How AI Is Rewiring Marketing with Profound’s James Cadwallader

Brands are losing control of search to AI answer engines

Search is being replaced by answer engines that browse on the user's behalf, so brands can no longer see or control what is said about them. ProFound raised $180m at a $1.8bn valuation to sell that visibility back to them. Cadwallader argues marketing was left alone by AI builders because it is messy and unverifiable, and that neglect is why it is now the biggest opening.

Takeaways

• Answer engines are replacing search. ChatGPT's 2022 launch started the shift and Perplexity connected an LLM to the web in late 2023, synthesizing answers instead of ranking links. Agents now browse on the user's behalf. Asked about a showerhead, ChatGPT ran 65 web searches.
• ProFound measures what models say about brands. ProFound surveys the models at scale and licenses a panel of billions of real prompts. It reads customer CDN data to see when pages get cited. A third of the Fortune 100 and nearly 20% of the Fortune 500 are customers.
• Model updates can move brand visibility overnight. A single ChatGPT update lifted IKEA's visibility 19% while Travelocity and Priceline fell. No brand controls these rankings, so Cadwallader's case is that measurement is the only way to see the shift and respond to it.
• Marketing was neglected because it is unverifiable. Marketing is a top three line item for every business but is messier and less verifiable than software engineering, so the strongest technical people went into engineering. Martech was out of venture fashion for about a decade, leaving the category open.
• Brands will define good with their own evals. Every brand will build evals that define what good marketing looks like, and AI will use them. Slop is a skill issue, and Cadwallader says two-line prompts are why generic AI produces generic marketing. Context is the antidote.
• Marketing splits into agentic volume and human moments. One end of marketing is high-volume agentic content orchestrated by a marketing engineer. At the other, billboards and events matter more because they are unmistakably human. Social media becomes a biozone protecting human exchange.

What Cadwallader predicts

• Within three to five years ChatGPT will search 650 or even 6,500 sites to answer one question as compute costs fall.
• Businesses whose product is content face a very difficult period. Large publishers such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal can find a path through deals with the AI labs.
• Humans are becoming APIs between reality and AI, a role that lasts until humanoid robots or drones take over.
• Elon Musk is ahead of the pack, and xAI's ability to train on X's human interaction data will build a flywheel and a moat.