Dylan Babbs
/Product
Introducing support for Claude Fable in Profound
Introducing support for Claude Fable in Profound
Blog
News and Updates about Profound
Multiple authors
/Product
Introducing Documents in Profound
Profound is where marketers that want to win in the AI era come to do their work. They run their visibility, sentiment, and accuracy analysis here. They build marketing Agents here. They surface opportunities, generate content, and act on insights here. So it only made sense that Documents lived here too.
Garrett Gomez and Siddharth Chandrappa
/Product
Go from tracking AI's narrative to shaping it with revamped Sentiment in Profound
Tools for tracking sentiment in AI responses existed, but most stop at the surface. They tell you sentiment ticked up or down, maybe break it down by platform, and leave the hardest part to you: figuring out what's actually driving the shift and what to do about it. That's where AEO strategy stalls. We rebuilt Sentiment in Profound to fix that.
Multiple authors
/Product
Introducing Skills in Profound
Skills are reusable instruction sets you create once and apply anywhere you generate content in Profound. Configure your team's writing style, AEO best practices, or content guardrails as a Skill, then plug it into your workflows without having to repeat yourself.
Nick Lafferty
/Research
The AEO playbook: 5 data studies marketing leaders need to know
Five recent studies are reshaping how marketing leaders should think about AI Search.
Brandon Punturo
/Research
Is Zero Click marketing dead? The branded link update
On May 7, 2026, ChatGPT quietly shipped the largest single-day change in AI-driven brand traffic we've measured all year. OpenAI referrals to monitored brand sites roughly doubled overnight. ChatGPT started hyperlinking brand names directly to their homepages, turning every AI mention into a clickable referral.
Jennifer Zou
/Research
What AI engines actually search for and why ChatGPT never searches the same way twice
When a user types a question into an AI engine, the engine doesn't always search for exactly what was typed. It fans out. Profound tracked 10,000 prompts across ChatGPT, Copilot, and Perplexity over 14 days and found striking differences in search behavior.
Davis McCain
/Research
How query language reshapes AI citations
Profound analyzed 3.25 billion citations across 7 models and 14 countries, and the data shows that query language is the dominant force reshaping social citation rates across AI models. Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT respond to non-English prompts in fundamentally different ways, with major implications for global brand visibility in AI search.
Brandon Punturo
/Research
Which retailers does ChatGPT actually send shoppers to?
Walmart leads rank-1 buy links. Target leads total presence. The carousel reshuffles on every request. Here's what 22.5 million ChatGPT shopping offers actually revealed.
Brandon Punturo
/Research
We reverse-engineered ChatGPT's Shopping trigger. Here's how it works.
ChatGPT Shopping is driven far more by product category than by purchase intent language. In our analysis of 1.18 million prompts and a 7,500-prompt labeled sample, prompts naming shippable consumer goods were much more likely to trigger Shopping cards, while software, services, travel, and financial products almost never did. Adding 1–2 concrete constraints like price, features, or use case increased trigger probability, but only within product categories. The clearest rule was simple: if the prompt’s main noun is something you could buy on Amazon, Shopping is likely to appear. Using that logic, we built a classifier that reproduced ChatGPT’s Shopping behavior with about 95–97% accuracy.
Davis McCain and Brandon Punturo
/Research
LinkedIn is the most-cited domain for professional queries in AI search
In the last three months, LinkedIn has become one of the most authoritative sources shaping AI-driven discovery. Between November 2025 and February 2026, the platform surged from outside the top 20 to rank among the most‑cited sources on ChatGPT – and is now the #1 most‑cited domain for professional queries across all AI Search platforms. That’s powerful data for both companies and individuals looking to grow their influence.
Brandon Punturo
/Product, Research
We tracked 2 Million ChatGPT prompts. Shopping showed up less than 10% of the time.
79% of prompts never trigger shopping. Not rarely — never, across nine months of data. The ones that do are surprisingly sticky: 83% chance of triggering again the next day. But that persistence decays, and model updates can reset it overnight. We tracked 26 million prompts across 13,000 categories to map where shopping actually shows up, how consistently it fires, and what that means for brands building strategy around a surface that barely turns on.
Brandon Punturo
/Research
We ran a controlled experiment on markdown vs. HTML for AI bots. Here's what happened
We ran a controlled experiment to test whether serving Markdown to AI crawlers increases bot traffic. After 381 pages and 3 weeks of data, here's what we found.
Brandon Punturo and Sartaj Rajpal
/Research
How ChatGPT cites social media
ChatGPT cites Reddit threads, YouTube channels, and LinkedIn profiles but ignores X/Twitter. Which social platforms matter for AI visibility?
Brandon Punturo
/Research
How ChatGPT sources the web
We analyzed 700K ChatGPT conversations with web citations from Q4 2025. The findings: Turn 1 captures most citations, Wikipedia is the default knowledge layer, and sources cluster by topic. What marketers need to know about the new citation economy.
Josh Blyskal
/Research
I analyzed 250M AI responses. Here is the uncomfortable truth about AI Search right now
Here's a copy of my deck from Tech SEO Connect in Raleigh, NC on December 5th 2025.
Josh Blyskal and Sartaj Rajpal
/Research
The Data on Reddit and AI Search
Profound, in collaboration with Reddit, analyzed how conversational data informs AI-generated answers.
Multiple authors
/Research
ChatGPT’s entity update: Fewer mentions, tougher competition
In mid-October, ChatGPT rolled out a major response update that changed how brands appear in its answers. Using Answer Engine Insights, Profound analyzed millions of prompts across ChatGPT and other leading answer engines to understand what changed and how it affected brand visibility across categories.
Josh Blyskal and Sartaj Rajpal
/Research
AI Search Shift: ChatGPT's growing alignment with Google's index
New research reveals ChatGPT's dramatic pivot from Bing to Google search results, fundamentally altering how we need to think about AI visibility and optimization.
Josh Blyskal and Sartaj Rajpal
/Research
AI Search Volatility: Why AI search results keep changing
New research reveals 'citation drift' in source selection across major AI platforms, showing how AI citations can change by up to 60% in just one month.
Josh Blyskal and Sartaj Rajpal
/Research
Answer Engine Citation Overlap Strategy: How to Win at AI Visibility
The era of one-size-fits-all content strategy is over. Our analysis of 100,000 distinct prompts run across both ChatGPT and Perplexity revealed a surprising truth: these models are citing fundamentally different corners of the internet.
Josh Blyskal and Sartaj Rajpal
/Research
AI Search intent study: What 50M+ ChatGPT prompts reveal
New research reveals drastically different citation patterns between major AI platforms. Understand how ChatGPT, Google AI, and Perplexity source their information differently and what it means for AI visibility.
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