From SEO to Agent-Led Growth: Profound's James Cadwallader
In a Nutshell
Marketing has shifted from SEO for human blue links to **agent-led growth (ALG)**, where AI agents like ChatGPT and Claude crawl the long tail of the internet, consume 100x more content, and make purchasing decisions—requiring marketers to create **original insights**, ensure **legibility** and interoperability for agents, and avoid manipulative tactics like listicles that models increasingly ignore. **Profound** analyzes how brands appear across AI platforms (via citations, sentiment, sources like Reddit/LinkedIn for ChatGPT, YouTube for Gemini), empowers agentic marketing (e.g., real-time sales battle cards from Gong transcripts), and predicts challenges like a "dead internet" without human clicks or incentives for first-party data. Future ads will be hyper-personalized generative campaigns in conversational AI, but agents demand objectivity in B2B/dev tools; marketers must use tools like Profound for visibility or fall behind like those ignoring the internet.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
Marketing teams not using agents, particularly Profound agents, for marketing are failing. Agents have gone from nice-to-have to must-have. Misconception: agents just automate past work. Reality: agents and LLMs enable entirely new types of marketing previously impossible.
Profound is a marketing platform for the AI era. Helps companies understand how they appear in AI search for agents like ChatGPT and Claude, improve rankings and visibility. Empowers a single marketer with agency-level power. Timely amid ChatGPT rolling out ads and marketers navigating generative search and agent-led growth.
Biggest platform shift in marketing history: from predetermined blue link search to probabilistic AI responses. Beyond showing up in ChatGPT queries about categories; models recommend software (e.g., coding tools). Agents and super intelligence replace consumer role. Internet's front door unchanged, but user has: from humans clicking blue links to agents crawling index, discovering brands/products/services, then maintaining consumer relationships.
ChatGPT as new front door, but agent walks through making buying decisions.
Internet unchanged; users have. Asking ChatGPT or Gemini delegates agent to crawl internet, visit sites humans would, determine usefulness, remix into answers.
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