Profound Raised $180m. Here’s Why Profound Is Already Our AI Visibility Platform of Choice

Profound just raised $180m. The AI visibility platform we already work with closed a Series D this month at a $1.8bn valuation, as reported by TheNextWeb, co-led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, with Lightspeed Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures returning as investors too. That’s roughly double what the company was worth in February, and it takes total funding since its 2024 founding past $335m. When the AI visibility platform underneath one of your service add-ons closes a round like that, it’s worth explaining why we chose it deliberately, and what it now means for your account.

What the funding round actually means

Profound is a two-year-old, New York-based company built for what’s increasingly being called AEO, or AI answer engine optimisation. Rather than showing where a brand ranks on a page of links, it tracks how often companies get mentioned inside AI-generated answers themselves, across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, along with the context each mention appears in. That’s a genuinely different job to traditional rank tracking, and it’s the reason we brought them into our own stack rather than trying to stretch existing SEO tools to cover it.

The round matters for a practical reason too. Profound is now building out agent-level monitoring: tracking how AI agents (not just chatbots) read and act on a company’s website, and building its own agents that can flag or fix visibility issues automatically. $180m of fresh capital, backed by two of the investors who’ve now led three of the company’s four rounds, is a strong signal that development keeps accelerating rather than stalling out. For construction, manufacturing and property clients whose enquiries increasingly start with an AI-generated answer rather than a Google search, that’s exactly the ground our SEO and AI Discoverability work is built to cover.

Why we chose Profound as our AI visibility platform partner

Every AI visibility platform on the market right now has gaps, largely because the underlying AI search behaviour is still moving fast. We picked Profound because it covers the broadest set of AI models in one place, gives us prompt-level detail rather than just a mention count, and tracks competitive win rate (how often you’re mentioned without a competitor sitting in the same answer). That’s a sharper picture than the alternatives we use elsewhere in our stack, most of which are built primarily for traditional search and have bolted AI tracking on afterwards.

It also solves a real problem we’ve had reporting on AI visibility for enquiry-led businesses. Semrush, Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are all improving here, but none of them yet give a complete or consistent picture, and a platform built specifically for this job is a different proposition to reporting bolted onto general SEO tools that weren’t designed for it. It’s why prompt-level AI tracking is becoming a core part of how we run SEO for construction and property clients, not a bolt-on extra.

What this means for your account

As of now, Profound access sits outside our standard SEO and AI visibility retainers as an optional addition, rather than something folded into every account by default. That’s deliberate. Not every client needs prompt-level AI tracking yet, and we’d rather offer it where it earns its place than pad out a retainer with it.

What you get with it: mention and citation tracking across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, prompt-level analysis of exactly how your brand is described (or not described), and competitive win-rate reporting against named competitors. Layered on top, our team turns that data into an actual content and technical plan, rather than leaving you with a dashboard and no next step.

Because we work with Profound directly, clients get this at a preferential partner rate rather than paying standalone list price. If you want to know whether it’s a fit for your account and what it costs, get in touch and we’ll talk it through. It sits alongside our existing SEO and AI Discoverability services, so if you’re not yet on one of those, that’s the natural starting point.