By pairing proactive AEO with Profound’s visibility and citation insights, One Identity moved from marginally visible to consistently winning #1 placements on key publisher pages and massive increases in overall visibility.
One Identity is a cybersecurity leader focused on AI-powered identity security, covering solutions like privileged access management and Active Directory management.
This is a highly competitive space and One Identity’s SEO lead, Ali Sayyed, immediately saw an opportunity to jump past competitors in a key channel. "When we saw organic traffic change behavior, while more traffic was coming from Chat GPT, we immediately wanted to take advantage of the changing landscape." states Sayyed.
Given the competitive nature of the security space, Ali made average position his north-star metric, supported by visibility, citations, and sentiment, so they could steer strategy with precision rather than gut feelings.
As AI answers and overviews began reshaping buyer research, traditional SEO tools couldn’t provide insight into the new buying funnel. The goal became clear: see what answer engines actually cite, then elevate One Identity into those shortlists.
The “aha” arrived with Profound’s citations dashboards. “Seeing the citation pages was a big revelation, suddenly I could quickly focus on target pages for campaigns,” says Ali. That single view turned data into a prioritized to-do list. “Answer Engines change all the time. I took a 90-day window and targeted the major cited pages, and then built our own pages to reinforce the narrative.”
“This is a form of link building and PR that is core to search optimization,” Ali says. “We contacted the top publishers Profound surfaced, offered deeper product context, and, where appropriate, secured sponsored placements.” The team systematically acquired #1 or #2 positions across the most influential listicles (e.g., PeerSpot, CyberPress, Expert Insights, etc.), giving Answer Engines (and buyers) authoritative third-party references to cite.
“We wrote our own ‘Top Active Directory Management Tools’ page” he adds. “We listed ourselves No. 1, but stayed objective about competitors, because LLMs pick up on overly biased negativity.” The intent wasn’t to game models but to help them: concise product details, feature depth, and credible references.
“Every day” Ali says of platform usage. The first phase focused on tuning the data model so he could present it with confidence to executives. However, the power of AEO and Profound’s insights started to trickle through the organization. “Measure, measure, measure!” became an internal mantra as dashboards hardened and outreach turned into rankings.
Within weeks, One Identity saw decisive movement:
On executive trust: “I can walk into a QBR with Profound data and slides that the board understands, industry-high growth in visibility and clear movement in Average Position,” he says. Turning Average Position into a core KPI let the team focus on outcome quality, not just surface-level impressions. This helped tie the entire AEO process to actual product positioning within markets.
Profound’s insights now flow to marketing, product, and sales engineering:
Closing, Ali states the plain value their organization gets from Profound.
