Tooling
Profound
AI-visibility platform for marketers tracking brand mentions and citation share across LLM surfaces. Added Documents (June 2026) and a redesigned Sentiment tool to move beyond surface-level metrics.
What it is
Profound is an AI-visibility platform built for marketers to track how often a brand is mentioned and cited across large language model surfaces. In June 2026 it added a Documents feature and a redesigned Sentiment tool.
Why it matters
As discovery shifts from blue links to generated answers, knowing whether and how a brand surfaces inside LLM responses is the foundation of AI search visibility work.
How it works
Practitioners run prompts representative of buyer questions, then review which sources the model cites and how the brand is described, using the Sentiment tool to gauge tone and Documents to organise supporting evidence.
When it applies
Reach for it when you need to measure and improve a brand's presence inside AI assistant answers rather than traditional search rankings.
Examples
- Tracking citation share for a SaaS brand across comparison style prompts.
- Comparing how favourably an LLM describes your product versus a named competitor.
- Auditing which third party pages an assistant pulls from when recommending your category.
How it is measured
- Brand mention frequency across LLM surfaces
- Citation share relative to competitors
- Sentiment of brand references in answers
- Source domains cited for category prompts
Related terms in Tooling
- Ahrefs Brand RadarAhrefs' AI-visibility module tracking brand mentions and impressions inside AI answers. Surfaces shifts in how brands appear across ChatGPT, Gemini, and other LLM surfaces.
- AI content detectionAI content detection is the use of software to estimate whether a piece of text, image, audio or video was generated by an AI model. Detectors return a probability or classification rather than proof, and accuracy varies with length, language, editing and model used. Because of that uncertainty, results are treated as a signal for review, not a verdict.
- AI watermarkingAI watermarking is the practice of embedding a signal into AI generated text, images, audio or video so the output can later be identified as machine produced. The signal is usually designed to be imperceptible to people but detectable by software that holds the matching key or detector. It is one of several provenance approaches used alongside metadata standards and content credentials.
- Bot detectionBot detection is the practice of identifying automated traffic to a website or API and separating it from human visitors. It distinguishes wanted automation, such as search engine and AI crawlers, from unwanted activity like scraping, credential stuffing and click fraud. Detection results feed decisions about what to allow, challenge, rate limit or block.
- Brave BrowserBrave is a Chromium based web browser from Brave Software that blocks third party trackers and most ads by default. It bundles privacy controls, Brave Search as the default engine, and an AI assistant called Leo. Because it strips tracking scripts, visits from Brave users are often harder to attribute in analytics.
- Brave SearchBrave Search is a search engine from Brave Software that serves results from its own web index rather than reselling another engine's results. It is the default engine in the Brave browser, offers AI generated answer summaries, and is sold to developers as the Brave Search API. That API makes it a grounding source for other search and AI products.
Primary research · August 2026
How ChatGPT Shortlists Software Brands
An audit across 10 categories and 60 buying questions. I recorded what ChatGPT reads, throws away and links to when a buyer asks it which software to buy, and what that decides.
- 60
- Questions asked
- 10
- Software markets
- 2,680
- Results read
- 367
- Links shown
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