Blog

News and Updates about Profound

Multiple authors

10 Jul, 2026/Product

One command center for your content’s performance

Introducing Pages in Profound, one command center for your content's citations, bot activity, and page health.

Dylan Babbs

9 Jul, 2026/Product

Introducing support for GPT 5.6 in Profound

GPT-5.6 is OpenAI's newest flagship model family, introducing the Sol, Terra, and Luna tiers to support everything from frontier reasoning to high-throughput production workloads. Built for agentic workflows, coding, research, and enterprise knowledge work, GPT-5.6 delivers meaningful improvements in capability, reliability, and efficiency across a wide range of business use cases.

Davis McCain and Kate Underwood

9 Jul, 2026/Research

The state of AI search in travel

Travel planning is moving away from the traditional search bar and into AI answer engines like ChatGPT. For the better part of two decades, a typical traveler would type a destination-focused keyword into Google, open a dozen tabs, and piece together a trip on their own. Now, they ask a question or have an ongoing conversation, letting the answer engine synthesize recommendations or even book a trip. This shift rewrites how searchers find travel brands. Visibility no longer comes from securing top-ranked blue links in traditional search. Instead, it results from earning mentions and citations in AI search. Increasingly, the brands that appear in AI search are the ones that win the trip.

Allen Wu and Kate Underwood

9 Jul, 2026/Research

Christmas in July: How retailers win the AI shelf

Christmas shopping has shifted away from the search bar. More shoppers are turning to AI answer engines to research products, compare options, and decide which gifts to buy. For retailers, a reframe is critical. Answer engines shortlist products and guide purchase decisions long before shoppers ever reach retail or ecommerce websites. This compresses the shopping funnel and makes traditional search insufficient as a primary customer acquisition channel. Instead, retailers need to ensure answer engines recommend them throughout the shopping journey. This requires understanding how shoppers use answer engines for Christmas gifting, how to earn mentions and citations in relevant AI responses, and how to maximize visibility across AI search. This report gives you that edge. It draws on real shopper behavior from Christmas 2025, analyzed through Profound’s AI visibility lens, illustrating how people use AI to shop for the holiday. It also provides actionable takeaways, revealing how to optimize e-commerce products before the 2026 season ramps up so you can win the AI shelf this Christmas.

James Cadwallader

1 Nov, 2024/Blueprints

How AI Answer Engines Will Transform the Future

AI Answer Engines are driving a platform shift more monumental than social media in 2009, mobile in 2004, or perhaps even the internet itself.

James Cadwallader

5 Jun, 2024/Blueprints

Goodbye blue links, AI Search has arrived

Google Search was a trillion dollar monopoly for the best part of two decades, until ChatGPT launched in November 2022 and the way people discover information was changed forever.