Ryan Van
/Company
Profound named in Forrester's Answer Engine Optimization Technologies Landscape, Q3 2026
Profound has been named in Forrester's Answer Engine Optimization Technologies Landscape, Q3 2026. Here's why it matters.
Blog
News and updates about Profound
Kyle Poyar and Nikolas Laskaris
/AI
What AI agents really think about your pricing
New research with Kyle Poyar (Founder & CEO of Growth Unhinged) to reveal how well AI agents understand pricing and how to influence them.
Allen Wu
/Research
ChatGPT 5.6 has transformed Shopping mode
Recorded as one of the largest changes to AI shopping, integrated feed retrieval has exploded by ~6.5x and overtaken web search retrieval for product recommendations in shopping mode after the release of ChatGPT 5.6.
Garrett Gomez and Aryan Chaudhary
/Product
Introducing Context Manager in Profound
Generic AI has generic suggestion and produces generic work. Context Manager in Profound is the layer where your business knowledge lives, gets structured, and gets applied, so your AI Marketer can suggest the most impactful, tailored work and deliver the highest quality outputs without manual intervention.
Allison Huang
/Research
Claude and Claude Code are distinct Answer Engines
An observational study of 24,135 responses and agent traffic found that Claude and Claude Code behave like distinct Answer Engines. They search at different rates, mention different brands, and visit different types of webpages. The findings suggest marketers should optimize for each separately.
Lucas Kopinski
/Research
Where do inaccurate AI claims come from?
We analyzed 158,000 AI claims validated by FactCheck to uncover what drives inaccuracy across models, sources, and topics.
Davis McCain
/Research
Commercial conversations in ChatGPT more than doubled in a year
Is ChatGPT a place where people create, learn, or buy? We classified 7.5 million conversations over a full year to find out, and increasingly, the answer is buy. Commercial intent grew from 13.9% to 19.2% of conversations, users are starting 41% more commercial conversations than a year ago, and at ChatGPT's current scale that adds up to an estimated 28 billion buying conversations a year. The catch for brands: the shift is wildly uneven, with a 10x spread in commercial intent between the top industries and the bottom.
Jasman Singh
/Research
Where do AI citations come from?
This is an observational analysis on approximately ~12 billion AI citations. The study works to understand how answer engine citation preferences differ by industry and model across 29 industries and 8 LLMs.
Allen Wu
/Research
Breaking down how ChatGPT Shopping works behind the user experience
For the first time, we piece together how ChatGPT shopping works behind the user experience, piecing components together, from user query to product search to card-offer relationship, to help merchants truly begin to understand how to approach AI shopping. Here's what over 200k shopping prompts revealed.
Jennifer Zou
/Research
Does AI keep office hours?
Every AI assistant has a daily and weekly rhythm. It just isn't the same rhythm on every platform, in every region, or for every user.
Davis McCain
/Research
Variability of Google models: Gemini vs AIO vs AI Mode
Gemini, AI Overviews, and AI Mode share the same underlying infrastructure, but they don't behave like the same product. Across 15,155 brand configurations tracked daily in May 2026, brands saw a median 8-point visibility gap between their best and worst-performing Google model, driven not by how many brands each model mentions (they're nearly identical, 4.4 to 5.0 per response) but by which brands they choose to feature and which sources they cite to back them up. Gemini leans on editorial and reference sources like Reddit, YouTube, and Wikipedia, while AI Overviews and AI Mode cite far more heavily from social and UGC platforms, at roughly double Gemini's citation depth per run.
Multiple authors
/Research
The shortlist is the new shelf
Profound teamed up with Kevin Indig and Clickstream Solutions on one of the first behavioral studies of how real users actually make decisions inside ChatGPT, the product of more than 150 hours of research design, participant sessions, behavioral coding, transcript analysis, statistical work, and writing. Watching 56 people compare products across 221 real shopping tasks, the study uncovered a surprisingly strong link between how often a brand shows up in ChatGPT's answers and what people ultimately choose to buy. The findings reveal something most marketers haven't caught onto yet: the moment of decision has quietly moved somewhere their analytics can't see.
Davis McCain
/Research
Google AI Mode's shift to citing itself
Google is increasingly keeping AI Mode users inside its own ecosystem, with google.com rising to the model’s second most-cited domain and Business Profiles and Product Knowledge Panels appearing directly in answers. This shift is most pronounced across local-intent industries and physical consumer products, where customers may see a Google-hosted card instead of visiting a brand’s website. For brands, accurate profile information, complete product data, and strong review management are becoming critical to winning visibility and preventing customers from switching to competitors.
Davis McCain and Kate Underwood
/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
/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.
Jennifer Zou
/Research
Is once a day enough?
Why we "only" run each prompt one time per day (and the statistics that show it’s plenty).
Nikolas Laskaris
/Research
The AI mention effect
Measuring downstream web browsing after AI brand mentions
Multiple authors
/Research
The Parrot Problem: Why AI Search has a second dimension marketers can’t ignore
Your brand is being misrepresented in AI search right now, and you probably don't know it. Nearly half of every AI response includes unsolicited comparisons, opinions, and recommendations the user never asked for. We analyzed 50,000 prompts across seven industries to understand why. Here's what we found, and what you can do about it.
Allen Wu
/Research
What ChatGPT actually looks for and how to get your products cited higher in AI Shopping
The rise in importance of product feeds in ChatGPT Shopping. Are PDPs still prevalent when ChatGPT searches for product information? What does this mean for brands? Here's what over 1 million ChatGPT shopping offers revealed.
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.
Layla Baradaran and Ralfi Berk
/Research
Who won AI Shopping on Black Friday? Check out the Black Friday Index
This Black Friday and Cyber Monday, our Black Friday Index, built on 400 million real conversations, reveals which brands AI recommended most as shoppers turned to Answer Engines for the best deals.
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.
Nick Lafferty
/Research
AI Platform Citation Patterns: How ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity Source Information
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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