When someone searches for “best project management software for small teams” on Google today, they might get the usual blue links. But when they ask the same question in ChatGPT or Perplexity, a completely different dynamic plays out. An AI synthesises an answer from sources it trusts, and either your brand is cited or it isn’t. There’s no page two.

That’s the problem Profound was built to solve, and on September 15, 2026, it raised $180 million at a $1.8 billion valuation to go after it harder. The round was co-led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, with existing investors Lightspeed, Khosla Ventures, and Saga Ventures also participating. Seven months earlier, Profound had closed a $96 million Series C. The company has now raised $335 million total since founding in 2024.

What Answer Engine Optimization Actually Is

AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization. It’s the practice of making your brand visible and citable inside AI-generated answers, not just traditional search result pages.

The targets are different from classic SEO. Profound tracks brand performance across five major AI surfaces: Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Bing Copilot. These aren’t just search engines with AI bolted on. They’re interfaces that form opinions about which brands are worth recommending, and they update those opinions based on the content they can find and verify.

Traditional SEO tools were not built for this. A backlink profile, a domain authority score, a ranked keyword list — none of these tell you whether ChatGPT recommends your accounting software or your competitor’s. Profound was purpose-built to measure that gap and close it.

The platform helps brands monitor where they appear in AI-generated answers, identify content gaps, and prioritise improvements based on actual citation data. It’s now ranked number one on G2 for AEO with over 300 verified reviews.

Who’s Paying for This

Over 1,000 enterprise brands are now Profound customers, and the list includes household names: Comcast, Estée Lauder, Walmart, Campari Group, and Royal Bank of Canada. On the tech side: Zoom, ServiceNow, Ramp, Cursor, MongoDB, and Figma.

That’s not a niche early-adopter list. These are companies with serious marketing budgets making a calculated bet that AI search visibility matters right now.

The fact that $180 million in new capital followed $96 million just seven months earlier says the market is validating that bet at speed.

Why the Traditional SEO Playbook Is Breaking

For the past two decades, getting found online meant optimising for Google’s blue links. Keyword density, backlinks, page speed, structured data — the discipline became sophisticated, and entire industries grew up around it.

AI search changes the economics. Instead of users clicking through to ten websites, an AI answers the question directly and cites two or three sources. The winner-takes-most dynamic becomes even more pronounced. You are either recommended or you are invisible.

There’s also a trust dimension that didn’t exist before. AI engines are effectively making editorial decisions about which brands they associate with credibility. Content quality, factual accuracy, consistent brand messaging, and presence in trusted sources all influence whether an AI model includes your brand in its answers. Gaming this is much harder than gaming a keyword algorithm.

Research from Voices’ Amplified 2026 report found that 55% of consumers now use voice as their primary interface for AI interactions. A meaningful chunk of those interactions involve product questions, service comparisons, and buying decisions. If your brand isn’t optimised for how AI engines interpret and summarise information about you, you’re losing sales you can’t even measure.

What This Means for Business

If you run a business with a digital presence, this funding round is a signal worth paying attention to.

AEO is not a future problem. It’s a current problem. Every day your competitors are potentially being recommended by ChatGPT while your brand goes unmentioned, and you have no idea it’s happening because your current analytics don’t track it.

A few things worth doing now:

Audit your AI search presence. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overview about your market category and see who gets cited. Do this for your own brand name and for the questions your ideal customers actually ask. The gap between what you expect and what you find is your AEO problem statement.

Treat content quality as infrastructure. AI engines don’t reward keyword stuffing. They reward accurate, well-structured content that answers real questions. The same content investments that serve humans serve AI models, but they need to be coherent and factual, not just keyword-optimised.

Get into the right sources. AI models lean on a set of trusted publications and data sources when forming answers. Being quoted in industry media, having accurate listings in business directories, and generating third-party content that references your brand all influence AI visibility.

Update your marketing measurement. If your team is only measuring organic search traffic, paid clicks, and social engagement, you’re missing what’s happening in AI search. Start tracking AI citations as a leading indicator of brand authority.

The $180 million Profound just raised is institutional validation that this shift is real and accelerating. Enterprise DNA’s own content work on this site is built with exactly this in mind: creating material that is accurate, valuable, and citable by both humans and AI models. The lesson for any business is the same. The interface your customers use to find you is changing. Your marketing infrastructure needs to change with it.

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Want help building a content and data strategy that performs in AI search? Talk to the Enterprise DNA team about what that looks like for your business.