AI Search Ecosystem Uncertainty
Profound
The core issue is that Profound is being built on top of a traffic shift that is real, but still too concentrated in a few fast-changing platforms to support a broad, durable tooling layer with confidence. Google has pushed AI Overviews to more than 1.5 billion monthly users, and later said the product passed 2 billion monthly users, while ChatGPT had more than 800 million weekly users by November 2025. That proves user demand is large, but it does not yet prove a stable, independent GEO market, because distribution, ranking logic, and data access still sit with Google, OpenAI, and Perplexity.
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Google and OpenAI are making AI answers a native feature inside giant existing products, not creating an open ecosystem first. Google says AI Overviews increased usage on covered queries by over 10 percent, which suggests adoption, but it also means optimization vendors depend on a surface Google can change unilaterally.
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The underlying search stack is still technically unsettled. Exa describes AI search as a research problem rather than a solved scaling problem, and Ecosia says it still routes roughly 70 percent of queries away from AI search because classic search monetizes better and AI answers cost money. That makes customer behavior and platform economics hard to forecast.
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Even if demand grows, the market may consolidate around a few winners rather than support a large vendor layer. Existing SEO suites like BrightEdge, Conductor, and seoClarity can bolt AI visibility features into current enterprise contracts, while Perplexity's original cited answer wedge has already been copied by ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Copilot.
The next phase is likely a narrower GEO market centered on measurement, brand monitoring, and workflow software for large enterprises, not a sprawling ecosystem of standalone optimization vendors. As AI search volume keeps rising inside Google, ChatGPT, and Perplexity, the winners will be tools that survive constant platform shifts and fit into existing SEO and analytics budgets.