When LLM referral traffic to Plaid started climbing faster than any other channel, the company's two-person organic growth team had no way to know what ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude were actually saying about Plaid. They deployed Profound, using Answer Engine Insights to replace the black box with visibility and Profound Agents to automate organic growth initiatives at scale. Since partnering with Profound, LLM referral traffic to plaid.com is up over 300%, with conversions from that traffic up 210%.
“Profound isn’t just a vendor to us. They are a partner we can ideate with and think through new ways of doing things.”
Building for an AI-powered financial future
Plaid is a financial data network that connects more than 9,000 apps and services to over 12,000 financial institutions. More than 150 million consumers have used Plaid-powered tools to manage their financial lives, and the company serves everyone from early-stage fintechs to large enterprises and banks.
Plaid played a critical role enabling fintech through open banking and advancing consumer-permissioned data sharing. Now, Plaid is building AI infrastructure that is purpose-built for financial services in a new shift widely recognized as intelligent finance. "AI is changing the way people manage their money, and institutions are evolving to keep up," says Hannah Hughes, Plaid's Chief Marketing Officer. "We see this primarily as more personalized experiences, and to deliver those, financial institutions need consumer data that's safe and permissioned. That's what Plaid provides."
Hannah noticed the same shift on the demand side of the business. "We've seen a similar evolution in how our customers discover new products," she says. "In the past they were using traditional search methods, and now they're also turning to LLMs to make those same discoveries. Plaid wanted to be ahead of the curve."
A hockey stick with no data behind it
Sarah Shaffer, Plaid's Organic Growth Manager, sits at the intersection of traditional SEO and Answer Engine Optimization, or AEO. "It's no longer just about optimizing our content for Google," she says. "AEO matters right now because our buyers are turning to AI models and asking questions or comparing vendors. If Plaid isn't showing up, at the moment it matters most, we might miss an opportunity to educate those buyers on how Plaid can help their business."
The catalyst arrived in May 2024, when Google launched AI Overviews. "At that moment AI Search became undeniable," Sarah says. "We were already seeing LLM traffic grow faster than traditional search. It looked like a hockey stick, up and to the right, and had no sign of slowing down. Buyers were going to AI Search and we had no visibility into what these LLMs were saying, or if they were mentioning Plaid at all."
“Before Profound, AI Search was such a black box. We knew our customers were asking questions but we had no idea what these LLMs were saying about Plaid.”
Finding a partner, not a vendor
Plaid needed more than a monitoring tool. The team needed a workbench for citation analysis, prompt tracking, competitive benchmarking, and content creation.
"From the very beginning, Profound was the clearest thinker in the space," Sarah says. "It was such an ambiguous black box we were trying to navigate, and Profound was the pioneer in building an all-in-one platform for AEO. And the Profound team was never trying to sell us. There was a problem, and they wanted to be the partner to help us solve it."
Hannah saw the same alignment. "Plaid is dedicated to making financial services work better with AI that has more context, and we appreciate that Profound shares our optimism," she says. "Our partnership was a natural fit."
Plaid has a lean organic growth team, notorious for producing high-quality work, so alignment as partners mattered as much as the product. "Since this channel is new and fast-moving, we needed a partner willing to build alongside us, one that was just as invested in our success as we were," Sarah says. "Profound felt like an extension of our own team rather than a vendor selling us something."
Serving three audiences at once
Plaid's business runs on three groups that all need to be served simultaneously. "Plaid plays a central role in connecting businesses, consumers, and financial institutions," Hannah says. "We create a network of the most relevant financial data to provide better tools and services across all of those groups, from better underwriting to fraud prevention to money movement."
Hannah sees AI as something that can serve all three at once rather than requiring three separate playbooks. "Plaid certainly doesn't serve just one group, but with the context that LLMs have, they can actually speak to what's relevant about Plaid to a given audience," she says. "We're the confluence of three different audiences, and with tools like Profound we can deliver more tailored information to all of them at the same time."
From reporting tool to workbench
What started as a way to monitor visibility in AI Search became a full operating system for Sarah's small organic growth team.
Since onboarding, Sarah has migrated her workflows to Profound. For example, she built a Content Optimizer Agent that pulls from sources like their prompt tracking, People Also Ask data, Perplexity search results, and more to then piece it together into one autonomous workstream that audits pages and rewrites them to earn citations. "Before, we'd mainly do research, a competitive gap analysis, a keyword gap analysis, spot-checking the SERP. It was a very manual process," Sarah says. "Now Profound tells us exactly what needs to be fixed, and it's an endless feedback loop. It can run without us even having to press start."
Sarah also uses an FAQ Generator Agent that surfaces the exact questions buyers are asking on Answer Engines, so Plaid has an answer ready before the question gets asked twice. And a set of AEO Health Report Agents automate the topical reporting on visibility, citations, and competitive benchmarking that used to take weeks to assemble by hand.
“It feels kind of crazy. I remember when I first started, I was doing this manually, and now I have so much fun building these agents and watching it happen at scale. It's almost like magic.”
Two hours, not two weeks
Sarah remembers a request that came across for competitive analysis and content strategy for over 300 prompts. Two years ago, that would have been out of reach for a two-person team.
"When we first got the ask to analyze hundreds of prompts, I thought it would be impossible," Sarah says. "But with Profound, we connected our SEO and AEO workflow in Profound Sheets, loaded in every prompt, and ran the Profound Agents workflow at scale. In seconds, Profound produced very high-quality drafts we could build off of and ship.”
“This project probably should have taken two weeks. With Profound, our team spent less than two hours. For someone like me who's done this manually in the past, that time savings is a game-changer because we’re able to scale our work without compromising the quality of output.”
Rapid gains in LLM traffic and conversion quality
Since onboarding Profound, LLM referral traffic to plaid.com is up over 300%, and conversions from that traffic are up 210%, evidence that the audience arriving through Answer Engines isn't just larger, it's higher intent.
“LLM referral traffic to plaid.com is up over 300% since we onboarded Profound, with conversions up 210%, which tells us the audience is high quality, not just high volume.”
Team-wide, the pace has changed just as much as the traffic. "Profound Agents have allowed us to work 10x or even 100x faster than we ever have," Sarah says. "Repeatable tasks that used to take 40 hours can happen in minutes." And that saved time can now go towards thinking through strategy and taking on bigger bets, letting Sarah and team focus on the work only marketers can do.
From marketing manager to Marketing Engineer
The scope of what Agents enable has changed what the job itself looks like. Sarah now describes her role as a Marketing Engineer, a title that didn't exist two years ago.
"I'm very proud to be a Marketing Engineer," she says. "Two years ago, this would have been such an oxymoron. Today it's one of the most valuable roles at every company. My job has changed so much. It's no longer just creating good content and optimizing for keywords. We have to understand how these AI models retrieve and weight information, how the structural integrity of content decides whether it gets cited, and how to instrument a whole new channel that simply didn't exist two years ago."
"I have to operate with a builder's mindset, systematic and analytical, and I need tools that give me space to build," she says. "Profound is my marketing workbench, and I use it every day."
Building toward a fully integrated marketing system
Hannah sees Plaid's marketing team as a preview of where the whole function is headed. "None of us truly know what an AI-native marketing team is yet," she says. "But at Plaid, we're not just focused on individual workflow optimizations. Profound has become a force multiplier where we're not just solving the problems we were already working on, we're taking on new challenges that weren't previously possible."
Her sights are already on the next horizon. "A lot of the conversation in the industry right now is about AI-enabled product development, and that's fantastic," she says. "But what I'm most excited about is AI automation for the marketing stack. We all work with a plethora of tools that don't connect, and AI can be the enabler that helps us build a truly integrated system, one the whole team contributes to instead of individual practitioners optimizing their own corner."
She's also clear-eyed about the strategic window that's open right now. "AEO is opaque in a way that SEO might have been ten years ago, but there's so much green pasture to make a stake before the space gets more crowded," she says. "Being a first mover has generated real results, and our investment now is going to be worth a lot more than waiting until the field is mature."
“The team working with Profound has been ahead of the curve. Having a tool like this helps us move our AEO strategy at the pace of AI innovation.”
Asked what she'd tell a peer at another company weighing whether to invest in AEO, Sarah keeps it simple: "Start now. The buyers are already there. The question is whether you're showing up when they're asking questions about your category. If you're not, your competitors might be. Choose a partner that pushes you forward."
