AI answer engines are increasingly stealing search traffic. In June, AI searches on desktop, through platforms like OpenAI-owned ChatGPT and Perplexity, accounted for 5.6% of all search traffic, according to market research firm Datos. Google, long the dominant player, still controls around 90% of the total online search market, but it too is leaning into AI search with its AI Overviews and AI Mode for complex and multi-step queries.
As users turn to AI summaries and chatbots with their queries, publishers’ traffic and clicks are declining. The publishers and brands that previously employed search engine optimization (SEO) tactics to increase visibility and traffic are seeing diminished returns from those efforts. Now, they’re seeking out new ways to find out how they show up in AI-generated answers, and optimize their content for AI discoverability.
In response, a new industry focused on AI search optimization—sometimes called answer engine optimization (AEO) or generative engine optimization (GEO)—is springing up.
Here are seven companies at the vanguard of the AEO space.
1. Profound
What it does: Arguably the category leader in the burgeoning AI engine optimization space, Profound is a comprehensive marketing platform built to help businesses understand their visibility in AI search—and optimize their content with custom tools to improve how they show up in chatbots and answer engines. The platform allows users to track brand mentions, and also create and distribute optimized content, and then measure the impact of that content across various platforms.
Differentiator: The company marries large datasets—including hundreds of thousands of prompts and responses—with workflow-building tools that enable marketers to stand up sophisticated content creation processes.
As cofounder and CEO James Cadwallader told ADWEEK: “Say I’m a marketer at La Croix, and I want to create a piece of content. A bunch of these slightly smaller competitors will say, ‘Hey, we do content generation in the platform.’ But what we’re doing is…plumb[ing] all of the data and insights that you’re getting—thousands of data points that are coming from the answers that we’re getting in the platform…and then we’re building these deep reasoning model workflows where marketers can actually go in and manipulate them themselves, and actually orchestrate the content generation within the platform. It’s not just it’s not one ChatGPT call. It might be 20 or 30 different AI reasoning model calls that are being used to distill all the data and insights and analyze all of the content that is performing and create new content.”
