#11: Technology is Profound
The Next Wave of AI Companies: AEO
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini. All large language models (LLM).
“What the heck is an LLM? Why are these models so large?”
Good questions. It’s artificial intelligence that can understand and generate human-like responses, thanks to its ability to analyze massive amounts of data. LLMs are difficult to create and maintain as they require access to an insane amount of data. Only firms that have such swaths of data at their fingertips already (ie Google, Microsoft from their search engines) and have a war chest of capital (to pay for the energy consumption associated with all that data crunching) can realistically create an LLM (peep DeepSeek though…).
Assuming you don’t live under a rock, you’ve likely played around with ChatGPT (the gateway LLM to AI addiction). You write a prompt (generally, longer than a typical Google search query) and you receive a singular answer to your inquiry. No sponsored links, no pages of options that you are forced to sift through. Just one response.
LLMs are changing the way we interact with technology, and upending traditional search engines (ie Google, Bing). I believe Google search (and search engines in general) will still be around for a long time; however, its relevance will decline over the next few years as prompts (vs. search queries) will take over the default human x internet interaction. It’s a much better user experience: you get one answer to that question.
An interesting wrinkle is that LLMs interpret data differently versus search engines. There’s a whole industry spun up to help companies gear their website content towards showing up top of search on an engine. It’s called search engine optimization (SEO).
Traditional SEO is being upended by LLMs. How you optimize to show up for various user prompts on an LLM is a different process than looking to rank top of search on Google. For any digital marketer or company owner, it’s a monumental shift in how we view “digital real estate”.
So, what’s going to be the SEO equivalent for LLMs? How do I get my company content to show up in that singular ChatGPT response that’s relevant to my business?
Well, I don’t know yet. But there are companies working very diligently to solve that problem.
Enter Profound.
The simplest way to describe what Profound does is that they help brands rank on LLMs (analogous with SEO for search engines). However, the way humans interact with LLMs is different than how we interact with search engines. So, this analogy really sells Profound short of what they do.
I checked out Profound’s software recently, with my objective to learn how one can influence the narrative of a consumer brand on LLMs.
And my eyes popped. There are a few AI start-ups out there already focused on answer engine optimization (AEO), but of these start-ups, Profound seems to be operating with a bigger picture in mind.
They are working closely with the most reputable LLMs (think ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc.) to build out a way for companies to gain visibility on what the heck is going on inside those models. Their business proposition today is showing you how AI talks about your brand, which pieces of content/links AI scrapes from your website already, and broader details on the state of what people ask LLMs across the broader AI universe.
They’re unraveling the black box of LLMs by going inside the belly of the beast. This isn’t a GPT wrapper; this is a technology built to deeply analyze LLM output and behavior.
If I’m a brand, they’ll tell me very clearly how my brand is talked about (ie tone, frequency, content), where my brand’s information is being scraped from (ie brand website, Reddit, authoritative backlinks). Then, they’ll provide detailed, automated recommendations on how to improve your standing versus other brands across the AI landscape. Old-school SEO strategies don’t work here, so you need to change your game.
I’m very excited as a technologist and operator in the consumer brand space because Profound is offering an opportunity to get ahead. AI and LLMs are here to stay and our reliance on them will continue to grow over time. Profound can help me control my brand voice and grow overall awareness. It’s like Whitepages (throwback) for LLMs but curated just for you.
As our way of communication with technology evolves, we’ll communicate with technology like it’s a human, instead of… technology. The whole underpinning of artificial intelligence is that it can generate human-like responses, so it makes sense that we should chat with technology as if it is human.
Kind of eerie, right?
Well, the future is already here. The timeline of which you transition your own communication style may vary to others, but you can talk to it like it’s your friend today.
And for businesses, that means you need to cozy up to your new “friend”, the LLM.