Profound

Dev platform Series D+ (opens in a new tab) tryprofound.com (opens in a new tab) · in/tryprofound (opens in a new tab) · @profound (opens in a new tab)

Profound sells answer-engine optimisation tooling: visibility in AI answers, the prompts people actually ask, agent-built marketing workflows and analytics on how AI crawlers hit a site. It is bought by SEO, content, PR and agency teams.

signals 13

October 2026
- ChatGPT stops tagging many of the links it cites (opens in a new tab)
  
  10-15 News tryprofound.com ↗ (opens in a new tab)
  
  Profound's own crawl found ChatGPT quietly dropping the `utm_source=chatgpt.com` tag from the links.
- Profound ships a bot-only render of your page (opens in a new tab)
  
  10-12 Release tryprofound.com ↗ (opens in a new tab)
  
  Profound shipped Dynamic Bot Rendering: it detects an AI crawler's visit and serves that request a fully.
- Profound measures personal shopping agents' footprint on retail sites (opens in a new tab)
  
  10-03 News tryprofound.com ↗ (opens in a new tab)
  
  Profound tracked unverified "meta-webindexer" requests.
- Most AI citations fade within two weeks (opens in a new tab)
  
  10-01 News tryprofound.com ↗ (opens in a new tab)
  
  Profound tracked 883,000 pages across seven AI answer surfaces.
September 2026
- Profound adds image generation to its AI Marketer (opens in a new tab)
  
  09-25 Release tryprofound.com ↗ (opens in a new tab)
  
  Profound added image generation to its AI Marketer product, so a user can request blog headers.
- Profound raises $180M Series D at a $1.8B valuation (opens in a new tab)
  
  09-16 Funding tryprofound.com ↗ (opens in a new tab)
  
  Profound raised a $180M Series D led by Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins at a $1.8B valuation.
- Answer engines change what they recommend based on who's asking (opens in a new tab)
  
  09-11 News tryprofound.com ↗ (opens in a new tab)
  
  Profound tested ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini across 71,147 responses, prepending persona details.
- Study finds AI answers rarely cite a company's own pricing page (opens in a new tab)
  
  09-05 tryprofound.com ↗ (opens in a new tab)
  
  Growth Unhinged and Profound sampled 7,600 AI responses to pricing questions about Cloud 100 companies.
- Ships a context layer to stop its tools giving generic answers (opens in a new tab)
  
  09-02 Release tryprofound.com ↗ (opens in a new tab)
  
  Profound launched Context Manager, a store for brand, market and offering details that its AI Marketer.
August 2026
- Claude and Claude Code behave as two answer engines, not one (opens in a new tab)
  
  08-25 News tryprofound.com ↗ (opens in a new tab)
  
  Its ten-day observational study of 24,135 responses across 1,724 prompts finds Claude Code invokes web.
- Ships a YouTube citation breakdown for answer engines (opens in a new tab)
  
  08-20 Release tryprofound.com ↗ (opens in a new tab)
  
  Profound added YouTube Citation Breakdown to its Answer Engine Insights product.
- Finds pricing pages are where answer engines err most (opens in a new tab)
  
  08-20 News tryprofound.com ↗ (opens in a new tab)
  
  Profound analyzed over 158,000 brand claims made by AI answer engines and found 4.3% to 6.8%.
- Measures commercial ChatGPT conversations more than doubling (opens in a new tab)
  
  08-19 News tryprofound.com ↗ (opens in a new tab)
  
  Profound analyzed 7.5 million English-language US ChatGPT conversations over a year.