Profound launches daily benchmark for AI search visibility

Profound used its Zero Click New York conference to unveil the Profound Index, a daily benchmark the company says shows which brands are winning AI Search and why. Launched on June 29 in New York, the index is built on more than 1.5 billion real-user prompts across 50-plus industries and major AI platforms, a data set Profound says is large enough to track how answer engines surface brands in practice.

James Cadwallader, Profound’s co-founder and chief executive, said the old question of where a brand ranks on Google is becoming the wrong question. His pitch is straightforward: consumers are increasingly asking ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude for recommendations, advice and answers, so a blue-link ranking no longer captures the competitive picture. The index is meant to show which brands surface inside AI-generated answers, how competitors compare and which signals drive visibility, with daily updates replacing static reports that can go stale quickly.

That daily cadence is the sharpest claim in the launch, and also the one marketers will scrutinize hardest. A benchmark that refreshes every day is more useful than a quarterly snapshot if AI answers are volatile, but it only works if the underlying prompt mix, platform coverage and category breakdowns are broad enough to reflect real buyer behavior. Profound is betting that brands want a moving measure of recommendation share, not just another dashboard with a fresh coat of AI paint.

The launch lands as outside data points in the same direction. Pew Research Center said on June 17 that more Americans are using chatbots and that some are adopting AI summaries and smart speakers. In April, Nielsen and Gracenote said AI-powered search and recommendations are already changing entertainment discovery. The problem for marketers is that AI visibility tools are multiplying faster than trust, and the category still lacks a single benchmark that the industry accepts as standard.

Profound has been building toward that argument for more than a year. It announced a $20 million Series A in June 2025, then a $35 million Series B in August 2025 led by Sequoia, bringing total funding at that point to $58.5 million. By February 2026, the company said it had raised $96 million at a $1 billion valuation and was serving more than 700 enterprise customers, including about 10 percent of the Fortune 500. The new index is the clearest sign yet that Profound wants to own not just AI search software, but the measurement layer brands will use to justify spend, compare categories and track whether they are actually being recommended.