AEO OS: Securing First-Mover Advantage in AI Discovery — Fireside Chat with Mark Ebert & Randy Wootton

Julia Nimchinski:
And next up, we have Randy Wooden, partner at CEO Coaching International, 3X CEO at Maxio and Rocket Fuel, and joined by Mark Ebert, SVP of Revenue at Refound, formerly SVP at Sixth Sense. What a pleasure! How are you doing?

Randy Wootton:
Great! Thanks for having us, we’re really excited to be here.

Julia Nimchinski:
Awesome. Brendi, take it away.

Randy Wootton:
Okay, let me, you know, do this whole Zoom thing. We’ll get the slides up and running. And… Can you see the screen, Julia?

Julia Nimchinski:
Yep.

Randy Wootton:
Okay, so I’m really excited to be here with Mark, Ebert from, profound to talk about securing the first mover advantage in AI discovery. So, Philippe was talking about how to take those leads and manage them with the agents, which was great. We’re talking about how do you even get discovered? The world has changed. And so, I am excited to be here.
I’m Randy Wooten. To your point, Julie, I’ve been a three-time CEO, all go-to-market tech, and so I’ve been wrestling with the problems of brand versus display, and SEO versus SEM for years, and now a partner at CEO Coaching, where I help other CEOs build out their organizations, and I’m joined by Mark Ebert.
You want to talk a little bit about Profound, Mark?

Mark Ebert:
Sure, absolutely, and Julia, thanks for having us. Very excited for the conversation today, Randy. Yeah, quick introduction, I lead all, revenue at Profound. joined the company over the summer, so around the end of July, and have been, yeah, very much enjoying it so far.
currently, dialed in from the, Shop Talk conference out in Las Vegas, speaking to retail, which is one of our, you know, industries that we sell into. But I think for today, it’ll be good to put more of a B2B lens on… on this whole topic, and, yeah, excited for the conversation.

Randy Wootton:
Great, yeah, and thank you. Has it been profound to be a profound, Mark?

Mark Ebert:
Sure has. Yeah, every day.

Randy Wootton:
I’m surprised that name…

Mark Ebert:
That question, then.

Randy Wootton:
Yeah, I thought that would… the name even be available. So you’re going to walk us through a couple slides. I can be your Vanna White and move them through, but do you want to set the context for us, please?

Mark Ebert:
Yeah, sure. So one of the reasons that we, one of the core reasons that we exist as a company is, really in response to the consumer behavior changing pretty dramatically and very fast. And, the chart that you have up on the screen is a representation of how fast ChatGPT, as we know, is one of the LLMs that we all like to use every day.
How fast it was adopted, and as these LLMs have begun changing the way in which they work.
a little over a year and a half ago, a big shift took place, which was that these LLMs began providing web search capabilities, which meant that consumers could start querying LLMs with questions, and they were able to, in real time, present back answers for a customer. So we’re all obviously very familiar with how that works today.
And for brands specifically. it creates a handful of challenges. So if you click to the next slide. If we just go back… if we go back 25 years, and, you know, for the prior 25 years, the way in which a consumer interacts with a brand is, through Google, right? And Google, historically, was presenting a consumer with. a bunch of blue links.
The name of the game, as you mentioned, Randy, in SEO, is to make sure that, your link is ranking. And, the consumer’s job was then to visit those websites, consume that information. Make a decision on their own after consuming what might be, you know, 2, 3, 4 websites, whatever they have the patience for, and go about their way transacting.
if you flip to the next slide, the introduction of chat and Claude and, you know, AI overviews and Gemini and all of the different LLMs has fundamentally changed the way in which consumers are now getting their information.
And one of the biggest shifts is this disintermediation between the consumer and the brand, and as opposed to presenting a bunch of links back for the consumer. To visit, you know, your webpage. These LLMs are out visiting tens of thousands of websites.
In a split second, and they’re deciding what websites to pull back and craft something entirely new, which is an answer for the consumer.
And so, the consumer experience, and I’m sure everyone on this call, you know, experiences this daily, has really, really enjoyed the hard work of not having to visit 50 pages of websites to get a really, really good answer.
And now these LLMs are, we refer to them, obviously, as answer engines, and… they’re taking that hard work on for us consumers, whether you’re a B2B buyer, or it’s, you know, me looking for a new pair of running shoes. But the trick is now, they’re making those decisions, and for brands, the challenge is that we are now in a binary outcome.
We are either in this answer or we’re not. And it presents a whole host of new challenges, right? One question all the brands are asking is, like, are we in these answers? What’s happening? It’s a bit of a black box at the moment.
The second question everyone asks is, well, when we are in the answer, how do we rank competitively, and how does AI talk about our brand? And… that has spawned an entire new category of what we call AEO or GEO, you know, whichever acronym you like.
But it’s really now the job of a marketer across every business on the planet They have one new, very, very important customer they need to now learn how to market to, which is a superhuman. And it changes the game a little bit, so I’m excited to just talk about, you know, how that’s shifting today, and how brands are starting to capitalize on it.

Randy Wootton:
I know we’re going to get into it in a little bit, but just some data points. McKinsey had a study in 2025 that says that 50% of the users are already relying on AI-powered search.
And so, I mean, ChatGPT, was it 3 years ago that it came on the market, to your other slide, how quickly it’s been adopted, and that the implication is, to your point, like, we’ve all grown up for the last 20 years display advertising, search advertising, optimizing our websites for SEO and SEM.
Now, McKinsey, again, has said that 20-50% of traditional search traffic is at risk, and so it’s requiring an entirely new paradigm to how to think about it. I know when I was at Maxio, for example, we started seeing this about 18 months ago, and that our SEO results were just dropping off a cliff, and we’re like, what is going on?
And, to your point, which we’ll get into in a minute, like, what do you do about it? How do you optimize the content on your site and the content on third-party sites? How do you measure it? How do you ensure that you get up in front of the click and are part of the answer? So, yeah, we’ll frame up some of those questions in just a minute.
Did you want to talk about the flywheel?

Mark Ebert:
Yeah, I think, you know, to set the stage for, just… I get a lot of positive feedback from this. It’s just a good, helpful visual when the response from a marketer at any brand we’re talking to goes, great, but, like, so what the hell do we do? Like, what is… what is the right way to approach it?
And at Profound, you know, we believe fundamentally, we believe two truths.
One truth is that every brand on the planet will care about how AI talks about their products or services, deeply, and two, that, marketers will leverage Agents, as, you know, we heard, you know, in a different context in the previous speaker, to do a lot of this marketing to help improve those results.
And so, the way in which we think we start at the top of this circle. One of the first things that we need to understand, which is very challenging, is what exactly, are people prompting these platforms? These are much longer queries, as you, you know, we all probably know.
We might write a paragraph question, you know, and they’re full conversations. So it’s different than the traditional keyword concept. And we need to understand, like, the size of prize. Like, what are consumers looking for in these LLMs, and what are they searching for?
The next thing on the right is we help customers then think through, alright, let’s get you all the analytics behind how you’re showing up in these responses. And it’s all things from, you know, share of voice, to visibility scores to… sentiment, like, you know, when they talk about us, how do they talk about us, like, all the intimate detail.
And then, inside, Inside those responses, we get the rich context of the citation data, which is effectively the sources that these LLMs choose to pull in to craft their answer. And brands want to know, are we a citation source? Who, like, who is actually influencing these answers?
That then generates you a set of opportunities to go improve your visibility, and then you enable agents inside of Profound.
to pick up a lot of that work based on the data that we’re monitoring all day long, and, deploy strategies across, like, your own content, but also social and affiliates, and everyone else who has, an influence over, these answers. And then lastly. as we optimize that content, we want to make sure, are we truly driving citations in these answers?
And we have an ability to, to measure that in the platform. to improve the next way we optimize or create new content. So, you know, we have an opportunity to close that loop to make sure that we are constantly improving the marketing that we’re doing to ensure that we’re staying top of mind through the eyes of a… of an LLM or a superhuman.

Randy Wootton:
That’s great. So let’s dig in on some questions. This is really kind of a fireside chat, and we will look to see if there are any questions in the chat as well to incorporate in the next 15 minutes or so. So, Mark, thanks for that overview, appreciate it.
You know, one of the things we were talking about in our pre-brief was the distinction between SEO, AEO, and GEO, and I do think there are some people who draw a distinction between AEO and GEO. How do you all think about it at Profound?
What is the undergirding technology, and how do you influence results that are in the AEO construct versus an LLM interface?

Mark Ebert:
Yeah, I think the… well, for us, we use interchangeably AEO, so answer engine optimization or generative engine optimization, you know, we, at least at Profound, kind of use them interchangeably.
I personally like AEO because it enforces… the concept that these are answer engines, which, to your point, your question was, how does that differ from SEO? That nails it right there. One of the biggest differences is that the consumer is not presented a bunch of websites to click into and go determine an answer themselves.
These engines are building an answer and helping make a decision right there in the conversation for a consumer.
And so it fundamentally changes the game for how we think about what kind of marketing we need to produce, so that we can influence not just making sure our website shows up, but, no, we can influence the decision that’s getting crafted right there within The answer.
A couple other differences from SEO, though, you know, we… it’s very, very similar. In fact, like. many, many, many of our users, a giant percentage of our users inside Profound, are SEOs. You know, they are our champions. And I think this category has created a very exciting path forward for them. for innovation.
And, so it’s a lot of the same muscle groups as SEO. But there’s a lot of differences. And, you know, like, one of those differences is that we’re just, you know, simply… we’re not competing for clicks. As you mentioned, you know, referral traffic, and the whole concept of. making sure we’re just driving that traffic.
That’s not necessarily the number one metric anymore. So the, the, the new game is thinking about how… instead of how do I rank number one, you know, how do I become the source that AI trusts enough to cite in their answer?
And for… Third parties, like, you know, other people’s websites, or affiliates, or, you know, social… How do we stay on top of that content to make sure that that content is accurately talking about our products or services as well? So that when they’re cited, you know, the answers pulled into those responses are accurate?

Randy Wootton:
Yeah, I remember when search first came on the market with Google, I was actually at Microsoft, and we launched Bing, and Bing Search, and we were always fighting to be part of the consideration set for people to spend their money, their search money, on Bing as well.
And at the time, we thought there’d be more search engines, and they all consolidated on Google, and SEO and SEM became about optimizing for Google, and Google would change their algorithm every 90 days, and everyone would get consumed with optimizing for Google.
So I do think, to your point, now we have this much broader array of LLMs to think about, and they’re all, though they’re all generative engines, they’re all doing it a little bit differently. And so, there are some commonalities, I think, in terms of how you, create, a presence, brand authority more broadly, which we’ll talk about in a second.
But I think one of the things you and I were chatting about is just, this requires a complete different way of thinking about how do you, how do you build a funnel?
So, in the world that we all came from, B2B marketers in particular, it was primarily search, driving to websites that then you would engage with, you would nurture over time, all sorts of lead nurturing technology, you’d try to get the demo and close it off.
And now, today, Mark, how do you think about that new way of thinking about the funnel, and what is… how buyers are going through that process, the buyer journey? How’s it been transformed through this, AEO construct.

Mark Ebert:
Yeah, I think the best word to describe the funnel is collapse, right? There’s the discovery happening. Then there’s… what’s really interesting is the behavior, excuse me, of some of these engines, the behavior almost promotes and pushes transactions. So for B2B, you know, it might be, I have a problem, help me solve this business problem. Yeah.
And then it’s proactively saying. well, here’s how you might approach that problem, and here are companies that you should look at. And then it gets comparative, without even being prompted often.

Randy Wootton:
Yeah.

Mark Ebert:
Would it be helpful if I compared those options for you? Yeah. And so what is taking place, and as someone who’s been in B2B, I’m on my 20th year in B2B as well, it… what is so scary is that you’ve now… you now have someone else telling your story And the consumer is not leaving that experience.
So this, this funnel collapse is happening because the LLMs are promoting the next phase. It’s like, it goes from information gathering right to comparative, you know, and all the way down to kind of transactional. The consumer still, at the end of that conversation, our data shows, and we do a lot of research on, that what happens next.
The consumer rarely goes to the bottom. Where you… that little, tiny area that shows citations, they rarely go down there and click, and then go… go finish.
What they do is they’ll leave that experience pretty much with, you know, a much further down the funnel decision made, and then they’ll go either to Google to get right to the brand that they want to talk to, or they’ll go right to the brand website.

Randy Wootton:
it’s… I think.

Mark Ebert:
So, it’s very interesting.

Randy Wootton:
Yeah, we’ve seen that. So, they’re showing up not just pre-qualified, but opinionated. And the opinionated… what their opinion has been influenced is by how the LLMs have constructed the narrative.
And we know they’re hallucinating at this point, but the consumer engaging with the LLM and asking questions may not have enough knowledge to know that what’s being represented is not truth.
So, there is this idea of how do you get your story out across many sites, beyond the own site, beyond the website, to the other referral sites, or Reddit is a huge influence. Where else do you build authority? Where do you build credibility, when you’re thinking about, as a B2B marketer, to influence your presence in the answer?

Mark Ebert:
I think the best way to think about it is… is twofold. One is… Like, first party. there is… there’s a lot that you can do as yourselves to help feed the engines the information that they’re so hungry to consume to help them make a decision, right? And so there’s… there is just purely… there’s a lot more content that you need to produce. Right.
Because they’re… and they’re hungry for it, and it’s gotta get produced in a format, in a style that in which they like to consume it, it may not be the pretty graphical, you know, made for humanized content. So I think, you know, that is well understood at this point.
So there’s… one category is you’ve really got to up your game of owning your own site content, the blogs, you know, a lot of those areas, but the structure of those are gonna be different. And then, as you mentioned, on the third party, that’s really where the LLMs are going for validation that you’re credible, right?
They’re going there for… think of it as the consensus layer. You know, is this truly what, you know, in G2, is this really what people think is the best platform? Is that what the reviews validate? Is that what LinkedIn seems to feel?
We published some data that was posted from the COO of LinkedIn last week, you know, that is showing, LinkedIn as a citation source in these answers continues to rise. If you’re on this call, and you’re in B2B, like me, that is a little scary, because… Yeah. what gets produced on LinkedIn. you know, God knows.
And so, one of the things that, you know, inside of Profound that we help our brands do is understand, for instance, what is the subreddit threads that are actually driving answers? and build them a strategy to go engage correctly. What are the LinkedIn posts that seemingly are influencing Claude?
And help connect the brand to the… the influence that’s taking place over there. And so, yeah, the third-party social affiliate strategy is now absolutely part of this game of AEO.

Randy Wootton:
Yeah, in fact, and we’re coming to the next world, you’re alluding to it in terms of agent-based buying. And so, not the human interfacing with the LLM, but agents interfacing with agents.
And I was talking to a colleague, Rebecca Thornton, who did a study on the state of B2B visibility, and interviewed 63 mid-market and enterprise organizations, and has a matrix to evaluate if there are They’re agent-ready, and none. We’re agent ready. none were agent-ready.
So, we’re just on that cusp, and I think to your point, you know, the different sources, a couple of categories. We talked about the own site pages. We’ve talked about, well, we didn’t, but documentation and help centers, because these provide the clearest machine-readable explanation of what a product actually does.
Third-party editorial and analyst sources, so this is the press, the trade publications, analyst write-ups, and to your point, community and review platforms like G2, Reddit, Forums, Customer, etc. And then, multimedia. And so I think what you were pointing to earlier.
the challenge is you gotta be everywhere, and now you can use agents to produce it, but we also have this challenge of AI slop, and no one’s reading it. So, how do you produce high-quality content, know where to put it? The challenge is exponentially more difficult than what it used to be.
And one of the things, Mark, that I think a lot of people struggle with is, well, how do I measure it? How do I know I’m making an impact? How do you guys have profound What are the new metrics of AEO versus SEO?

Mark Ebert:
Yeah. Yeah, everything you just said is, resonating very well. I couldn’t agree more. To your last question, how do you measure? There are… I think this is exciting. Marketing has new metrics.

Randy Wootton:
Yes!

Mark Ebert:
that now matter. Finally, we’re not, you know, we can move beyond. It’s not that, like, the concept of an MQL doesn’t exist anymore, of course it does. It’s not that web traffic doesn’t matter, of course it does, but citation share matters. Right? Visibility by topic, or category, or by region matters.
So if you’re a multinational brand, and you’re selling in Europe, and you’re selling in the US, and, whatever category it is that you’re in, You know, how visible are you in the conversations that are relevant to your category? We call that, what percentage of the time is your brand mentioned in that answer? That’s a visibility score.
But then you also have a new measure of what’s your, what’s your share of voice? what’s your competitive ranking in AI? And there’s lots of new metrics here that, when we sit down with a new customer. we help get a baseline first, right?
So, like, step one to the question in the chat is, like, first, you need to understand a baseline, and that’s, you know, one of the things that we do really well for our customers. Get a sense for, okay, let’s turn the light on in the pitch black room and understand what the heck is going on inside these answers.
We then have, you know, all this rich data flowing in. We know the sources that are influencing these answers positively, negatively. You can look at it through the lens of your competitors. We understand what’s driving competitive progress.
And then you… then our platform starts recommending and building Proactive templates for the highest impact processes you could deploy to fix.
So if you’ve got a real big issue on a certain category that you’re not answering with your own content, you know, when you log into the platform, it’ll start drafting some things for your team to evaluate, and your content team can pick that up, finish it, and get it out there.
But one thing that we talk about a lot when it comes to building that content, Randy, is it… the power is still in the marketer. We provide a tools… we definitely provide a toolset to do these things more efficiently and at scale.
But at the end of the day, everyone still has a marketing voice, a brand voice, a style, and we are… we don’t recommend, you know, that they blindly publish junk. Because… you know, it can’t hurt them. We’re in the early innings.
But what we do know is that there’s so much information that just isn’t produced by brands, because it wasn’t needed in SEO, that is needed now, that you can do quickly. You know, something as simple as. Have you defined in your own blog what is your category? So, do you have something on your website that has your take on what is AEO?
you should, you know, we know that everyone’s asking the question, what’s the difference between AEO and SEO? So we publish lots of information. What is it? And we know that the models love that information, and they want to consume it, and now Profound has risen, in our category, has risen to the number one citation source.
Because we’re helping answer the questions in the way in which, you know, they’re looking for it.

Randy Wootton:
Yeah, I love it. I wrote this article about brand versus demand, which has been the struggle in terms of how you make investments for years, and in an SEO world, most marketers I’ve talked to spend disproportionately on demand gen, though they know that brand influences demand gen over time.
Just a quick case study, Webflow, shows how quick readability improvements can influence AI visibility, and one example, they added a table of contents to the blog posts, and they increased their AI source traffic by 59% in 4 weeks, and SEO traffic by 23%.
They optimized their fact content plus schema to 6 product pages, and it drove 57% of new citations. So, I do think there is a… programmatic way to approach it.
To your point, kind of like the attribution debate that we’ve had, and attribution technology that’s been out there for years, is you kind of got to buy into a system and then optimize it, right? The good news is, 3 years ago, we didn’t know what the hell was going on.
It was just, oh my god, search traffic is going down, we’re not showing up in the answers, but it sounds like companies like yours, Profound, and others are building the data, the tech. the insights for marketers, for B2B marketers, to get in front of this next revolution.

Mark Ebert:
You got it, yeah. And Randy, I’ll plug, we have, we have a few different ways, you know, if people are looking to learn more, I would say, some of the best events coming up. April 8th, we’re gonna be hosting a giant ZeroClick conference. Actually, Webflow is participating.
We have speakers from OpenAI and some of, like, the biggest companies that are gonna be on stage. April 8th in San Francisco, the event is called Zero Click. Also, we have a Zero Click New York on June 11th. So we’ve got 2 big conferences coming up if people are interested in, like, coming in person to experience.
you know, what this is looking like on the bleeding edge. And then, of course, you know, on our website, if anyone wants any more information, we can help get brand audits, so if you’re wondering, like, you know, what do we… what does our brand look like, there’s lots of easy ways to engage, kind of pre-sale with our team. And of course, lastly.
welcome to reach out to me directly on LinkedIn, and I’m sure yourself as well, right, Randy?

Randy Wootton:
Yeah, no, so happy… this is one of the things that every single board… on a couple of boards, every single board meeting comes down to two topics. One is, what are you doing to optimize your own solution to be AI-powered, right? Especially legacy SaaS. And then number two is, how are you thinking about the new world of go-to-market?
And the session we saw before, in terms of using agents for sale, and now we’re for sales, and that process to manage the sales pipeline. And what you’re pointing us to, Mark, really is, how do you think about marketing, the new world of marketing?
It’s really exciting, and people can reach out to me on LinkedIn, and I’m writing articles about it, and got a white paper that I’ll publish today that captures a lot of what we talked about, and I look forward to continuing the conversation, Mark, as you, as you drive forward with Profound.

Mark Ebert:
Well, thank you so much. Randy, it was a fun conversation. Appreciate you.

Julia Nimchinski:
What an incredible session. Thank you so much. Thank you, Randy and Mark. And, we have the questions keep coming. We’ll be sending it to you after the summit, so…

Randy Wootton:
Happy to follow up.