Profound: The Birth of the AI-SEO Market

On February 24, 2026, startup Profound raised $96 million to develop "answer-engine optimization" (AEO) tools. Classic Google search is dying, making way for direct answers from AI assistants.

For brands, this is a disaster: how do you control your reputation if Perplexity or ChatGPT decides your product is bad? Profound offers solutions for monitoring and adjusting how language models "see" and describe brands. This is the birth of a new multi-billion dollar industry of manipulating AI outputs, replacing traditional SEO.

Source: Fortune