Every brand we work with starts with the same two questions.
The first: "How are we showing up in AI Search?" The second, almost always within the same conversation: "What does good look like?"
The second question requires a view of the entire category, measured the same way for every brand in it. Today we are announcing the the Profound Index to be that view: the leaderboard for AI Search.
The Profound Index is powered by 1.5+ billion real user conversations, covering 50+ industries across all major LLMs, updated weekly. You can see who's winning AI Search in your industry, where your brand ranks, and which competitors are showing up alongside you.
Why we built the Index on real user conversations
Every other AI visibility benchmark relies on synthetic prompts: someone sits down, decides what people are probably asking in a category, and writes a tracking list. The result is a leaderboard that reflects assumptions, not behavior.
We started somewhere different. Profound's dataset includes 1.5+ billion real user prompts. The question was how to turn that volume into a defensible prompt set for 50+ industries. Our Prompt Research Report tool answers this question.
Creating the Index prompt sets
Our Prompt Research Report tool takes our data set of 1.5+ billion prompts and surfaces what people are actually asking about you industry. This allows the Index to track real behavior, not assumptions.
For each industry, we run our data through four stages:
- Retrieve real user prompts via semantic search across answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude over the last six months.
- Filter and rank those candidates through multiple rounds of relevance scoring, deduplication, and translation until only verified, high-signal prompts remain.
- Cluster prompts into meaningful topic groups using embeddings and query fan-outs.
- Select the top prompt per cluster based on how much of that cluster it represents, so each tracked prompt captures the widest set of similar user conversations.
Because the Index is designed to be a neutral industry view, we filter the final prompt set toward open-ended, brand-agnostic questions. Prompts that name a specific brand or read as too narrow to a single region are dropped.
The output is a prompt set that reflects how buyers in that category actually talk to AI, with no thumb on the scale for any one brand.
Once an industry's prompt set is locked in, we run it every week across all major LLMs through our Answer Engine Insights tool. Every metric in the Index is calculated against fresh data, using the same infrastructure that powers our customer-facing visibility reporting.
What the Index measures
The Index ranks brands within an industry across six core metrics. Together, they move beyond a single visibility number and into something diagnostic.
Visibility Score measures how often a brand appears in AI-generated answers across the platforms we track. It's the headline number for AI Search presence in a category.
Share of Voice contextualizes that visibility as a percentage of total category visibility a brand owns. It's the AI equivalent of market share in search.
Mention Position tells you where in a response a brand appears. First position drives the highest engagement, so a brand landing fifth or later in most responses has a specific, fixable problem.
Citation Share measures how often a brand's domain is cited as a source. It signals which domains AI models treat as authoritative, and which third-party publishers are filling that role in your category.
Co-citation Share tracks which domains are cited alongside yours. It tells you which content sources are paired with your brand in AI responses.
Co-mention Share shows which competitor brands are mentioned with yours most frequently, and which competitive comparisons AI is drawing on its own.
The Index also breaks each industry down by Topic Cluster, by LLM (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AIO, and others), and by Mention Position distribution per competitor.
How to access your industry report
For existing Profound customers, your full Profound Index report is available today. If you are not a customer, reach out to our team to understand how to access your full report today
