Foundation Is Now a Verified Profound Partner

Let’s make it official.

Foundation Marketing is now a verified Profound Partner after joining their inaugural agency certification cohort. The certification recognizes agencies with the expertise to measure and improve AI visibility for brands across AI engines, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, and Gemini. 

For the last 18 months, Profound has been our AEO tool of record, powering baseline visibility audits that form the foundation of our AEO strategy for enterprise clients.

That matters because the way B2B buyers find software has changed drastically over the past few years. They ask ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini before they visit a vendor site, and the answers they get are built from sources most brands have never audited. 

You can’t fix what you can’t see. Profound is how we see it. 

Nobody makes a model mention your brand, but you can show up in the sources they trust. What Profound gives us is a measurement layer, and what Foundation does is build the presence, signals and citations that make a brand likely to surface. Measurement without execution is a dashboard. Execution without measurement is a guess.

The Leading AEO Agency and the Leading AEO Platform: It Just Makes Sense

Profound tracks how brands surface inside AI answers. Citation share, share of voice, sentiment, average position, and the specific sources models pull from to build a response. 

It’s trusted by 18% of Fortune 500 companies, including Walmart, Wayfair and U.S. Bank. Profound  reports at the prompt level across the platforms buyers actually use, so we can see which questions a client wins and which competitor is taking the ones they lose. That turns a vague worry (“are we showing up in ChatGPT?”) into a number we can move.

Profound is our AEO tool of record for two main reasons:

1) They built the category, the way we’ve built ours. 

Profound launched in 2024 as one of the first platforms dedicated to answer engine optimization, back when most of the industry was still arguing about whether AI search mattered. They named the problem before anyone else was measuring it, and 24 months later closed a Series D at a $1.8 billion valuation. 

Foundation has the same habit. We made the case for Reddit as a B2B channel years before agencies would touch it, again for YouTube as a search surface rather than a video platform, and again for content distribution as a key driver of AI visibility. Neither of us waited for the category to be safe.

2) We know the product from both sides. 

Profound trusts Foundation to strengthen AI visibility, and we’ve relied on Profound’s technology to measure client performance. Our place in the cohort is the result of the work we’ve done together over the last two years. But that’s not all:

• Ross presented at the inaugural Zero Click summit, Profound’s first conference dedicated to AI search. 
• Foundationites Tanya Desai and David Reilly were among the first people to earn diplomas from Profound University. 
• Our strategists work closely with their team to ensure we get the most out of their answer engine insights. 

The relationship runs through the whole organization, which is the difference between a tool we bought and a tool we help shape.

Buyers now ask AI before they ever visit a website, and those answers are increasingly shaped by community conversations. Profound shows brands where they stand today. Our job is to improve where they stand tomorrow. Clients can see where they started, track progress over time and invest with confidence because every strategic decision is backed by data.

Ross Simmonds, CEO of Foundation Marketing

How We Use Profound to Chart the Course for AI Visibility

Every AI visibility engagement with Foundation opens with a hard baseline on how a brand actually shows up in AI answers, before anyone writes a word of strategy. Here’s how our team of strategists use Profound at every stage of the work:

• We start with an AI visibility baseline. Every AEO engagement opens with a Profound audit: brand, domain, competitors, regions, and the topics buyers care about. It captures where our clients stand in AI answers before we set strategy, which becomes the number every later report is measured against.
• We build the prompt library ourselves. An initial audit runs on 10 to 15 core prompts. That’s just the starting point. Our strategists expand the list to track hundreds of active prompts, covering intent-signalling modifiers like “best,” “cheapest” and “compare,” plus vertical and geographic variations.
• We filter out prompts that flatter the client. A question like “Is [Brand] a good option?” will always return the brand, and it tells us nothing. Prompts have to be neutral and intent-driven, or the data becomes a mirror instead of a measurement.
• We read the citations, not just the scores. Profound’s citation view shows which URLs models pull from to build an answer. That list is the opportunity map. For most B2B SaaS brands, AI answers are shaped by third-party sources like Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, and review sites.
• We review monthly. Prompts drift, categories shift, competitors move. Every account gets a monthly pass to remove prompts producing irrelevant results and add coverage where the client is losing ground.
• We report on what moved. LLM referral traffic and whether it reached pipeline, brand visibility, how often our on-site and off-site work is being cited, average position, and how all of it compares to competitors.

From the initial assessment to monthly reporting and strategic shifts, Profound plays a central role in our ability to increase AI visibility for our clients. Our successful work with Bitly is the perfect example of this.

Partnership in Action: Helping Strengthen Bitly’s Position as a Top-Cited Brand in AI Search

Bitly is one of the more competitive categories in AI search, and it’s where we proved the model out.

Over a 12+ month engagement, we helped Bitly grow a dormant branded subreddit with 38 members into an active community and owned content engine that’s cited regularly across search and generative engines. Progress was measured across hundreds of BoFU prompts tracked in Profound.

Here are some highlights from the last year::

• Number one citation share among link shorteners at 11.7%, close to double the next competitor
• Reddit referral sessions up 422% over the 12 months, from 178 to 930
• Eight branded subreddit threads cited directly in Google AI Overviews, four of them in the top position

Over the course of our engagement, our Profound reporting identified another key channel Bitly could leverage to increase AI visibility: YouTube. As we continue to help Bitly build out a holistic AI visibility strategy, Profound plays an integral role.  

Foundation has demonstrated that AI visibility is measurable and improvable when the right strategy is paired with the right data. They’ve used Profound to help clients establish a baseline, identify opportunities and track meaningful progress over time. Their work with Bitly shows exactly what’s possible when measurement and execution work together.

Trevor Pyle, Head of Growth Marketing, Profound

Learn more about our AI visibility strategy in the full Bitly case study.

Ready to Find Your AI Visibility Baseline?

If you don’t know your citation share, your competitors’ share, or which sources AI is citing in your category, that’s the place to start. It’s a real number, it takes days rather than quarters, and it tells you whether your current investment is pointed anywhere useful.

Talk to our team and we’ll run your baseline.