Customers ask AI now, not Google. Track your AI visibility.

More of your customers are asking ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity for a recommendation before they ever see a Google results page. Which means an AI model is now deciding whether your business shows up in the answer — and on July 2, a company that tracks exactly that shipped an agent to manage it. If you sell anything, this is the search-traffic shift you can't afford to ignore.

What actually happened

Profound launched Aim, an always-on background agent that watches how AI systems talk about your brand and turns what it finds into work (per MarTech Series). It monitors AI-response visibility and sentiment, citation accuracy across platforms, prompt-volume trends, and "agentic traffic" — the visits driven by AI agents rather than humans. When something shifts, like a drop in how often you're cited, Aim writes up what changed, why it matters, and spins up a project that routes tasks to other AI agents for research and content while the team stays in control.

The context is a $96 million round Profound raised in February at a $1 billion valuation, led by Lightspeed (per Fortune). The company works with 700+ enterprises — Target, Walmart, Ramp, Figma. One stat from their research is the whole ballgame: up to 90% of the sources an AI cites for a given answer can change over time, and different models pull from largely different sources. There is no "rank once and coast" in AI search.

Why it matters for your business

Traditional SEO was a slow, stable game — earn a ranking, hold it. AI search isn't stable. The model that answers "who's the best HVAC company in Phoenix" might cite five sources today and five different ones next month, and each model — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity — answers from its own set. If customers are asking AI and you're invisible in the answer, you don't get a lower ranking. You get left out of the sentence entirely.

You don't need Profound's enterprise pricing to act on this. The move is to start measuring: ask the major models the questions your customers actually ask, and see whether you show up, how you're described, and who gets recommended instead. That's a repeatable check you can run weekly. Then feed the gaps back into content that answers those questions plainly, on pages you own — because the one thing you control in AI search is the source material the models read. Own the answer, and you own your spot in it.

Sources: MarTech Series, Fortune.