Profound, Searchable, and AthenaHQ Ship Agentic Features as AEO Platform Race Accelerates

The AEO platform market has entered a second phase. The first phase, which ran roughly from 2023 to early 2025, was defined by monitoring: platforms competed on how many AI engines they tracked, how many prompts they ran, and how quickly they could surface citation data. The second phase, now underway, is defined by action. The leading platforms are shipping features that do not just measure AI visibility, but improve it.

Profound: From Analytics to Agentic Workflows

Profound, which raised a $35M Series B led by Sequoia in August 2025, has expanded its platform significantly in 2026. The company now tracks 10+ AI engines using a database of 1.5 billion real user prompts, running over 6 million prompts daily. Its most significant 2026 additions are agentic workflows that move beyond reporting: pre-publication content optimisation tools that score content for citation eligibility before it goes live, and a Prompt Volumes feature that provides weekly data on what users are actually asking AI engines. Profound's tracking data on Google AI Mode, which showed google.com becoming the second most-cited domain inside AI Mode, has been widely cited across the industry as a benchmark data source.

Searchable: The AI Agent Layer

Searchable, the London-based platform that raised $14M at an $85M valuation in May 2026, has shipped what it describes as an AI agent layer on top of its monitoring infrastructure. The agent goes beyond dashboards to generate actionable recommendations, content briefs, and technical fixes based on citation gap analysis. Searchable now tracks 9 AI engines, including ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Copilot, Grok, Meta AI, and DeepSeek. Its AI Search Accelerator training programme has enrolled more than 1,000 brands. The platform has achieved G2 High Performer status for Summer 2026.

AthenaHQ: The Challenger

AthenaHQ has emerged as the most aggressive challenger in the platform market in 2026. The platform's positioning centres on brand share of voice across AI engines, with a particular focus on competitive benchmarking at the query level. AthenaHQ tracks which competitors are being cited for the same queries a brand is targeting, and surfaces the content and structural differences that explain the citation gap. The platform has attracted significant attention from enterprise marketing teams that want competitive intelligence alongside their own visibility data.

The Market Signal

The broader market context makes the platform race urgent. According to Conductor's 2026 benchmarks, AI search traffic converts at 14.2%, compared to 2.8% for Google organic, a five-times premium. Google AI Overviews now appear on 48% of all search queries as of March 2026. Organic click-through rates at position one drop by approximately 34.5% when an AI Overview is present. The platforms that can move brands from monitoring to active citation improvement are now the most valuable tools in the marketing stack, and the 2026 feature drops from Profound, Searchable, and AthenaHQ are the clearest evidence yet that the category has reached that capability threshold.