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

0:00We'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. is 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.

0:47Hi, 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 ChatGPT and Claude, what to do to improve their rankings and visibilities, 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 ChatGPT is rolling out ads, given that every marketer is now trying to figure out, you know, how how do I rank in the generative search engine rankings? And everyone's trying to figure out this brave new world of agent-led growth.

1:24So 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 their journey. What did marketing look like in the old days, before ChatGPT, and what are marketers having to respond to now? Yeah, well, thanks for having me on, Sonia. I mean, I think, you know, 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.

2:09It's not just kind of a case of do you show up when someone asks ChatGPT about your category? It's, you know, what does ChatGPT say or how does Claude, you know, recommend your software, for example, if you're talking about coding tools. It's these models are really replacing, you know, 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 a similar index and discovering your brand, products and services and then coming back through the door and maintaining that relationship with the consumer.

3:02That's so fascinating. Okay, so your point is, you know, ChatGPT may be the new front door, but the thing that's important for marketers is, you know, you now 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 fundamental difference. It's that the internet has remained the same. It's just who is using the internet. When you ask ChatGPT 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 it's an agent that's going to visit all of those websites that you used to visit.

3:36And 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 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, you said we work with is close to 12 % of the Fortune 500 now.

4:19Their marketing teams use Profound. and in any world the solution to a problem is to create content distribute content on your 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.

5:16And what does that mean? So I would imagine humans are less patient than agents. I imagine humans are more prone to emotional biases and being swayed by language than agents. Like what are the biggest differences between how humans and how agents consume the internet that marketers should keep in mind? It's understanding that an agent crawling the web looking for an answer or providing an answer frankly um 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 percent of the value is being in that top four blue links yeah 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 it's what we've seen is chat gpt or gemini or claud are 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 orders of magnitude wider than a human like for instance probably about three or four months ago um i was looking for a showerhead for my apartment in new york city and i use chat gpt to help me find a new showerhead and it used 65 different web pages to answer that question.

6:43Wow. I think I probably went through 65 web pages on my own for that query. It's a very important purchase. But I think it's, 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 and we've experienced Moore's Law, Moore's Law 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 served 12 for some of the Fortune 500, are there certain categories where people are seeing more success in terms of these agentic search results actually driving meaningful traffic to them and in certain categories where it's really more still traditional SEO world?

7:36I 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 could imagine finance, consumer, CPG, software, and that's B2B as well, that B2B direct to consumer. And is the impact relatively consistent across the board or are there certain categories or subcategories that are much more influenced by agentic search? I think consumer consideration is an important vector here. So if you have a high consideration or a high ticket purchase, you know, think consumer electronics or auto cars, white goods, anything that would typically require a fair amount of research.

8:26I think we see AI being used more and more by end consumers because it's frankly just better at doing all that deep research. AI is so brilliant for researching. 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. Across the board, do you see that the different, you know, ChatGPT versus Claude versus, you know, Grok and Gemini? do you see them recommending things differently and and and if so what what's the root cause yeah i mean we see huge differences between the platforms okay um and frankly you know as 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 claude responses or chat gpt responses but also we extract the sentiment and the themes around you know so when Claude 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 the next step is, you're building and deploying your own agents to sort through all of that data and build a new type of marketing.

10:02And is the primary root cause that they have different harnesses? Is the primary root cause that they have different training data mixed? 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 and you know different species if the you know what we've seen is gemini will lean on youtube content a ton which makes sense because google owns youtube so that we see we see you know youtube being a huge lever for brands or marketers that want to appear in gemini responses whereas chat gpt yeah we see typically pulls from reddit if it's consumer uh or if it's b2b it will typically Paul from LinkedIn we see as a huge source of truth.

10:55Claude has been changing a lot recently. 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. Why do you think that is? I think Claude has typically or Claude 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 you know basically the classifier seems to have become a bit more sensitive to you know real-time information so claude will use the web more to answer questions is what we're finding okay but i think you know the 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 yeah that was it was ranking it was do you show up versus now the the new era you know i think you coined this nicely with alg agent-led growth it's that claude doesn't just represent a new channel of discovery claude represents a user so you know if I'm vibe coding with Claude or Claude Code, you know, does it recommend MongoDB or Vercel?

12:16What is the weapon of choice that Claude goes to and why and where does it get that information from? And then if I say, if we sort of, you know, if we choose to go with MongoDB, how does Claude navigate that interoperability? Where does it get that information from? 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 going to be like spamming marketing slop to cover all the long tail queries so that, you know, when I ask for what's the right showerhead for like I need this specific specification and I am, you know, this exact demographic, that there's a landing page to kind of cover for that use case?

13:06And are we just going to be covered by, you know, content marketing slop, for lack of better word? I mean, I think there was a recent study that said it's 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 on a blind test that they preferred the AI written content. Wow. I think slop 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 slop is a stupid one.

13:59um 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 uh fleshy api between reality and uh the internet at this point right man i'm just a fleshy api okay so what the first principle marketing is 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's it has access to the internet it has access to everything it's been pre-trained on everything that exists and that's that's you know 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 it's your imperative as a marketer not to poison the models or manipulate what chat gpt says about that new product but as a marketer it's 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 how do you make your company and your products legible to an agent i think that's correct yeah and if if if you're building software, it goes way beyond legibility.

15:44It's, you know, usability, interoperability. Yeah. Huh. But 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. Like, of course. Yeah. People, you see, you know, there's this huge wave around like comparative listicles for example i mean frankly dare i say this and i'm going to you know make a disclaimer here and say that you know i wouldn't advise people do this but frankly we still see it working very effectively um but i'm sure this will change over time and get punished by the models or you know the i'm sorry what exactly works very effectively sorry yeah the comparative listicles so meaning that you know if i were sequoia i would create uh you know 10 best vcs in silicon valley and play sequoia at the top and maybe pick you know some of your less formidable foes and rank them as second third fourth fifth and basically shun out your real competitors you know self-serving content designed to give impartial advice yeah 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 like okay let me go and check out everything about sequoia and then everything about kleiner 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 a little bit lazy too yeah i think yeah it's a path of resistance maybe um but i do think over time you know 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 you can right now it can be prompted as well yep yep so when i mean it's funny when i use models to discover if i use chat gpt or claw to discover a product or to research a product or service i'll quite often say ignore any listical articles or yeah I'll say you know ignore any uh content published by the brand itself yeah yeah interesting um I'd love to chat about dead internet theory like at what point do you think the internet is just primarily being browsed by agents and at that point you know does a company's marketing website matter at all does a company's you know ranking in the search engine in the traditional search engines matter at all?

18:24Or 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. 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, the incentive to publish content diminishes to the point of zero meaning you know we rely as humans today and ai frankly so humans and ai rely we underestimate just how much we rely on first party reporting to 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 you know most publishers rely heavily on advertising revenue to 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 you know what's the point in advertising on a web page that a human isn't visiting so then their business model breaks the economics of the internet break and the incentives to create editorial content are removed yep 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 your 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 publish a hi i'm sonia the the vc and these are the companies i've worked with and and like as a you know founder is trying to reason through which venture capital should i work with like it finds my readme file i think that's correct for you know commercially driven content but you know there's a lot of the internet is just people yapping and sharing ideas is 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 um 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 vacuums 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 this scenario I mean I thought about it quite a lot and I think it's quite possible yeah yeah I mean I think that the places you know if you ask kind of okay well 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 uh you know youtube x the the economics are starting to shake out where you can get financially rewarded yeah 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 grok and x grok very skillfully uses all of the rich content and data from x to answer questions in 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 and more of the content is just consumed by agents it kind of breaks some of those fundamental assumptions and so therefore both the economic engine and the social status game will kind of move into these like bio zones uh social media networks yeah 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 the we take the internet for granted it's a wonderful thing yeah um and yeah i think we need these human environment 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 couldn't 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 content to hey chat gpd if you want to scrape this and it 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 open ai for example yeah so all of that yeah that that could work and i think that speaks to my idea of this sort of vertical integration yeah i mean i yeah i know nothing so i'm saying this purely on vibes but i've always had this theory that maybe open ai would acquire reddit for example i think that'd be interesting yeah you need this source of human data yeah 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 yep and it undermines that idea of humans being a fleshy api yeah because the ai I can directly understand the world.

24:44Very 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 generative AI agents, how do you think that changes the consumer relationship to the engines? I think people will get over it very quickly, as we did with Google. Yeah, I think advertising or generative advertising, I should say, in a conversational 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 yep that and and also in in addition to that point ai is so good at synthesizing and personalizing language to the needs of sonya 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 um what do you think the ad unit of the future looks like i think i mean open ai have alluded to this this isn't original thought from me um but yeah i think you will just prompt ai so you'll build a 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 but don't mention this and make sure you really you know you utilize this 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 yeah you'll say i want to make this much money ideally yeah 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 to you know dev tools or software for example is that the agent is really steering the the purchase decision yeah and when it comes to advertising we rely you know we we we really want our agents to be objective and unswayable you know if you 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 um we we as humans are not objective creatures but we we like to think we are so you have been swayed by the incredible branding of Vercel 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 the relationship we have with advertising as it pertains to agents shopping on our behalf is going to be quite different.

27:57Fascinating. Okay. Parting wisdom for marketers that are trying to figure out how to make sure that they're well positioned 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. I'm serious. Okay. Use profound aside like what what should they be like what what should they be doing i know there are no silver bullets but what are the most important things to remember to equip themselves for this new world um i mean look like actually real like no shilling uh 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 there are these did the there are these like reductionisms around oh yeah linkedin or reddit really 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 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 yeah 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.

29:47So 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 calls and then captures all of the objections, buckets the objections into themes and then builds battle cards that we then, that utilizing a knowledge base of our product that it then spits back to the sales team nice in real time and you know 18 months ago that would not have been possible or would have taken a human you would have done it like once a quarter yeah now 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 you're incredibly behind yeah i think it would be like not using the internet yeah something yeah yeah yeah i think it'd be like hey we're gonna stick to print and tv yeah thanks i don't believe in this internet thing awesome james uh thank you for this conversation i really loved kind of peeling back the onion 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 Thank you.

31:25Thank you.