyers describe the problem in their own words before anyone has turned those words into messaging. The trouble is volume: thirty calls a month is more than anyone can listen to.

In chapter two of our AEO Guide, we suggest cross-checking what you hear against outside sources, since phrases that show up across Gong calls, Reddit, and review platforms are your highest-confidence material. AI search adds a source to that list, and agents can do the cross-checking:

  • The Content Radar Template agent takes your call notes, pulls out the buyer themes that keep coming up, works out the queries those themes map to, and scores them against AI search demand. For a product marketer, that shows which problems buyers raise on calls are also being asked about in AI search, and how often.
  • You can build your own agent that goes a step further. Give it a batch of call notes, have an LLM step extract how buyers describe the problem and the alternatives they considered, have an Answer Engine Insights step pull how the engines currently describe you on the same topics, and ask it to draft a positioning update that flags where the two disagree.

At One Identity, Profound's data now reaches product and sales as well as marketing. Sentiment tied to the prompts buyers run in AI tools feeds into UX and messaging priorities. The sales team also noticed that many objections seemed to come from "pros and cons" prompts prospects ran before their calls, so the team now addresses those objections in its own content, in publisher placements, and in sales enablement.

Keep the competitive one-pager current

A battlecard is accurate the week you make it. After that, competitors change their pricing, launch features, and rewrite their homepages without telling you, and the engines often pick up those changes before your battlecard does. AI answers also show you how buyers will hear about each competitor before they get on a call with your sales team.

  • The Industry Analyst Report Simulation agent checks what you give it against public G2 and Gartner peer review data, sweeps every competitor in your primary and secondary categories, and builds a competitive intelligence report.
  • The Citation-to-Content Engine agent looks at which pages the engines cite across a broad topic, works out the patterns behind your competitors' citations, and returns the specific prompts where a page from you could compete.
  • Sentiment's competitor view shows each theme for you and your competitors side by side, so a competitor's new strength shows up as a theme before it shows up in a lost deal.

This is another good job for an agent you build yourself. Have it run your most important competitor prompts, compare how the engines describe each competitor with the last run, and draft edits to the battlecard for anything that changed. You review the edits before they reach sales.

Work with your team's AI Marketer in Profound

Product marketing rarely runs the AEO program, but few teams have more riding on it, because so much of what the engines say about you comes down to positioning.

That's the case for working in the same Profound workspace as your SEO, AEO, and content teams. The prompts they track, the citations, and the Sentiment and FactCheck results are already there, and so is AI Marketer (Aim), the orchestrator inside Profound.

Aim is a marketing teammate that already knows your brand. It reads everything your team tracks in Profound, draws on Profound's prompt data, and keeps your company data in Context Manager, including your positioning, audiences, competitors, offerings, and approved claims, filled from sources like Slack, email, and Gong. You start from what Aim already knows instead of a blank page.

Here's how that maps to the five jobs above:

  • Competitor framing. You can ask Aim how the engines describe you next to a specific competitor. It answers from your Sentiment and citation data, down to the pages behind each theme.
  • Launch messaging. You can ask Aim what changed in how the engines describe you since a launch, and get to the cause in the themes and citations behind it.
  • Outdated claims. Wrong claims from FactCheck can show up in Aim's weekly ranked list of opportunities. When you approve one, Aim turns it into a project, such as a correction request to the publisher, an update to your page, and a reply to the Reddit thread repeating it, then builds and runs the agents for each task.
  • Sales calls. With Gong connected to Context Manager, Aim works from what buyers say on calls as well as what the engines say.
  • Battlecards. When your benchmark against a competitor falls, Aim flags it with the data behind it and can build an agent that drafts the battlecard update.

Nothing goes live without approval, and Aim learns from what you approve, edit, or turn down.

Sharing the workspace also keeps everyone's work consistent. Every agent drafts from the same Context Manager, so a positioning change you make there carries into the briefs, pages, and pitches the rest of the team's agents write. If your SEO or AEO team already uses Profound, ask for access. And if it's choosing an AEO platform, ask to be part of the decision, since you'll rely on it too.

See what Aim already knows about how AI engines describe you. Book a demo.

AI agents for product marketers FAQs

Where does product marketing fit in an AEO program?

As a core contributor, even when another team runs it. The SEO or AEO team usually owns the platform, tracks the numbers, and coordinates the work, but AI search is more cross-functional than SEO ever was. Answer engines build their picture of you from every mention across the internet, and product marketing shapes more of those mentions than almost anyone.

How do AI engines decide how to describe my product?

From the pages they find when someone asks, weighted toward claims that several sources agree on. Answer engines tend to hold back on a claim only one source makes, so a line that appears on your site, in two reviews, and in a comparison article is more likely to end up in an answer than one that only appears on your homepage.

Can I change how AI engines position my product against competitors?

Yes, by changing the pages it reads. Start with your own site. Make sure your homepage, pricing, and comparison pages say clearly who you're for and how you differ, in the words buyers use. If a competitor's "vs." page is the only comparison the engine can find, write a fair one of your own. Then work on the third-party pages the engines cite for your competitor prompts. Correct wrong claims at the source, pitch the comparison articles that leave you out, and make sure review sites reflect your current product. Expect a lag. The engines only change their answers once they find and read the new pages, so check the trend over weeks instead of the next day.