Profound, a marketing platform built for the AI era, has announced the launch of the Profound Index at its annual Zero Click New York conference. The new index is designed to help marketers understand how brands appear within AI-generated answers across platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, where traditional search rankings no longer fully reflect visibility or influence.
As consumer discovery increasingly shifts from search engines to conversational AI systems, brands are facing a new challenge: understanding how often and in what context they are recommended by AI models. The Profound Index aims to address this shift by providing large-scale visibility analytics based on real user interactions.
The Profound Index is built to measure how brands are represented inside AI-generated responses rather than traditional search engine results. It analyzes over 1.5 billion real-user prompts across multiple AI platforms, creating a benchmark for visibility in what the company calls “AI Search.”
The platform is designed to reflect a fundamental shift in digital discovery, where users increasingly rely on AI systems for recommendations, advice, and purchasing decisions rather than clicking through search engine links.
James Cadwallader, Co-founder and CEO of Profound, said:
"Marketing teams spent years asking where they ranked on Google. Increasingly, that is becoming the wrong question. People are asking ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and other AI systems for recommendations, advice, and answers. The brands that matter are the brands AI recommends."
Unlike traditional SEO tools, the Profound Index updates daily and tracks brand visibility across AI platforms in real time. It evaluates how often brands appear in AI-generated responses, how those mentions change over time, and how model updates influence brand recommendations.
The system aggregates prompt-level data across industries, allowing marketers to understand competitive positioning and identify shifts in AI-driven discovery behavior.
Initial findings from the Profound Index suggest that AI visibility does not always align with traditional search engine rankings or brand awareness. Instead, brand representation in AI-generated responses appears to be influenced by evolving model behaviors and platform-specific updates.
Examples of observed trends include shifts in recommendation patterns following AI model updates, changes in travel and healthcare brand visibility, and unexpected movement in retail brand mentions across platforms.
These insights highlight how AI systems are actively reshaping digital discovery and influencing brand perception in real time.
The Profound Index is designed to help marketing teams adapt to AI-driven discovery by providing tools to benchmark brand performance against competitors. It enables organizations to:
This approach reflects a shift from keyword-based SEO strategies to AI visibility optimization.
The launch of the Profound Index comes as AI systems increasingly replace traditional search engines as the primary entry point for information discovery. Conversational AI platforms are now synthesizing answers rather than presenting ranked lists of links, fundamentally changing how brands are discovered and evaluated.
As a result, marketers are being forced to rethink how visibility, awareness, and influence are measured in a zero-click digital environment.
Profound’s launch of the Profound Index marks a significant step toward redefining digital marketing measurement in the AI era. By shifting focus from search rankings to AI-generated recommendations, the platform provides marketers with a new framework for understanding and optimizing brand visibility in conversational AI systems.
About Profound
AI is the new front door to every business. People no longer just search, they ask AI. Profound is a new-age marketing platform relied on by thousands of leaders globally to understand and control what AI says about their brand, and empower their teams to create AI-optimized content that increases brand awareness. Trusted by industry titans like Figma, Ramp, MongoDB, Chime, and U.S. Bank, Profound arms marketers with the tools to win in a future where AI agents, not blue links, define discovery. Win the zero-click internet with Profound.
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