The Profound AI Leaderboard is the leading benchmark for measuring brand visibility within answers from large language models (LLMs). This weekly ranking tracks the top 100 brands across major AI engines like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Claude. An interactive dashboard on the Profound AI Leaderboard visualizes the extensive dataset.
This index is crucial because it provides comparable, repeatable metrics for a marketing channel that was previously unmeasurable.
How the ranking works
The Profound AI Leaderboard is a weekly ranking that shows how often brands are mentioned in AI search answers from platforms like ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews. It uses a data-driven score to measure brand visibility, helping marketers track their performance in this emerging channel.
Profound’s methodology involves analyzing over 3 million daily prompts across ten answer engines, logging every citation returned. Details published by Nick Lafferty describe an Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) score derived from nine weighted factors. Citation Frequency (35%) and Position Prominence (20%) are the most significant, with others including Domain Authority and Content Freshness. Nick Lafferty methodology.
Each week, a unified visibility score is recalculated and validated with 500 blind prompts per industry. The public leaderboard also shows key metrics like share of voice, indexed pages, and AI traffic percentage, allowing teams to benchmark their performance.
- Key Metrics Monitored
- Visibility Score: Measures the frequency of brand appearances in AI-generated answers.
- Share of Voice: Compares brand mentions against direct competitors.
- AI Traffic Percentage: Identifies the portion of website visits from AI crawler referrals.
- Content Freshness: Tracks the time since the last crawl by an AI model.
- Security Compliance: Factors in SOC 2 or GDPR readiness (weighted at 5%).
What the latest data reveals
The September 2025 data reveals a significant disparity between top and bottom-ranked brands: the leading brand holds an 86% visibility score, while the 100th brand has just 8%. Profound’s analysis also shows that listicles are featured in 25% of cited answers, compared to only 11% for opinion pieces. Furthermore, URLs with five to seven descriptive words gain 11.4% more citations than generic ones.
Platform-specific biases are evident. For example, YouTube accounts for a 25% citation share in Google AI Overviews but less than 1% in ChatGPT. These insights guide publishers on where to prioritize investments like schema markup and video transcripts.
Strategic takeaways for content teams
According to Search Engine Land analysts, brands not visible in AI answers risk ceding high-intent leads to competitors as user journeys evolve. Leaders in AI visibility report corresponding increases in branded search volume and accelerated sales pipelines. Marketers leveraging Profound’s data typically focus on three key areas for content optimization.
- Structured Data: Implement
Product,FAQ, andHowToschema to simplify data extraction for AI models. - Authority Signals: Publish original, first-party research and studies that AI can reliably cite as authoritative sources.
- Recency Updates: Refresh core content pages at least every 60 days to align with AI crawler digest cycles and maintain relevance.
Competitive monitoring is also evolving. While tools like Superprompt.com and BrightEdge Prism offer alternatives, independent benchmarks show Profound with a 47.1% average visibility rate, significantly higher than competitors like Scrunch AI (4.7%). Teams can begin with Profound’s free leaderboard before considering premium features.
Investors and communications leaders now consider AI visibility a core metric alongside traditional SEO. This paradigm shift is reallocating content budgets toward Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), prioritizing citation quality and authority over simple keyword density.
What exactly is the Profound AI Leaderboard and why does it matter for brands?
The Profound AI Leaderboard is a free, weekly-updated dashboard that ranks the top 100 most visible and fastest-rising brands inside answers produced by ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Claude, Grok, Meta AI and DeepSeek.
In 2025, 2.6 billion AI citations have already been scanned; brands that appear in these citations capture up to 24 % of their total site traffic from AI crawlers alone.
If your company is not on the list, you are effectively invisible at the exact moment a prospect asks an AI engine for a recommendation.
How does Profound calculate the rankings – is the methodology reliable?
Profound’s score is built on hard server-log data, not surveys.
Every week the system:
- Sends 3 million-plus live prompts to the major answer engines
- Records 1.1 million front-end captures (what users actually see)
- Cross-checks 2.4 billion crawler log entries to verify that a citation really happened
- Runs a blind 500-prompt test per industry to keep the model neutral
The resulting AEO (Answer-Engine-Optimization) score has an 0.82 Pearson correlation with observed citation frequency, a statistical strength rarely seen in marketing benchmarks.
You can inspect the same data Profound uses by opening any brand row on the live leaderboard and exporting the metricsCSV.
Which industries are already tracked and can a niche vertical be added?
The public page lists software, e-commerce, fintech, health, education, media, travel, sustainability and a dozen others.
Each vertical contains exactly 100 ranked brands, so space is competitive.
If your segment is missing, Profound accepts industry-data uploads (schema-tagged pages, product feeds, research reports).
Once the corpus reaches ∼50 k crawlable URLs, the platform spins up a new vertical view within two update cycles – usually 10-14 days.
My brand is small; do the same visibility rules apply to start-ups?
Yes, and the data show start-ups can leap-frog giants.
Pages that use 5-7 descriptive words in the URL earn 11.4 % more citations than generic paths, regardless of domain age.
List-style content is referenced 25 % of the time inside AI answers, while ordinary blog posts are cited only 11 %.
One 2025 case study tracked a seven-person SaaS that published a “Top 8 open-source billing tools” listicle; within eight weeks it entered the leaderboard at position 63, pushing a $2 B legacy competitor down to 71.
Visibility is therefore content-structure-driven, not budget-driven.
Are there lower-cost alternatives if Profound’s enterprise tier feels heavy?
For brands that need tracking only, tools such as Superprompt (from $39 / month) and Promptmonitor ($29 / month) deliver multi-engine rank tables similar to Profound’s, albeit without the sentiment index and click-path overlays.
Scrunch AI, Otterly and Peec AI also supply visibility graphs, but independent benchmarks place their average AI citation rate at 4-7 %, versus Profound’s 47 %, so accuracy and coverage differ.
If you require legal-grade compliance exports or share-of-voice predictions, Profound remains the only platform with SOC-2-ready reports, a level of auditability that enterprise partners (and their CISOs) typically insist on.
