If you're the first marketer at a startup, or the founder doing marketing between everything else, AI search probably landed on your plate without anyone asking whether you had room for it. It touches several jobs at once, and while a bigger company splits that across an SEO lead, a content marketer, a PR lead, and more, you’re often in charge of most of them.

The upside is that AI search is a channel where a small team can compete. If your company is newer than a model's training data, or hasn't been written about much, the model knows very little about you. Whatever an engine says about you comes from the pages it finds when someone asks, so what you publish and earn this quarter counts from the day an engine finds it.

What you don't have is time. That's the gap Answer Engine Optimization platforms are starting to fill. The best ones are becoming agentic, running agents that handle the research, drafting, and tracking so you don't have to do it by hand.

Profound does this with Agents built 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 engine describes you and your competitors. You can build your own agents in a drag-and-drop builder, or start from Profound's library of agent templates.

Below, we go role by role through the templates that cover each job, in the order we'd set them up.

Your AEO and SEO lead: Decide where you can win

You won't take "best CRM" from Salesforce and HubSpot this instant, and you don't need to. Buyers ask AI long, specific questions, like "which CRM works for a five-person sales team that lives in Gmail?", and on those, a focused company with a clear answer has a real shot at AI visibility. This role's job is to find those questions, and to make sure the engines can read your site when they go looking.

Map the questions before you launch

If you're launching a new product or opening up a new category, the questions buyers will ask don't have much history yet, and you want your pages live before a competitor answers them first. The Pre-Launch AEO Strategy Playbook agent builds that plan. It maps your competitors, groups buyer questions into clusters, lists the pages you'll need at launch, and lays out a plan for earning citations, a technical checklist, and a 90-day roadmap.

Find the questions nobody owns yet

Once you're live, the job is finding demand you can realistically capture. Several templates can help you 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 which sources they cite. A question where the engines cite a scattered mix of forum threads and thin listicles is one a focused page can win.
  • The Pull SEO + AEO Keyword Volume agent reports search demand and answer-engine demand for a topic side by side, so you size a topic by its whole cluster of questions instead of the one head term you already know.
  • 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, and reports the questions buyers ask most, what they're trying to get done, and which questions nobody answers well yet.

Aleph, a fast-growing FP&A company up against vendors that have been around for decades, built its program on this kind of list. Charlie Rhomberg, Senior Content Marketing Manager, filtered prompts by volume, intent, and theme into a priority list, then focused each month on one theme. Aleph's citation share rose 253% in two months. "This approach has put us on par with competitors who have been in the market for decades," he says.

Make sure the engines can read your site

New sites break in boring ways. A default setting, a security plugin, or pages that only render in JavaScript can keep AI crawlers from reading what you publish, and nothing on your end will show an error. Agents can ensure you get your technical AEO ducks in a row:

  • The Robots.txt & LLMs.txt Auditor agent reads your robots.txt and llms.txt files and tells you which of 25-plus known search and AI crawlers can get in.
  • The Schema Markup Generator agent writes the structured data that helps search engines read a page.
  • The Chunk-Level Citation Audit agent reads a page the way an engine does. It splits the page into the passages an engine could lift, and scores each one on whether it stands on its own, answers first, and is specific enough to quote.

Airbyte, the open-source data integration company, made tweaks like these once it saw where it was missing from AI answers. The team added schema markup, published an llms.txt file, moved to server-side rendering so crawlers could read every page, and rewrote content into direct answers. Its ChatGPT visibility went from 9% to 26% in one week, and it closed a $100,000 deal from the same engine.

Your content marketer: Publish the pages buyers' questions need

A startup's site is small, so every page has to earn its place. What you have that bigger competitors don't is direct access to the people building the product and talking to customers. Engines cite pages that answer a question specifically, and at a startup, the specifics live in a few people's heads, often including the founder's.

Turn sales calls into a publishing plan

Early sales calls are full of buyers describing their problems in their own words, before anyone has turned those words into marketing language.

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, scores them against AI search demand, and hands you a ranked shortlist of articles worth writing.

Brief and draft from the pages engines already cite

  • 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 against 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.

Get more out of what you've already made

You probably have more material than pages. There's the founder's conference talk, the product demo on YouTube, and the help doc that answers a sales question better than anything on your blog.

  • The Generate Blog Post From YouTube Video agent turns a YouTube URL into an article designed for answer engines.
  • The AEO Content Refresh agent suggests changes to an existing article and applies them, and the Optimize Page Headings agent recommends new H2 to H4 headings based on the high-volume prompts the page should answer.
  • The AEO-Optimized FAQ Generator agent writes an FAQ section for a page you already have, based on the page's core question, Google's People Also Ask results, and the related searches engines run in the background.

Lake.com, a vacation rental platform built as a focused alternative to Airbnb and Vrbo, planned its content from what travelers ask AI. The team mapped prompts to each stage of trip planning, then published event-driven articles, destination guides for lakes within two hours of major cities, and evergreen guides.

Its visibility on unbranded prompts rose above 30%, and branded organic traffic grew 5x heading into the July 4 peak. "We weren't sure if we could beat Airbnb, but we knew we needed to be in the consideration set," says founder and CEO David Ciccarelli. “Profound helped us see where we stood—and where we could win.”

Your PR lead: Get other sites to vouch for you

Engines tend to hold back on a claim only one source makes. If the only site saying you're good is your own, you're asking the engine to take your word for it. A handful of mentions on the pages the engines already cite for your topic can do more for you than a launch announcement no engine ever reads.

Check whether coverage will impact your answers

Before you spend a month pitching, check how much the engines rely on outside sources in your category. In our analysis of 11.84 billion AI citations, SaaS brands got about 11% of their citations from earned media, while pharma and biotech brands got 59%.

The Citation Type Breakdown for a Given Topic agent shows the mix for your own topics. It sorts the pages the engines cite by content type and reports citation counts and share of voice for each type, so you can see whether the answers in your category come from publications and review sites or from vendors' own pages.

Build the list from pages the engines cite

  • 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, and analyzes which ones are worth going after.
  • The Citation-Friendly PR Target Finder agent checks each cited domain's robots.txt and ranks the outlets into a pitch list, with cite-friendly, high-citation outlets at the top and outlets that block AI crawlers at the bottom.
  • 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 puts one row per target in a spreadsheet.

Pitch, and show up in the threads engines read

  • The Draft Outreach Email agent scrapes a target page and drafts a pitch built around what the page says and what it leaves out, like a comparison that lists five competitors and not you.
  • The Reddit Insights Generator agent analyzes the most-cited Reddit discussions on a topic and reports what people are saying, so you know which conversations are worth joining.
  • The Reddit Comment Generator agent finds the most-cited Reddit thread on a topic and drafts a comment that fits it. You post it yourself, from an account that makes clear you work at the company, and follow the subreddit's rules.

Statsig, founded in 2020, worked both sides at once. Skye Scofield, who leads marketing, set up tracking for all of Statsig's core prompts in under two hours. He then published AI-friendly pages on product analytics subcategories and comparisons with legacy tools, and amplified pages the engines already cited, including Reddit threads. "We've nearly doubled our visibility across all answer engines in key categories in less than a week," he says.

Your product marketer: Keep the engines' description of your brand current and accurate

Startups change fast. You reprice, rename a plan, ship a feature, retire another, and sometimes pivot. The engines only learn about each change once they find pages that say so. Until then, they describe the version of you that existed when the pages they cite were written, and a buyer who asks ChatGPT about your pricing may get last year's.

Catch the facts engines get wrong

FactCheck feature 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:

Watch how the engines frame you against competitors

Every fact about you can be right while the framing works against you. A review calls your product promising but immature, or a comparison presents an incumbent as the safe choice. At this stage, three templates can help:

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • The Sentiment Action - Update Content agent starts from a page of yours that engines cite with negative sentiment, and rewrites it to address the negative claims.

Your analyst: Know what's working without a data team

Startup numbers swing hard. With a few dozen tracked prompts, one engine changing one answer can move your visibility several points, so don't read much into any single day. Early on, the useful questions are simple. When a buyer asks about your category, do you show up? How do the engines describe you when you do? And is any of it bringing people to your site?

The Weekly Brand Health Report agent pulls your visibility and share of voice from Profound and writes them up as a weekly overview you can read in one sitting. The third question, whether any of it brings people to your site, needs data the engines don't report. Agent Analytics, a Profound feature, reads your server logs to show when AI crawlers visit your pages, and measures how many visitors who arrive from AI search go on to convert.

CRS Credit API, a fast-growing credit data platform, connected Profound's data to Google Analytics and Looker to follow AI visibility through to MQLs and closed deals. It has seen 15% pipeline growth attributed to AI search traffic.

Plan each week with your AI Marketer in Profound

Every agent above waits for you to start it. When you're the whole marketing team, the hard part is deciding which job gets more attention this week, because there's always more to do than hours to do it in. AI Marketer (Aim) makes that call for you. It's the orchestrator inside Profound, a marketing teammate that reads your AI search data, works out what's worth doing, and builds the agents to do it.

Aim draws on two sources. One is your data in Profound, meaning the questions buyers ask, the pages each engine cites, how the engines describe you and your competitors, and what AI crawlers do on your site. The other is Context Manager, which holds what Aim needs to know about your company, like your positioning, target customers, competitors, products, priorities, 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 a week with Aim works:

  • Aim brings you a ranked list of opportunities, with the data behind each one. For example, ChatGPT answers a comparison question in your category by citing a competitor, and you have no page on it. Or prompt volume is climbing on a topic you've never written about.
  • You decide which opportunities to act on. For each one you approve, Aim builds a project, which is a plan that breaks the work into specific tasks. The comparison question, for instance, might become four tasks: pulling the answers and the pages they cite, writing a brief for a comparison page, drafting the page, and drafting pitches to the two review sites the engines cite most. Aim then builds and runs the agents that do each task.
  • You review everything before it goes live. Afterward, Aim tracks whether the engines started citing the new page and whether their description of you changed. It also learns from what you approve, edit, or turn down, so the list fits your priorities better each week.

You keep the parts of marketing that make a startup worth noticing, like the founder's point of view and your relationships with your first customers. Aim keeps up with the data, ranks what to do next, and hands you first drafts, so how much you get done depends less on how many people you have.

Outfit your startup with an enterprise-level team of agents. Book a demo.

AI marketing agents for startups FAQs

Is AI search worth a startup's time before product-market fit?

Yes, as long as your buyers research your category in ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI surfaces, because getting started takes very little time. Check that AI crawlers can reach your site, pick the 20 or 30 questions your buyers are most likely to ask, and see how the engines answer them today.

The heavier work, like publishing a page for every question and pitching the sites engines cite, can wait until you know which questions count most. Before product-market fit, your positioning may still change, and pages written for last quarter's pitch will need rewriting. Tracking from the start gives you a baseline for when you're ready to invest, and it catches an engine describing you wrong before buyers act on it.

Can a small company get cited over incumbents?

On specific questions, yes. Broad head terms favor established brands, because the review sites and roundups that answer engines cite for those terms have covered the incumbents for years. The long, detailed questions buyers ask AI often have no clear owner, and a page that answers one of them better than anything else has a real chance of getting cited.

Do we still need to hire marketers?

Yes, eventually. Agents handle the repeatable, data-heavy work, like research, briefs, first drafts, target lists, and weekly reports. They don't replace the point of view or the judgment about what your company should stand for.

What changes is how much you can cover before those hires, and what you hire for. If agents handle the research and first drafts, your next marketing hire can focus on the work agents can't do, like interviewing customers, building relationships with the publications your buyers read, or sharpening your positioning.