- Jan 29
- 6 min read
Brands are used to optimizing content to be discovered by algorithms and consumed directly by humans. Now, in the age of the agentic web, AI sits between your content and your audience, synthesizing, interpreting, and reshaping your message before a person ever sees it. The end consumer is still human, but AI has become the gatekeeper that decides what gets through and how it's presented.
This shift represents "arguably the biggest disruption in the history of capitalism," says James Cadwallader, CEO and co-founder of Profound. "We're entering a future where you don't need to click," he says. "You can just talk to the internet and it talks back to you."
That's why Cadwallader and his team at Profound built a platform that helps brands measure, understand, and improve how AI talks about them. By tracking visibility across answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini—and using reasoning models to analyze patterns across millions of citations—Profound turns AI visibility data into actionable strategy.
Here, as part of our Human in the Loop AI interview series, Cadwallader discusses the evolution of information retrieval, why SEO experts are perfectly positioned for this shift, and why winning in generative engine optimization requires both deep conviction and a willingness to experiment.
How long have you been working in AI?
I've been working with AI for about two years, as the CEO of Profound. We launched the company in August 2024, so we're native to the generative AI era—we've never operated without it.
How has your relationship with AI changed over the years (or months)?
If you look back at the technologies that have most impacted the way we live, search and the modernization of information retrieval is probably at the top of that list. Access to the world's information at the click of a button fundamentally changed society. You can track GDP growth to the birth of search. Google built one of the most exciting companies in the history of mankind off of that technology.
Now, we're entering a future where you don't need to click. The shift to a version of information retrieval where you can just talk to the internet and it talks back to you—that's underestimated. This isn't just a new UX on search or a chat interface. This is the ability to access intelligence through conversation.
There's a second-order platform shift here that impacts marketers specifically. Most companies have relied on search, clicks, and search advertising for the last 25 years. Now, that question has evolved to: when AI talks about your category or industry, does it surface your brand? How does it talk about you? This will become the most important topic in marketing over the next decade.
What’s your AI-search philosophy right now?
The market is still coming to terms with the idea that they must now create content for bots to consume, rather than humans. SEO was focused on creating content designed to be discovered by bots but consumed by humans. Answer engine optimization shares that discovery element, but now the content is designed to be consumed by a large language model, not a human. ChatGPT is the consumer. That's a very different end user.
This shift in mindset will take a while to really sink in. It's philosophical: you're creating marketing aimed at bots, not just picked up by them.
Can you share a recent success in improving visibility in LLMs?
We worked with Hone, and they increased their visibility by 800% using Profound. What stands out about that success isn't just the numbers—it's how awesome the team is. They're so leaned in. They understand this is a marketing function, not a big red button you press for instant results.
Generative engine optimization is no different from any other form of marketing in that you get out what you put in. The teams who get technical, get into the data, and focus on building high-quality content—they don't want to ship a thousand pages overnight—are the teams that see results and keep building. Hone has done even more incredible things since that case study. It hasn't been a one-hit wonder.
What mindset or tactic led to this success?
A willingness to experiment. The best teams we work with don't just innovate once—they do it over and over again. They're smart, they take risks, and I think they probably have top-down agency given to them. The best way to manage people is by giving them lots of context, lots of agency, lots of encouragement, and lots of feedback.
It's cultural. These teams are creating a new form of marketing: creating lots of content, distributing it in the right places, measuring it, doing more of what works and less of what doesn't. Everyone wants to hear about some miracle hack, but the reality is that you're just creating marketing aimed at AI rather than humans.
Which AI tools do you use the most?
Our engineering team lives in Cursor. Anyone not in engineering spends significant time in ChatGPT. These tools make us far more effective. I used ChatGPT to find a shower head a couple of months ago, and it was incredible. It did 37 different searches in six minutes, synthesized all the information beautifully, and the shower head it recommended was perfect. It's like deploying the mind of an MIT PhD to find a shower head.
The interesting nuance is that our engineering team has a very low tolerance for people who don't know how to write code and don't think from first principles. There's ferocious adoption but also deep skepticism of the technology at the same time. That seems to be the winning formula: using AI extensively while maintaining critical thinking.
What excites you the most about AI-SEO/GEO right now?
The fast-paced and ever-changing category means every day is exciting. But more than that, I think the SEO marketer has been the forgotten child of the marketing stack for the last decade. This is the chance for SEO folks to become the hero in a new story.
The future of visibility is beyond search. Brand is getting pulled in, product is getting pulled in, eCommerce, everything's getting pulled into this one interface. And the SEO expert is so well positioned because they're analytical thinkers who understand the core concepts of indexing, metadata, page structure. That's the foundation. These are the right muscle groups to take charge of this new category.
What’s the biggest challenge for marketers diving into AI-SEO today?
Understanding that although this space carries a lot of similarity with SEO and search, in many ways it's entirely different and unique. About 53% of commercial inquiries in answer engines use web search to build answers, and they'll tell you which websites they used. So there are similarities.
But here's where it forks: In SEO, you created content to be discovered by a bot and consumed by a human. In answer engine optimization, you're creating content to be discovered by a bot and consumed by a large language model. That's fundamentally different. And I think it's only going to get more different from SEO over time, not more similar.
Marketers need to think of bots as their audience now. They're so used to understanding their ICP and knowing who they're targeting. Now, the bots are your audience.
What advice do you have for those looking to improve performance in AI search?
This sounds self-serving, but I truly believe the ability to win in this new category will be driven by technology adoption. The first step is to measure what's going on. Understand how answer engines talk about your industry, your category, your brand when they surface you. Then, understand why: which websites are they using to build those answers?
Once you have that insight, you can start building strategies. Profound is really an action platform, not an analytics platform. We use reasoning models to analyze all the data and insights, looking at patterns across hundreds of thousands of citations to understand what makes the most prominent content work. Then we help brands act on those insights.
If you look at the sheer amount of value being created day-to-day with these tools, it's undeniable. The question isn't whether this shift is happening—it's whether you're going to be part of it.
