From SEO to Agent-Led Growth: Profound’s James Cadwallader

We've now reached a point in marketing where if your marketing team is not using agents, and in particular, profound agents to do marketing, then you are failing. It's gone from a nice to have to a must have. And I think the big misconception with using agents to build marketing is that it's just a way to automate the work that we've been doing in the past. And the reality is quite different. It's that you can now because of agents and because of LLMs, you can do a type of marketing that just frankly was not possible before. Hi and welcome to training data. Excited to welcome you, James, co-founder and CEO of Profound. So Profound is a marketing platform for the AI era. You help companies understand how they show up in AI search for agents like chat, GPT and cloud, what to do to improve their rankings and disabilities. And also you help give a single marketer the power of an agency. And I think it's especially timely to have you on the podcast today, given that chat GPT is rolling out ads, given that every marketer is now trying to figure out, you know, how do I rank in the in the generative search engine rankings? And everyone's trying to figure out this brave new world of agent led growth. So I'm very excited for the conversation. Let's start with, so you serve 10% of the Fortune 500. You have a great sense of your customer and what the average marketer is facing today. Maybe take us through through their journey. What did marketing look like in the old days before chat GPT and what are marketers having to respond to now? Yeah. Well, thanks for having me on Sony. I mean, I think, you know, what we're, what we're witnessing is the biggest platform shift in the history of marketing as the world turns from blue link search, like predetermined blue link search to probabilistic AI responses. And it's more than that as well. It's not just kind of a case of do you show up when someone asks chat GPT about your category. It's, you know, what does chat GPT say or how does Claude, you know, recommend your software, for example, if you're talking about coding tools, it's, it's, it's these models are really replacing, you know, it's the agents and super intelligence is replacing the role of the consumer. It's not so much that the front door of the internet has changed. It's actually the person that's going through the door has changed. It's gone from being a consumer that is using a list of blue links to discover your website and click into it to an agent is now using, you know, a similar index and discovering your brand products and services and then coming back through the door and, you know, maintaining that relationship with the consumer. That's so fascinating. Okay. So your point is, you know, chat GPT may be the new front door, but the thing that's important for marketers is, you know, you don't have an agent walking through that door and making a big part of that buying decision for you. Yeah. It's this, I think that's the, that's the fundamental difference. It's that the internet has remained the same. It's just who is using the internet when you ask chat GPT a question or Gemini a question, what you're essentially doing is asking an agent to go and crawl the internet on your behalf. And that is an agent that's going to visit all of those websites that you used to visit. And it's an agent that's going to determine if that's useful or this is useful and remix all of that information into an answer that it spits out to you as, you know, here you go. Yeah. What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about what it takes to to show up well for this new agentic paradigm? I think the biggest misconception is that it's just SEO. You know, there's a reason why that misconception exists because, yeah, of course, you still, you know, in any world of marketing and discovery, there is an impetus on a brand or, you know, the, you said we work with this, it's close to 12% of the Fortune 500 now their marketing teams use profound. And in any world, the solution to a problem is to create content, distribute content on your own, own channels or, you know, earned media or social channels, etc. So they're very similar levers to what we've seen with SEO. And yes, ranking on the index still matters. It's just that the human consumer is no longer using the web. And you are building content that may quite literally never be consumed by a human. And I think the fundamental difference between SEO and this new world is that in SEO, you were building content that was designed to be, you know, picked up by an algorithm, but fundamentally consumed by a human. Whereas in this new world, you are building content that is frankly designed entirely to be both discovered and then consumed by an agent. And what does that mean? So I would imagine humans are less patient than agents. Imagine humans are more prone to emotional biases and being swayed my language than agents. Like what are the biggest differences between how humans and how agents consume the internet that Marker there should keep in mind? It's understanding that an agent crawling the web, looking for an answer or providing an answer, frankly, will discover information differently to a human. And so it uses the index differently to us. In the old world of SEO, you know, 95% of the value as being in that top four blue lengths, the top five blue links. And that really is a function of our scarce cognitive energy and patience and our lack of time where an agent is using that index is what we've seen is chat GPT or Gemini or Claude a far more prone to using the long tail of the internet. And the amount of surface area that an agent will use to answer a question is all does have magnitude wider than a human. Like for instance, probably about three or four months ago, I was looking for a showerhead for my apartment in New York City and I used chat GPT to help me find a new showerhead and it used 65 different web pages to answer that question. Wow. I think I probably went through 65 web pages on my own for that query. It's a very important purchase. And it's the, you know, marketers need to understand that you are building marketing for a super intelligent agent with infinite bandwidth with, you know, as the cost of inference goes down as well. We experienced more law. Mozilla continues. We're going to see agents only use more and more of the internet to build rich answers. Yeah. Totally. Fascinating. Are there certain categories you mentioned you serve 12 for some of the 4 to 500? Are there certain categories where people are seeing more success in terms of these agent search results, actually driving meaningful traffic to them and then certain categories where it's really more still traditional SEO world. Um, I mean, this is across the board now. So, you know, I think when we began, we saw more demand from software companies. And I'd say today we, yeah, we work with every single category, every single sector. You can imagine finance, consumer, CPG, um, software and that's B2B as well. That B2B direct consumer. Um, and is the impact relatively consistent across the board? Are there other certain categories or subcategories that are, you know, much more influenced by agent search? I think consumer consideration is an important vector here. So if you have a higher consideration or a high ticket purchase, you know, think consumer electronics or, you know, auto cars, white, white goods, anything that would typically require a fair amount of research. I think we see AI being used more and more by end consumers because it's frankly just better at doing all that deep research. And AI is so brilliant for researching product. I mean, have you ever used AI to research for a find a product all the time using it right now to buy a car? Cool. I'm not going to out myself for this specific car, but it's been very helpful. Uh, um, across the board, do you see that the different, you know, chat, activity versus cloud versus, you know, rock and Gemini? Do you see them recommending things differently and, and, and if, if so, what's the root cost? Yeah, I mean, we see huge differences between the platforms. Okay. Um, and frankly, you know, there's a shameless plug that's why marketers are using, uh, software like profound because what we're able to do is help you understand not just how your brand or product shows up across different platforms. So, you know, okay, do you show up more frequently in Gemini responses or cloud responses or chat GPT responses? Also, we extract the sentiment and the themes around, you know, so when cloud surfaces, your brand or product, what are the other things that it says alongside the answer? Yeah. But then we also get to the root cause. So we show, we expose to marketers. Okay, these are the citations and sources that the different models are using to answer questions about your brand, your products, your category or your competitors. Yeah. So once you understand the what and the why, then in profound, what you're, the next step is your building and deploying your own agents to sort through all of that data. and build a new type of marketing. >> It's the primary root cause that they have different harnesses, the primary root cause that they have different training data mix, primary root cause some of them bias for, let's say Reddit data over company-owned platforms. What's the root cause for why these platforms are so different in terms of how companies show up? >> Think of them, this sounds very reductive, but think of them as just different species. What we've seen is Gemini will lean on YouTube content at time, which makes sense because Google owns YouTube. So that we see YouTube being huge lever for brands or marketers that want to appear in Gemini responses. Whereas Chatch Bt, we see typically pools from Reddit if it's consumer, or if it's B2B, it will typically pull from LinkedIn. We see as a huge source of truth. >> Clude has been changing a lot recently. I think what- >> And why is that? I noticed this. It seems like between 4.5 and 4.6 even like what it's recommending has changed a lot. What do you think that is? >> I think clude has typically, or clude has historically relied more on the pre-trained LLM to answer questions. And is now, I think they've updated their classifiers or something that's, basically the classifier seems to have become a bit more sensitive to, real-time information. So clude will use the web more to answer questions is what we're finding. >> Okay. >> But I think the next paradigm here, we're so, we're such, humans are such creatures of heuristic, that when we think about this new world, we really want to pattern match it to the old world of search and SEO, which was just information retrieval. Whether it was ranking, it was, do you show up? Versus now the new era, I think you coined this nicely with ALG, Agent Leggrove, it's that, clude doesn't just represent a new channel of discovery, clude represents a user. So, if I'm vibe coding with clude or clude code, does it recommend MongoDB or Versel? What is the weapon of choice that the clude goes to and why? Where does it get that information from? And then if I say, if we choose to go with MongoDB, how does clude navigate that interoperability? >> Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to chat about what this means in terms of content and content marketing. You told me earlier that agents will consume 100x more internet, which I thought was a really fascinating way to put it, which means that marketers will need to create 100x more content. Is the solution just like everyone's spamming marketing slopp to cover all the long tail queries so that when I ask for what's the right shower head for like, I need this specific specification and I am this exact demographic, but there's a landing page to kind of cover for that use case. And we're just going to be covered by content marketing slopp for lack of other word. >> I mean, I think there was a recent study that said is estimated about 50% of the web is now utilizing AI written content. >> Yeah. >> The New York Times recently published an experiment where they created two articles, one written by a human, like a journalist, and the second written by AI. And it was like 53% of readers voted afterwards, black on a blind test, that they preferred the AI written content. >> Wow. >> I think Slopp is a red herring that is going to be quite quickly disproven. You can, you know, it's a really, I'm not saying you're suggesting this, but I do think that this idea of if it's written by AI equals Slopp is a stupid one. >> Yeah. >> I think AI is more than capable of writing high quality content, high quality marketing. It's just that the way to think about it is that the consumer is super intelligent now. So you as a brand or a marketer, you need to tell Claude something it doesn't know. How do you tell a super intelligent being something it doesn't know already when it's been trained on the entire internet? >> How do you? What do you say? >> I think you have to have original insight. You know, really, humans are this kind of a fleshy API between reality and the internet at this point, right? >> Man, I'm just a fleshy API, okay. >> So what is first principle marketing? It's thinking from first principles, okay, if I'm marketing the new Nike alpha fly, like what can I tell Claude about this new product that it wouldn't be able to get from the internet already because it has access to the internet. It has access to everything. It's been pre-trained on everything that exists. And that's more mysterious if you're talking about an existing product. If we're launching a new product, of course, Claude doesn't know anything about that product. >> Yeah, okay. >> If we're launching the alpha fly too, is your imperative as a marketer not to poison the models or manipulate what ChatGPT says about that new product? But as a marketer, is your responsibility now to equip super intelligence to be able to answer any question about your product, brand or service? >> Okay, so it's fundamentally a question of legibility. >> Yeah, I'd say to an extent. How do you make your company and your products legible to an agent? >> I think that's correct. And if you're building software, it goes way beyond legibility, it's usability, interoperability. >> Yeah. >> How does Claude troubleshoot that issue? >> Yeah, very interesting. Do you think that people are trying to game the system and is trying to game the system effective? >> I mean, yes, of course. Yeah, people, you see, there's this huge wave around comparative listicles, for example. I mean, frankly, dare I say this, and I'm going to make a disclaimer here and say that I wouldn't advise people do this, but frankly, we still see it working very effectively. But I'm sure this will change over time and get punished by the models or the- >> I'm sorry, what exactly works very effectively? >> Sorry, yeah. Comparative listicles. So, meaning that if I were Sequoia, I would create 10 best VCs into the convadi, and play Sequoia at the top, and maybe pick some of your less formidable foes and rank them as second, third, fourth, fifth, and basically shun out your real competitors. Self-serving content designed to give impartial advice. And what we found is because of the way that these models reason, they're very attracted to pieces of content that have already done the hard work, because they don't want to use the first principle thinking of. Okay, let me go and check out everything about Sequoia and then everything about Client of Perkins and actually compare the two. I'd much rather find a piece of content that exists and seems impartial and has compared the two against each other. >> I guess the models aren't infinitely patient then, are a little bit lazy too. >> Yeah, I think it's half of the least resistance maybe. But I do think over time, going back to my 65 websites for a showerhead, I think over time we can expect that to change and we'll see a lot more kind of like first principle reasoning coming from the models. And I think that right now it can be prompted as well. So when it's funny, when I use models to discover, if I use chat GPT or Clod to discover a product or to research a product or service, I'll quite often say ignore any list of articles or I'll say ignore any content published by the brand itself. >> Yeah, interesting. I'd love to chat about dead internet theory. At what point do you think the internet is just primarily being browsed by agents? And at that point, does a company's marketing website matter at all? Does a company's ranking in the traditional search engines matter at all? Or should we all just have a readme file for the agents to crawl? >> I mean, at the risk of sounding a little dramatic, I think that we could experience a dead internet outcome in the next three years. I do think it's possible. I'm maybe not likely. But what does that mean? It means that in a world where humans just speak to AI to get the responses that they need, be incentive to publish content diminishes to the point of zero. Meaning, we rely as humans today and AI, frankly. Humans and AI rely, we underestimate just how much we rely on first party reporting to feed the information that AI uses to answer questions or to feed the information that appears in a search engine that we rely on every day. And I think in a world where humans no longer click into websites, the majority of the internet is still funded by advertising for a start. So most publishers rely heavily on advertising revenue to fuel all of the content that is being more and more consumed by AI. In a world where consumers, humans aren't visiting those web pages anymore. Well, what's the point in advertising on a web page that a human isn't visiting? Sometimes then their business model breaks, the economics of the internet break and the incentives to create editorial content are removed. And then in that world, you start to ask the question, well, where does AI go to answer these questions. To the readme files. But then who, why would you publish a readme file? Because the agent needs to go somewhere to answer a question, right? It works if you're a brand or a marketer, but why would you, you know, would you publish a blog? What's the point? I'm publishing hi. I'm Sonya the VC and these are the companies that have worked with and and like as a, you know, founders trying to reason through which venture capital I work with, I get finds my readme file. I think that's correct for, you know, commercially driven content. But you know, a lot of the internet is just people yapping and sharing ideas. Yeah, sure enough. And that's what we rely on and the reason why this has worked so well in the past is because humans are very incentivized by money and status. You know, if I publish a really good blog post and put advertising on it, I can earn money from that blog or I'm recognized and I become famous. Yeah. But in a world where AI just goes into that piece of content, that cumes all the good stuff out of it and then remixes it and maybe I get a little citation at the bottom of the article, but who cares? No one's clicking those citations. The incentive to create that rich, original content, you know, that the Fleshy API that we're talking about, it diminishes to zero. Yeah. Huh. What do you think is the likelihood of the scenario? I mean, I thought about it quite a lot and I think it's quite possible. Yeah. I mean, I think that the place is, you know, if you ask kind of, okay, what are the second order outcomes? Like what happens after that? I think a theory I have is that every AI lab will eventually vertically integrate with a social media network. So I think, you know, social media will become more and more human. I think, you know, already, I mean, meta is actually probably leading the way here. It's like, it's very hard to build a bot and post on Instagram. Yeah. Right now. It's very human. So I think social media networks become more human over time. Yeah. And that's the place where we can exchange ideas for status or money. You know, you see X is doing lots of, you know, YouTube X, the economics are starting to shake out where you can get financially rewarded for creating good content. And so social media will become the platform where we share ideas. And if you vertically integrate that with an AI, like, you know, what we've seen with GROC and X, GROC very skillfully uses all of the rich content and data from X to answer questions. Yeah. I'm quite a thoughtful way. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. So you're saying that, you know, the internet as we know it has kind of been this like economic slash social status game machine that just works. If more and more of the content is just consumed by agents, it kind of breaks on those fundamental assumptions. And so therefore, both the economic engine and the social status game will kind of move into these like biozones and social media networks. Yeah. And we're seeing that with Reddit now is that Reddit is in Reddit is truly embracing its humanity. And saying, okay, we, this is a precious place. And it is precious. I think it's really important. I think we take the internet for granted. It's a wonderful thing. Yeah. And yeah, I think we need these human environments so that we can share ideas. Yeah. Original ideas. Yeah, that will be, it will be these places where AI, you know, understands reality. That's how AI taps into what's actually going on in the world. Can you imagine that these platforms just ban, you know, agents from scraping their platforms and then the business model then becomes, you know, a revenue share from the original creator of the contents to hey, chat, GPD, if you know what this great business costs you a lot of money. And so doesn't that kind of solve the economics challenge? Yeah, I mean, X has obviously just opened up their API, right? Yeah. And Reddit has got a big deal with OpenAI, for example. Yeah, so they're all of that. Yeah, that could work. And I think that speaks to my idea of this, well, like, virtual integration. I mean, I know nothing. So I'm saying this purely on vibes, but I've always had this theory that maybe OpenAI would acquire Reddit, for example. I think that'd be interesting. Yeah. And you need this source of human data in real time. The alternative is robots, I suppose. You know, because if they're, you know, if you said we end up with 50 billion robots walking around, you know, maybe they're bipedal, maybe they're drones or something, but it allows AI to capture first party data. Yeah. And it undermines that idea of humans being a fleshy API. Yeah. Because the AI can directly understand the world. Very interesting. I'd love to talk about advertising since we've been talking about ads in the context of the internet. Now that ads are coming to some of these, um, generative AI agents, how do you think that changes the consumer relationship to the engines? I think people will get over very quickly as we did with Google. Yeah. Yeah. I think advertising or generative advertising, I should say, in a conversation interface with higher levels of personalization, yeah, will be the most effective form of advertising, the world has ever seen. There's so much rich consumer intent captured inside of these conversations. Yeah. That and also in addition to that point, AI is so good at synthesizing and personalizing language to the needs of Sonja in that exact moment, because it understands you so deeply that I think, you know, once chat GPT is able to append a super personalized ad in the exact moment in a conversation where you would be the most responsive to it, it will be extremely effective. And they've got a great team working on ads. What do you think the ad unit of the future looks like? I think, I mean, OpenAI I have alluded to this. This isn't original thought from me. But yeah, I think you'll just prompt AI. So you'll be able to system prompt as an ad campaign. So you will just say, hey, I really want to target, you know, women and Minnesota between the edges of 35 and 40 and like, yeah, if you could make sure you meant whenever they're talking about photography, I want you to mention this, this, this, this. But don't mention this and make sure you really, you know, you utilize this knowledge base of understanding so you know how to talk about our brand products and services, but obviously tailor it to their tone of voice. And that's probably how you'll deliver an ad campaign. You'll say I want to make this much money, ideally. Do you think it's less relevant in the B2B context? The nuance with B2B or just coding agents, people using AI to build things. So this is particularly relevant, you know, DevTools or software, for example, is that the agent is really steering the purchase decision. And when it comes to advertising, we rely, you know, we, we, we really want our agents to be objective and unswable. You know, if you were using Claude and it was like, hey, I actually went with insert name of database because they showed me a really good ad. You're like dude, dude, no, use whatever's best. Yeah. We, we as humans are not objective creatures, but we like to think we are. So you have been swayed by the incredible branding of Versailles. You have been swayed by that podcast you watched with the founder of MongoDB. You just don't know it. And because of that, we like, we, you know, we, we demand that our agents are objective too. But it will, the, yeah, the relationship we have with advertising as it pertains to agents shopping on our behalf is going to be quite different. Fast naming. Okay. Parting wisdom for, for marketers that are trying to figure out how to make sure that they're well positions for this new era. Perhaps with bosses sending them screenshots every day of like, hey, I put in this query. Why are you not number one on the list? What wisdom would you impart on them? Use profound. Oh, serious. Okay. Use profound aside. Like what, what should they be, like, what should they be doing? I know they're no silver bullets, but what are the most important things to remember to equip themselves for this new world? I mean, look, like actually real at no shilling. Genuinely, you need to use a platform like profound to understand how you show up. Because otherwise you're just guessing, you know, you could, they're these, they're, they're these like reductionism around, oh, yeah, LinkedIn already matters. But if you are just going on vibes, you will fail. Yep. Each category is quite specific. And you need to look at the sources and understand the sources and citations to determine how and why AI is mentioning you in its responses. But then the second part is that we've now reached a point in marketing where if your marketing team is not using agents and in particular profound agents to do marketing, to build content, to build marketing, distribute marketing, then you are failing as a marketer. I think this is, it's gone from a nice to have to a must happen. I think the big misconception with using agents to build marketing is that it's just a way to automate the work that we've been doing in the past. Yep. It's that you can now, because of agents and because of LLMs, you can do a type of marketing that just frankly was not possible before. So you could build an agent that, you know, for instance, we have an agent that we've built in house, a marketing agent that plums in all of our gong transcripts from our sales course and then captures all the details. of the objections, buckets the objections into themes, and then builds battle cards that we then that utilizing a knowledge base of our product there then spits back to the sales team. Nice. In real time. And you know, 18 months ago that would not have been possible. I would have taken a human, you would have done it like once a quarter. Yeah. Now it runs every day in real time. Yeah. Okay. So the advice is you need visibility because you can't optimize what you can't see. And to like fully embrace agentic marketing if you're if you're not using it, you're just you're incredibly behind. Yeah. I think it would be like not using the internet or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think it'd be like, Hey, we're going to stick to print and TV. Yeah. Thanks. I don't believe in this internet thing. Awesome. James, thank you for this conversation. I really loved kind of peeling back me on the end on how exactly agent led growth works. And you've been at the forefront of so much of it. So thank you for joining today and sharing your hot takes and advice with with our audience. Yeah. Thanks for having me. [Music]