In G2's survey of 1,076 B2B software buyers in March, 51% said they start their research in an AI chatbot, and chatbots now shape shortlists more than review sites, analyst firms, or vendor websites. 69% of buyers ended up choosing a different vendor than they'd planned because a chatbot recommended it.

That makes AI search a channel you can't ignore, so every role on your marketing team now has an Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) version of its job. Each one has to keep track of how the engines answer buyers' questions, then act on what it finds.

AEO platforms now take on both parts. They monitor and run agents that do most of the manual work for you. Profound runs its monitoring and its agents on the same data: 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 with a drag-and-drop builder or start from Profound's library of templates.

Below, we go role by role through the work each part of a SaaS marketing team can hand to agents.

SEO and AEO: Win the questions buyers ask

Software buyers ask engines the questions they used to take to G2 and Google, only longer and more specific. For example:

"Best accounts payable software for a 200-person company"

"HubSpot or Salesforce for a 20-person sales team"

"Alternatives to Expensify"

And so on.

For each prompt, a handful of vendors make the shortlist, and the engines answer each one based on the consensus they’ve formed about your brand. Chapter three of our AEO Guide teaches you how to sort prompts into six types, from discovery, where a buyer is still exploring options, to competitor prompts that put two named brands head to head.

Your job is to know which of those prompts count in your category, which pages the engines cite for them, and whether any of those pages are yours.

Find the prompts that decide shortlists

A keyword tool tells you how many people search "AP automation software." It can't tell you what a buyer asks ChatGPT when they're down to three vendors, or which pages the answer comes from. Three templates can help at this stage:

  • The AEO + SEO Research Report agent shows, for a topic, which keywords have search volume, what ranks for them on Google, and how the answer engines respond to the same questions, including the sources they cite.
  • 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. You can filter it by persona, so a CFO's questions come back separately from an AP manager's.

In addition to these agents, Profound’s Query Fanout Analysis tool shows what happens between the buyer's prompt and the answer. Engines rewrite each prompt into several web searches before picking sources, and Query Fan-Out lists every variation generated from the prompts you track, how often each one appears, and which ones most often decide the sources that get cited. It also shows which words the engine adds or drops when it rewrites a prompt, flags when it adds a date (a sign it wants recent pages), and compares the searches across personas. Those searches are the sub-questions your page has to answer to get pulled into the response.

Win the comparison and alternatives answers

Competitor prompts are where you win or lose deals you never knew were happening. When a buyer asks an engine to pick between you and a competitor, the answer usually leans on a handful of pages: comparison articles, review-site category pages, and the vendors' own "vs." pages. If your competitor wrote the only comparison page, the engine is reading their version of the matchup. To help you compete, you can turn to:

  • The Citation-to-Content Engine agent that looks at which pages engines cite across a broad topic, identifies patterns in your competitors' citations, and returns the specific prompts where a page from you could compete.
  • The Chunk-Level Citation Audit agent that reads a page the way an engine does. Point it at your existing comparison page, and it splits the page into the passages an engine could lift, then scores each one on whether it stands on its own, answers first, and is specific enough to quote.

Chapter five of our AEO Guide explains why these pages deserve extra attention. Your homepage, pricing, about, and comparison pages are crawled heavily, and they're often where AI goes for basic company facts. That makes them some of the first places to add anything you want the engines to say about you.

Make your docs and product pages readable

SaaS sites have more surface area than most. You might have a marketing site, a docs site, a help center, and a changelog, sometimes on different subdomains managed by different teams. Each subdomain has its own robots.txt, so a rule written for one can block AI crawlers from another without anyone noticing.

  • The Robots.txt & LLMs.txt Auditor agent reads a domain's robots.txt and llms.txt files and tells you which of 25-plus known search and AI crawlers can get in. Run it on every subdomain, including your docs and help center.
  • The Schema Markup Generator agent writes the structured data that helps search engines read a page.

If you haven't run a full audit yet, chapter four of our AEO Guide walks through one across visibility, citations, opportunities, and AI traffic.

Ramp's SEO team saw the engines citing content about automation and software comparisons in its category, so it built pages for exactly those prompts. Two pages, one on accounts payable software for small businesses and one for large businesses, earned more than 300 citations within a month, alongside comparison pages like a roundup of the top accounts payable automation tools. Ramp's AI visibility in accounts payable went from 3.2% to 22.2% in that month, moving it from 19th to 8th among fintech brands.

Content: Keep up with a product that ships every week

In SaaS, the product changes faster than the blog. A release renames a plan, an integration launches, a feature moves to a higher tier, and somewhere on your site a page still describes last quarter's product. The engines can't tell it's out of date. They keep citing it until they find something newer, so your library now has to stay accurate for the engines that quote it as well as the buyers who read it.

Brief and draft from the pages engines already cite

You don’t need to start every new content asset from scratch:

  • The Content Brief + Final Draft Generator agent looks at the pages the engines already cite for a topic, the live Google results, and what you've published, then writes a brief and a full draft for you to edit.
  • The SERP Content Gap Analyzer agent compares a page you want to improve with the top 10 Google results and the pages AI Overviews cite for the same query, and lists the topics, formats, entities, and angles your page is missing.

Fix the pages the engines skip

Your existing library is usually the quickest place to win citations back. The pages already exist, they're already linked from the rest of your site, and most of them need an update rather than a rewrite:

Roll a fix out across the whole library

Some updates belong on every page. Done one at a time, they stay on the backlog for quarters, but with agents on your side, you can roll them out at scale:

  • The AEO-Optimized FAQ Generator agent writes an FAQ section for an existing page from its core question, Google's People Also Ask results, and the related searches engines run in the background.
  • The Add Internal Links agent takes an article and adds links to your own pages based on a keyword you choose.
  • The Multi Language Article Translator agent translates an article into a list of languages in parallel, then reviews each translation for quality and AEO alignment and refines it.

To apply any of these across hundreds of pages, you can run Profound Agents in a spreadsheet, where each column can be an agent, and each row a page.

Kiteworks, which sells secure data-sharing software to more than 3,650 enterprises and government agencies, uses Profound Agents to draft content from its target prompts in its own tone and positioning. The team now publishes about eight times as many posts a day, and its aggregate AI visibility on key compliance and security topics reached about 50%, ahead of Microsoft, Box, and Dropbox.

Product marketing: Keep the engines' description of your product current

In SaaS, product facts change often, and the engines repeat the old version until they find pages that say otherwise. That hurts most on what our AEO Guide calls accuracy prompts: the questions about pricing, features, integrations, or anything else with a right answer.

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:

Accuracy is half of the equation. The other half is framing, like an engine calling you the budget option when you've spent two years moving upmarket. Profound's 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. Each recommended action links to an agent that drafts the response. For the wider market, 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.

Comms and PR: Earn the third-party pages that count in software

With only 11.4% of SaaS citations coming from earned media, PR in AI search comes down to a short list of pages: the listicles and comparison articles engines cite for your category, the review sites, the Reddit threads. Those pages carry weight with buyers too. G2 found that a citation from a software review site is the top trust signal buyers look for in an AI answer.

Find the pages worth pitching to

Three pre-built agents make it easy to uncover the pages you should focus on:

  • The Citation Type Breakdown for a Given Topic agent sorts the pages the engines cite by content type and reports citation counts and share of voice for each type. You find out whether the answers in your category come from publications, review sites, or vendor pages before you plan a single pitch.
  • The Create Media Target List agent pulls the earned media domains and pages cited in your category, with share of voice and citation counts for each.
  • The Citation-Friendly PR Target Finder agent checks each cited domain's robots.txt and ranks the outlets into a pitch list, with high-citation outlets that let AI crawlers in at the top.

Reach the people behind them

Once you know where to go, you need to find the who:

  • The Citation to Outreach Target Finder agent takes the most-cited URLs for a topic, finds each author's name, role, and contact details, and writes one row per target to a spreadsheet.
  • The Draft Outreach Email agent scrapes a target page and drafts a pitch built around what it says and what it leaves out, like a roundup of AP tools that lists five of your competitors and not you.

One Identity, an identity security company, used Profound to find the publisher pages the engines cited most in its category. The team contacted those publishers with deeper product context and, where it made sense, paid for sponsored placements. One Identity won first or second position on the most influential listicles in its space, including PeerSpot, CyberPress, and Expert Insights. Its visibility grew 30% in a quarter, and its non-branded citation share doubled. "Profound showed us exactly which pages to influence," says Ali Sayyed, SEO Lead.

Marketing ops: Run the reporting without building it by hand

Every role above produces numbers, and they all land here. Visibility comes from your AEO platform, AI-referred signups from your analytics, pipeline from the CRM, and leadership wants it in one place they'll actually read. Chapter six of our AEO Guide lays out a measurement framework in three layers (visibility, traffic attribution, and revenue impact), and each layer is a separate pull you'd otherwise do by hand.

With agents, it’s a different story: the Weekly Brand Health Report and Monthly Brand Health Report agents pull your visibility scores and share of voice from Profound and write them up as an overview you can edit before it goes out.

Still, the most useful agent for ops is often one you build yourself, because you decide exactly what it checks. You can pick the data it pulls (visibility, citation share, or sentiment), the slice you care about (one engine, one topic, a set of competitors, a region, or a persona), and the periods it compares, whether that's this week against last week, this quarter against last quarter, or the four weeks since a launch against the four weeks before.

We go deeper on this in our piece on [AI marketing agents for reporting and monitoring].

Run all AI search work with your AI Marketer in Profound

AI Marketer (Aim) is the orchestrator inside Profound, a marketing teammate that reads all of your AI search data, works out what's worth doing, and builds the agents to do it.

Aim draws on your data in Profound, including visibility, citations, sentiment, prompt volumes, FactCheck, and Agent Analytics. It also draws on Context Manager, which holds your company's positioning, audiences, competitors, products, strategy, and the claims you've approved. You fill it by connecting Slack, email, and Gong, and by answering the questions it raises when something's missing.

Here's how it works across the team:

  • Every week, Aim brings you a ranked list of opportunities, with the data behind each one. That might be a visibility gap on a prompt your competitors own, a sentiment drop on a key topic, rising prompt volume in a category you don't cover yet, or a falling benchmark against a competitor.
  • You decide which opportunities to act on, and Aim turns each one into a project. Say a competitor launches a new integration and starts winning "X vs. Y" answers you used to own. That could become one project with tasks for several roles: update the comparison facts, draft an integration page, and pitch the two review sites the engines cite most. Aim then builds and runs the agents that do each task.
  • Nothing goes live without your team's approval. Afterward, Aim tracks whether the engines started citing the new pages and whether their description of you changed. It also learns from what your team approves, edits, or turns down.

Because every agent drafts from the same Context Manager, the content team's integration page and product marketing's comparison update use the same positioning and the same approved claims. It's the practical answer to "Are we all telling the same story?"

See which AI search work your team could hand to agents. Book a demo.

AI marketing agents for SaaS FAQs

Which pages do AI engines cite for software questions?

Mostly company websites. In Profound's analysis of 11.84 billion citations, SaaS brands got a median of only 11.4% of their citations from earned media. Most of the rest came from company sites, including your competitors', and from social platforms like Reddit and YouTube.

Who should own AI search on a SaaS marketing team?

AI search is more cross-functional than SEO ever was, because engines build their picture of you from every mention across the internet, which touches product marketing, PR, customer success, sales, and product. In practice, the SEO or AEO lead acts as the conductor, briefing the other teams and tracking the numbers, while each role owns its part of the work as laid out above. The head of marketing sets the priorities and settles the trade-offs between them.

Can we tie AI search to signups and pipeline?

Partly. Agent Analytics shows when AI crawlers visit your pages and how many visitors who arrive from AI search go on to convert, and you can join that with your CRM to follow those visitors into pipeline. Self-reported attribution helps too, like asking new signups how they found you.