How We Cracked AI Search at Yonder
Our AI Visibility has gone from 11% to over 21% in three months. Here's what we're doing to show up more in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot and Google AI Overviews, and the role Profound plays in it.
In partnership with Profound
Yes, Profound sponsored this post. But before you roll your eyes, the sequence matters here.
After last week's Internet Visibility piece, loads of you asked about the AI bit. So I wrote up how we actually track AI visibility at Yonder and the role Profound plays in that. Then I asked them to sponsor it. So put your pitchforks down.
Anyway, here’s how we think about AI visibility and how Profound has been fundamental to our strategy.
We’re virtually invisible online
At the end of last year I wrote about how Yonder wasn’t showing up online because we couldn’t outspend competitors in Search Ads and I didn’t have the patience or frankly the experience to make SEO work for us. While we’d recognised this early and made progress through earned media, I still needed a plan to show up more during pivotal moments of our customer’s purchase journeys.
I’d heard whispers about how some brands were thinking about AI visibility – essentially the strategy behind getting ChatGPT and the like to recommend you – but hadn’t really given it much thought until I came across Profound while reading a newsletter from Rex Woodbury.
What Profound actually does
Profound prompts AI tools - ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI, Copilot etc. - with real questions about your product category. Things like:
“What’s the best credit card for travel?”
“Alternatives to Amex in the UK”
“Which cards don’t have FX fees?”
Then it logs what brands get mentioned, what gets said, and which sources are being referenced. You then get a ranked snapshot of your visibility and a market-wide X-ray of how people perceive your product. The detail is, frankly, mind-blowing.
Profound is like Ahrefs and Google Trends on steroids
While I get the fundamentals of SEO, I’ve mostly been managing this off the side of my desk and always found tools like Ahrefs to be overkill. I don't have the deep channel knowledge or the time to know how all these granular systems and rules impact our search visibility let alone try to change them.
The clarity with Profound is frightening. You can see clear as day how our visibility is trending. In March, we sat at 11% compared to Amex on 73%. Three month’s later we’re on 21% and Amex have dropped to 71%. We’re virtually invisible on Google but in AI Search we’re now showing up in one out of every five searches while our competitor’s visibility is on the way down.
I like where this is going.
See exactly how people feel about your brand
Most sentiment analysis is pretty useless. "Oh, people feel 'neutral' about our brand." Revolutionary.
But Profound's version showed me something actionable. While overall quite positive, our negative sentiment is categorised and prioritised into things like "Limited rewards availability" "London-focused offers" "Security concerns."
We were London-only for so long, and while I thought we’d solved that by opening up nationally, the data is telling me it’s still a huge issue hurting our perception.
Turns out Profound isn't just a visibility tool, but a product research tool too. For the first time I could see how the market perceived us and what our strengths and weaknesses are. It’s basically just a prioritised list of things for your product and marketing teams to work on.
The citation list is an actual goldmine
Profound doesn’t just tell you what the AI says. It shows you why it says it. You get a ranked list of the sites, articles, and pages that get cited in AI answers.
You can see where we’re mentioned, so you can work with publishers who don’t write about you and pay them more to change their mind lol.
Turns out Amex didn’t have some secret AI strategy. They just showed up in all the places that matter - trusted finance sites, comparison tools, editorial pieces that get referenced again and again.
So the good news is that AI Visibility isn’t miles away from a traditional SEO backlinks strategy. Which means a lot of the foundational work you’ve done should set you up for a strong start to life in ChatGPT etc. I literally copied the URLs and handed the list to our affiliates agency and told them to work through it top to bottom.
Search trends help us spot seasonality and plan spend
It took us a while at Yonder to truly understand what seasonality looked like for us and how that impacted growth. I think we wasted a lot of money over the years overspending during quiet periods and then not having the budget available when we needed it most.
While this sort of exists with Google Trends, it’s not as detailed or actionable. Seeing live AI search trends helped us adjust our marketing budgets to take advantage of popular seasons (like leading into summer) and avoid overspending on low seasons (towards the end of the year).
So what’s it cost?
Profound costs $499 USD / £370 a month. They’ve got some enterprise stuff going on as well if that’s what you need. DYOR.
It felt like an easy decision to try it for a few months. £1,000 to understand a completely new channel? I've wasted more on worse ideas. Remember when I spent £5k on flyers and people were mostly using them as ash trays? At least this would tell us something useful.
Sometimes you need to pay to see around corners.
It’s not a miracle fix
AI visibility isn't some secret hack that'll revolutionise your marketing overnight. It won’t make people like your product if it’s just a little bit sh*t. Sorry to burst that bubble.
The good news is that a lot of the foundational work we did with earned media over the years, and the evergreen articles we commissioned two years ago, are driving our AI visibility now. You don’t need to start from scratch.
The fundamentals still matter. Getting reputable sites to write about you, building genuine authority, creating actually useful content. It all still moves the needle.
It's like having a personal trainer - you’ve still got to do the push-ups, mate.
Is it for you? If your customers use the internet, then yes
We're probably using about 40% of what Profound offers. There's a whole website analysis tool I haven't looked at and they've also just launched an "Actions" feature which is... fine. Our top suggested Action is to "Get mentioned in MoneySavingExpert." Should I try improve my brand awareness too?
But even at 40% usage, it's transforming how I think about our Internet Visibility strategy.
It’s certain not perfect. It's another subscription and sometimes I genuinely don't know what to do with all the data it gives me. But my god it's off to a good start.
Search has always been such a important part of our customer journeys but something we’ve really struggled to make progress on. Social is fine but Search is where people go when they’re ready to buy and if you’re not in that conversation, well, I've got bad news for you. You have to get it right.
P.S. - If you work at MoneySavingExpert and are reading this, my DMs are open. Like, wide open.
In partnership with Profound
While I’ve got you…
About me
My name is Tom. I’ve launched and grown products at some of the UK’s most loved consumer brands and I’m part of the founding team and VP Marketing at Yonder, a modern day rewards card. Since starting at Yonder, I’ve written about all my marketing learnings along the way.
If you're a senior marketer at a startup, this Substack is for you. I write about what actually works in startup marketing (and what definitely doesn't) for marketers on the verge of breakdown.
You can find me on LinkedIn congratulating my mates on their new jobs, trolling Forbes articles about billionaires, and occasionally sharing something useful when absolutely forced to. Say hello.
I do some 1:1 consulting from time to time where my speciality is helping you understand why your brilliant product isn't selling itself. Contact me on LinkedIn if you're into that sort of thing.
Take my short reader survey so I can learn more about who reads this so I can write more useful stuff. I know you ask your customers to take surveys, so one won’t hurt you. Thanks in advance.