Introducing: AX (Agent Experience) Featuring James Cadwallader

Garrett: All right, welcome back to The Next Chapter of Search produced by SEO Week and iPullRank. If you haven’t already gotten your tickets, we’re going to be in New York City the end of April, the 28th to May 1st, four days of just nonstop SEO data, AI content, LLMs, you name it. And we’ve got experts across all the industries that are going to be cranking out really action-packed insights. And I am so excited to be joined by a really awesome dude who’s put together a kind of game changing piece of software. I’m joined today by James Cadwallader, who is the co-founder at Profound – Profound helps you monitor your brand visibility across Co-pilot, Gemini, AI overviews, and of course, ChatGPT and Perplexity. Thanks for joining me today, James. How you doing, man?

James: Hey, Garrett. Nice to be here.

Garrett: I, this is so your wheelhouse because you’ve been eating and breathing this market of brands who want to pay attention to their visibility on these platforms, as well as Google as a search engine and AI overviews. Can you share what’s your perspective on the current state of search?

James: I mean, from our perspective, yeah, so I’m James, yeah. Co-founder, CEO here at Profound. We’re a New York City-based startup. And yeah, our view of the world is that this is one of the biggest platform shifts in the history of marketing, period. I think today, AI visibility, AI optimization, answer engine optimization, the non-cliché is not sticking, but this, this new thing, it kind of sits on the shoulders of the world of traditional search and SEO. But what we’re expecting looking forward is that it’s, we’re going to see a ton of change. And a lot less, you know, over the years and, you know, traditional search, you’ve seen like lots of incremental, lots of change, but in quite incremental fashion.

But in this new world, we’re expecting these giant leaps, you know, agentic browsing, you know, we have like, already we’re starting to see things like a perplexity launching Comment, their own browser, we’re seeing Operator from OpenAI. We’re expecting the answer engines to, you know, start really implementing their own indexes, in a meaningful way. New, you know, new introductions of things like voice, I think will have a huge difference, personalization and memory. That there’s, I think people are underestimating. I think today this is, you know, the world of answer engine optimization and SEO kind of sit hand in hand, or one on top of it, you know, the, the last are being built on top of the former, but I think we’re expecting a huge fork there. And what I, I personally believe that every brand on the planet will have an AI Visibility Department.

Garrett: Which is a perfect segue into your talk, because you’re talking all about like the agent experience optimization and, and what brands should be doing right now. Can you give a preview about what you’ll be talking about and why, why it’s like going to matter to marketers and SEOs?

James: Sure. So I think the, you know, again, to sort of go wide aperture or a bit more abstract to start off with it, in the old world, if it were, you had the brand and the consumer and yeah, there were Google sat in between that relationship and Google would introduce the consumer to your brand, you know, via some sort of a top of funnel search. And then you as a brand were pushing that consumer down the funnel into conversion, essentially. Obviously, that’s a simplified take, but nonetheless, there were essentially two parties with Google playing a connector.

In this new world, there’s three parties and we have the brand, the consumer, but sitting in between those two parties really is ChatGPT or the answer engine for all intents and purposes. And the answer engine is controlling that relationship with the consumer, more similar almost to what we’ve seen in influencer marketing, for example. So, your job now as a brand is to feed the answer engine with all the information that it needs to, so when it’s having conversations with that end consumer about your industry, your business, your competitors, that it can thoughtfully respond on your behalf, essentially.

So that kind of introduces this topic of AX, which is, yeah, essentially, you know, we’re all very familiar with the idea of user experience. How does a user come in and navigate your content, your website? And in this new world, it really comes down to how do agents interact with your content? And we’re seeing some very interesting new developments or some very interesting new paradigms where, you know, ChatGPT isn’t caching right now, as an example. So, our platform, Profound, we’ve built arguably the category leader in AI visibility software right now. We’re used by a large chunk of Fortune 500 brands, enterprise brands, mid-market brands are relying on Profound for their AI visibility. And we have CDN level integrations, so we’re seeing how retrieval crawlers are visiting websites. So OpenAI’s crawlers are coming to websites in real time to gather information when answering questions about that brand or even open-ended questions about that industry.

Garrett: And it’s so important because, you know, there’s a lot of conversations between like publishers and brands of like making their content available or like cutting off their nose despite their face. What is like one specific takeaway or one specific recommendation that you can make right now for brands that want to make sure that they are visible as these crawlers are, you know, gobbling up every information, every piece of content they can?

James: I’m going to give you two. First is going to just sound extremely self-serving, but I really mean it. You know, it’s my most honest answer is you need to track what’s going on. If you aren’t paying attention to your AI visibility, like…most brands who we speak to when we first speak to them still have no idea what their AI visibility is. You know, if I search for running sneaker, does your brand show up in the response? Yes or no? Or if so, like what’s the, you know, these models are probabilistic. So what’s the percentage? If I ask it a thousand times, how many do you show? How many, what percentage of answers does your brand appear in? And then, you know, that’s the most rudimentary.

Beyond that, you’re looking at, okay, well, which citation, you know, why, which citations are being used that are making your, ensuring your brand shows up. Or even more granular, we can say when you show up and your brand, you know, your dot com is being used as a source or a citation, which pages specifically from your.com are getting pulled into answer engines? And if you publish new pages, are they getting pulled into these answer engine responses? And we can start to, you know, our software profound allows you to understand that. So yeah, I think the first step is just to know what’s going on. I think being blind right now is probably the biggest, is the biggest sin here, just like paying no attention to what’s going on is the biggest sin.

But maybe more in the spirit of your question, Garrett, so, you know, asking for more pragmatic tips, you’re on just tracking and understanding what’s going on. We’re seeing that brands dot coms are like your on-page dot com content is being very effective and can be utilized in a very powerful way in answer engine responses. So yeah, a big group of our customers are doing something very – we’re about to release a case study with one of our big customers in the coming weeks, and they published a bunch of dot com content that was optimized for retrieval agents. And how was it optimized? You know, the content was more self-serving. It was better schema’d. It was that we ensured that the URL slugs were perfectly worked out for retrieval engines to pull in. I mean, that’s just a tip of the iceberg, but by creating that content, they increase their share of citations, so they were becoming more cited as a source of information. And because the content was perfectly structured, they increased their visibility as well. And we’ve seen that visibility in AI answers go up, the answer engine saying their name more in the responses, which is pretty cool.

Garrett: Oh my goodness, there’s so much to unpack there. And that’s why people have to come and hear your presentation, because it’s like you said, you know, you have to change your perspective on the probabilistic results and how it becomes that much harder in a lot of ways for SEOs. Like we’re so used to, I mean, you go from advertising, which is like precision performance marketing, and then we’re talking more general accuracy. And then thinking about the technicalities, there’s a lot of debate and misinformation out there in terms of what the crawlers are picking up in terms of JavaScript and structured data. And I think there’s a lot of clarification that your team is putting out and seeing people on the ground trying and experimenting and figuring out what’s working. It’s so interesting.

Now, going forward, you kind of touched on it, but like The Next Chapter of Search, which is the theme of the conference, do you believe that Google has a moat? Or are you really bullish on all these other competitors ultimately stealing market share and changing the way that people search for things?

James: I think 2024 was kind of, it was the year of the foundation model. And while everyone was battling over the incremental benefits of these different foundational LLMs, what actually happened in secret, or I should say, right in front of, under our noses was ChatGPT became the de facto consumer product. My mum uses ChatGPT, which is obviously very anecdotal, but they’re really starting to make headway in the consumer race. Who has captured the consumer’s attention? Because the consumer doesn’t really care about token windows and the number of parameters used in the model. The consumer just wants a good product and it’s become like a product game. And ChatGPT is now used by 5% of the world’s population on a weekly basis. Sundar, CEO of Google, has mandated 500 million weekly actives by the end of this year. So there’s this huge consumer race that’s taking place right now.

And yeah, I think our prediction is that it will be more fragmented than traditional search. Whether that will change over time, we’ll see more consolidation maybe to a monopolistic environment by what we’ve seen in traditional search with Google, who knows. But no, I think this is OpenAI or this is ChatGPT’s game to lose. And then there’s kind of outliers as well. Grok from XAI is very interesting. They have an unfair advantage with the data funnel because of the tweets that they can use. Obviously, there’s things like DeepSeek or even Copilot. I wouldn’t write Microsoft Copilot off here. There’s lots of movement going on.

I think what we are expecting this year, and we’ve seen it with Perplexity, early glimpses of it with Perplexity, with Perplexity Pro Shopping, but we’re expecting shopability to fold into ChatGPT at some point. There’s a huge iceberg of unattributed traffic right now. Even myself, I’m a power user of these answer engines. If I research a brand or a product on ChatGPT, nine times out of ten, I’ll head back over to Google to complete the purchase or Amazon to complete over there without actually clicking anything. So there’s no way to attribute – or it’s very difficult to attribute that. We’re starting to build those attribution bridges as well, which is very interesting. So, we’re seeing some of our customers are getting thousands of attributed web visits that we can attribute back to answer engines through network log fingerprinting, which is pretty cool.

Garrett: It’s such a fun thing to talk about because nobody really does know. But to your point, it’s like there are so many players you mentioned like Amazon. At what point do they get involved in the game? Facebook and Meta. And obviously, you mentioned Perplexity, and there’s a big piece of the pie from a monetization the transactional commercial aspect of things kind of folding in. Dude, I can’t wait to talk to you more at this conference. You’re going to get a chance to talk to all the other folks here.

So, if you want a chance to come and talk to James, find out more about Profound, what opportunities it has for your brand, and obviously see all of our great speakers at SEO Week, I hope you come to New York City at the end of April. Get your tickets now. Thank you so much for joining me, James. This has been an awesome conversation.

James: Thanks, Garrett. I’m looking forward to SEO Week.

Garrett: Okay, see you soon.