AI search continues to grow in popularity, with about 50% of Google searches showing AI Overviews and half of consumers saying they seek out AI-powered search engines, especially when making buying decisions. In fact, by 2028, McKinsey expects AI search to be responsible for $750 billion of consumer spend.
Now is the time to assess how your brand performs in AI search and measure visibility across top answer engines. With that data in hand, you'll be ready to make informed decisions to improve AI visibility.
Profound's free AEO report gives you the insights you need to gauge brand performance and identify next steps. I'll walk you through how this free tool works, cover exactly what you'll learn from your visibility AI audit, and show you what to do next.
What is Profound's AEO report and how can it help your brand?
Profound's AEO report is a free tool that reveals how your brand performs with AI search engines. It provides a summary of key metrics that help you understand your AI visibility, benchmark against the competition, and act on AI visibility gaps and opportunities.
Getting your free AI visibility report from Profound is simple:
- Click the "Analyze my brand" button
- Input your site URL, the email address where you want to receive the report, and your region
- Optionally, input a blog post URL to analyze
- Click the "Get AEO Report" button
- Check your email and open your report
Once you have your report in hand, you can start analyzing your AI search performance and taking steps to improve answer engine optimization right away.
What you'll learn from your free AI visibility report
Profound's AI visibility report AEO report covers these areas:
- AEO Snapshot: Overview of your brand's AI search visibility
- Visibility Score: How visible your brand is in answer engine responses
- Sentiment: How AI engines perceive your brand
- Cited Websites: Which sites are cited in AI search results
- Blog AEO Content Score: How well your blog post is optimized for AI answers
- Content Suggestions: Where to start improving your AEO
Let's look at each one in detail.
AEO Snapshot
The AEO snapshot gives you a quick look at your brand's main visibility metrics: your visibility score, positive sentiment, citation share, and AEO content score. Each metric includes a rating (good, fair, or poor) so you can easily see how well your brand is doing in AI results.
Here, the tracked brand is performing well in terms of citation share and decently in terms of AEO content score. But the visibility score and positive sentiment have room for improvement.
For an in-depth analysis of each of these metrics, scroll down to see the rest of your report.
Visibility Score
Your visibility score shows how often relevant answer engine responses mention your brand. A higher score means your brand is mentioned in more answers to questions on topics that matter for your industry.
Profound calculates this score by comparing your brand to its competitors. That means you get both an overall score reflecting the percentage of AI responses that mention your brand and you see how your brand ranks.
Plus, you can assess how far ahead of the competition you already are — or how much work you need to do before you can catch up and take the lead.
Here, the tracked brand ranks 16th in its space, with a 9.6% AI visibility score. The top-ranking brand in this space has over 30% visibility, which will require a strong AEO strategy to compete with or overcome.
Your free AEO report also reveals the answer engines where your brand has the highest visibility. Here, the tracked brand is strongest by far in Google AI Overviews, with decent visibility in Perplexity and ChatGPT.
This data helps you see where your brand currently has good coverage and where it needs work. For example, say you know your audience uses AI platforms like ChatGPT, but your brand is basically invisible there. Now you know where to focus your efforts.
Sentiment
The AEO report's sentiment insights measure how positively or negatively AI search platforms reference your brand. You'll see a percentage for positive sentiment (green) and negative sentiment (red).
But you don't have to rely on the percentages alone. Profound also surfaces positive and negative trends that appear in answer engine responses. You can click on each one to see exactly what the responses say.
Here, ChatGPT positively mentions elements like integrations and scalability for the tracked brand. But it also negatively references some of the brand's limitations.
These insights can help you identify common complaints and inaccuracies related to your brand. Then, you can take steps to address them in website comments, forum threads, or social media posts.
With a Profound subscription, you can dive deeper into prompt executions. You can read the full responses, identify citations, and make a game plan for improving brand sentiment.
Cited Websites
Your AEO report gives you a shortlist of cited websites and pages in relevant answer engine responses. It also tells you how often each one is cited as a source (i.e., linked in the response).
The list of cited websites is helpful for understanding which sites answer engines prioritize in their responses. Is your brand a top source? How about your competitors? Or do answer engines prefer citing industry websites and community forums?
Profound also generates a list of the most frequently cited pages. This is helpful for identifying the exact URLs answer engines cite in response to prompts about topics that matter for your brand. Click any of the pages to go directly to the URL.
Ideally, your brand will be in the list of top websites and either in the list of top pages or mentioned by one of the top pages. If it isn't, you have a couple of options. Take steps to:
- Get your brand cited in more responses to improve your citation share
- Get your brand mentioned on the pages that get cited most
Blog AEO content score
If you provided a blog URL, you'll also get an AEO content score for the post. This score tells you how optimized your post is for answer engine citation.
It considers elements like:
- Readability: How easy your content is to read and understand by AI and humans
- Content Structure: How your content is organized, including the hierarchy of content elements
- Information Density: The level of richness and depth in your content
The best case scenario is scoring 85–100. This indicates that your content is optimal for citation in AI-powered search engines.
If your blog AEO content score is lower than this target, check your scores for each element. There, you can spot where your content needs the most work.
Here, the analyzed blog post has the most issues with information density and readability. This is helpful for making targeted improvements to the published content.
Content Suggestions
Profound also generates new ideas to improve your brand's visibility in AI answers. These recommendations are based on citation data from key prompts for your brand, so they can help you compete in your niche.
Take one or all of these ideas and use them to guide the next piece of content your team produces. Follow SEO and AI visibility best practices as you create content. Once you publish, track the results to see if your AI visibility increases over time.
How to improve your AEO strategy
Profound's free AEO report gives you a snapshot of how your brand is performing across major answer engines. But the insights you get from this free AI search visibility checker are just a small sample of what the full platform offers.
With a Profound subscription, you get detailed visibility data, including comparative data to track progress over time and competitive data that shows where you and your competitors rank in terms of visibility score, share of voice, and average position in AI results.
The visibility rankings leader board makes it easy to see how your brand performs across relevant topics. It also reveals where you're winning and highlights areas where you still have a lot of work to do.
The sentiment analysis data gives you deeper insights into what answer engines say about your brand and the top themes they associate with it. You can read the full responses to see exactly how they reference your brand.
Use the detailed citation data to create a roadmap for AEO success. It shows you the top citation pages and domains (including whether your brand is mentioned) so you know where to focus your content creation or outreach efforts.
Find that your domain isn't getting the citations you expect? Profound's Query Fanouts tool can help. It breaks down the multiple sub-queries that answer engines consider when responding to a prompt. Answering these queries in your content can improve citations and AI visibility.
When you aren't sure what to do next to boost your AI search presence, Profound's Opportunities dashboard can guide you in the right direction. It suggests subreddits to join, outreach to try, and content to create. Then, use the pre-built Workflows to outline and draft content optimized for AI search.
With Profound's Agent Analytics tool, you can track which AI crawlers visit your site and how much traffic you're getting from answer engines like Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT. Most importantly, you can see how that traffic drives business outcomes and generates revenue.
Curious how your brand performs across major AI platforms? Get your free AEO report from Profound in minutes.
