While the rest of the market was just beginning to contemplate AEO, Hone partnered with Profound to implement a strategy fast. What started with monitoring their visibility in AI search and analyzing the citations powering the answers soon evolved to taking action on the insights and influencing the answers.
By leveraging Profound’s content generation workflows, Hone became the #1 cited source by AI for the answers they cared about while visibility for their most critical growth product line skyrocketed 800%.
Overview
Hone is an AI-powered coaching and upskilling platform that helps organizations develop better leaders, stronger teams, and higher-performing employees. Its customers range from 50-person startups to Fortune 500 companies, all focused on empowering people to perform at their best through a mix of AI-driven and human-led experiences.
When it comes to learning and development, Hone acknowledged that there are many platforms to choose from and buyers in the market often have many questions around what will best suit their needs. As AI reshaped how people discover and evaluate solutions, Hone’s marketing team knew they needed to adapt fast to make sure they were a part of that narrative.
The Challenge
For the first time in her career, Linda noticed a troubling signal: Hone’s organic search growth was declining.
Linda recognized that prospects weren’t browsing search results as much anymore, but instead asking questions directly to answer engines like Google AI Overview. But Linda noted that visibility in these answer engines was opaque and difficult to measure. Hone needed a way to understand how its brand was represented in this new discovery landscape and, more importantly, how to influence it.
“It was clear that behaviors were changing. People still go to Google, but they’re not clicking - they’re getting answers instantly. I needed to make sure we weren’t losing awareness just because clicks were disappearing.”
The Solution
Despite noticing the shift and establishing the need to do something, Linda was strapped for resources which meant finding a true partner was the first step. When a member of their board told her that another one of their portfolio companies was evaluating Profound, she quickly reached out.
Linda and other members of her team - across product marketing, demand generation, and content - worked closely with their Profound account team to develop an AEO strategy that bolstered category positioning with new, optimized content.
“Profound gave us both the data and the partnership we needed,” said Linda. “They helped us identify where to focus, how to structure our content, and what success should look like in a world where SEO metrics no longer tell the full story.”
A key collaboration was a targeted blog initiative. Using insights from Profound, Hone optimized articles for AI crawling and citation potential.
The Results
Within just a few months, Hone saw measurable, meaningful impact with Profound.
Shaping the Narrative
Hone’s citation share for the category grew by 10x (from nearly 0% to 7%) making their domain the #1 most cited source for related prompts. AI bots went from skipping over their website almost entirely to using the content on it as source material for answers.
Showing up in Key Moments
The newly created and optimized content began picking up citations in a matter of weeks, and caused Hone’s visibility in this category to increase 800%, helping them surpass over a dozen competitors in the space.
The ability to benchmark against competitors and track category trends has also become a key advantage in an emerging market. And beyond the data, Linda values the peace of mind she says working with Profound offers.
“Marketing is a game of tradeoffs. It’s easy to get lost in short-term demand capture,” said Linda. “Profound helps me keep sight of the long game—making sure we’re showing up where it matters most.”
Looking Ahead
Hone plans to build on its momentum by expanding visibility across ChatGPT and other answer engines, deepening its understanding of how prospects engage with AI search tools, and continuing to refine its AEO strategy with Profound.
