Kiteworks needed to ensure its hard-earned presence in traditional search for secure and compliant data exchange would carry over into LLM-generated answers. Learn how Profound helped them capture AI visibility and citations across relevant queries to outrank industry giants like Microsoft and Box.
Kiteworks is a cybersecurity company that enables organizations to securely share sensitive data like personally identifiable information (PII) and intellectual property (IP) in compliance with global data privacy regulations, including CMMC, GDPR, HIPAA, and ITAR. Their platform is among the first to unify employee and AI agent data exchange under a single governance, policy, and audit framework. At a $1B+ valuation, the company serves over 100M end users and more than 3,650 global enterprises and government agencies across industries.
As Kiteworks’ Senior Director of Search Content, Rob Dougherty’s mission is to ensure buyers find Kiteworks wherever they look for secure, governed data exchange and AI privacy solutions. So when LLMs emerged as a new discovery channel, maximizing AI visibility and citations became his top priority.
“I could see buyers turning more and more to AI for answers, and I knew we needed to get ahead of that shift,” says Rob. This led him to the critical first step of understanding how Kiteworks was already showing up in AI-generated answers.
Kiteworks had already built a strong SEO foundation that was earning page-one and page-two Google rankings for multiple keywords. But ranking in traditional search and appearing in AI-generated answers are two different games.
“Google still maintains the lion’s share of search traffic,” says Rob. “But search itself is rapidly evolving to encompass LLM queries, and the search market is expanding. We couldn’t afford to wait for traditional SEO tools to build AEO functions that bridge the gap.”
To build an authoritative, durable presence across LLMs, he had three strategic requirements:
Recognizing that optimizing for AI visibility required a fresh approach, he began evaluating dedicated AEO platforms.
Rob evaluated several vendors that reported citation share across ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, but most stopped at a dashboard.
“A lot of companies in this space can tell you what your LLM performance is, but almost nobody gives you the next step,” says Rob. “We needed a partner who used their data to recommend content topics, strategies, and layouts that would help us capture new visibility opportunities.”
Profound checked every box. The platform combined prompt-level measurement across models, a content execution layer, and an experienced team with real AEO and cybersecurity experience.
These capabilities were exactly what Kiteworks needed to turn answer engines into a key acquisition channel.
The Profound team handled every part of the onboarding process. The moment Rob logged in to the platform, he already had a 360-degree view of Kiteworks’ AI visibility across a library of relevant topics and prompts, so he “went straight into writing on day one.”
With this foundation, Rob operationalized AEO across five key areas:
Tracking AI visibility and competitive positioning. Rob uses Profound daily to track Kiteworks’ brand mentions and citations across LLMs relative to direct and peripheral competitors, and surface opportunities to take ground. Equally important, he tracks how answer engines present Kiteworks in their answers to see the brand narrative as buyers do. With this perspective, he prioritizes content that communicates the platform’s depth and accelerates qualified leads toward the next stage.
Using LLM intelligence to drive content decisions. Rob and the Kiteworks team already had the technical depth to write authoritatively on compliance and data security. With Profound, they now have the signal telling them where to point that expertise. “Every signal that Profound gives us shapes the next asset,” shares Rob. “The tactical guides, trend reports, and vendor comparisons we build all answer questions that buyers are asking across LLMs.”
Producing content at scale. Once Rob knows where to focus, he uses Profound Agents to generate content based on target prompts and Kiteworks’ tone, voice, and positioning. With this execution engine, his team delivers enterprise-level output, publishing eight times more posts per day and building a library that keeps them at the top of AI-generated answers. As a result, Kiteworks has enhanced aggregate AI visibility across key compliance and cybersecurity topics to 48%, surpassing much larger competitors like Microsoft, Box, and Dropbox.
Maximizing AEO potential at every stage. While the platform exceeded Rob’s expectations, Profound’s customer support sealed the partnership. Their dedicated Customer Success Manager stays close, providing hands-on support as Kiteworks’ needs evolve and new capabilities roll out.
When Agents launched, he mapped the capability to existing workflows so Rob could extract value immediately. “Our Customer Success Manager immediately got in touch to walk me through the Agents feature so we could start extracting value right away,” shares Rob.
Staying ahead of a rapidly evolving category. As LLM algorithms and citation patterns shift, Profound helps Rob keep Kiteworks’ AEO strategy one step ahead. “Profound isn’t just keeping pace with where AI Search is going,” he says. “They’re on the forefront, backed by extensive research and testing.” Leaning on their deep AEO expertise and innovative product features, he can identify emerging content opportunities across answer engines, explore new content formats to match each model’s answer patterns, and optimize for query fanouts.
With Profound, Kiteworks has built a leading presence in the queries that matter most to security professionals and governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) officers. That AI visibility translates into a concrete, measurable advantage over key competitors.
As Rob puts it, “We are a lean team at a fast-growing company, but Profound empowers us to operate and win at an enterprise scale.”
Five months in, the results are clear:
Rob is expanding his use of Profound Agents to more workflows and building a regular content optimization rhythm. “There are even more citation opportunities we can capture by updating our existing assets alongside net-new content production,” he says.
The program is also growing beyond Rob. As his EMEA colleague deepens his practice on the platform, he consistently expands Kiteworks’ reach among qualified leads in key emerging markets. What started as a North American playbook has become a global, coordinated AEO function that compounds Kiteworks’ citation authority and sets the stage for exponential growth.
