What Profound's Billboards Teach Us About AI Search

Trevor Pyle, Head of Marketing at Profound, published a LinkedIn post this week that had nothing to do with AI search. It was about billboards. Specifically, why Profound is investing heavily in out-of-home advertising despite openly acknowledging that it is one of the least measurable marketing channels available. Profound, of course, helps brands understand how they are represented in AI search. The apparent irony is worth examining, because it turns out to be no irony at all.

<h2>Measuring signals, not certainty</h2>

Trevor's list of success metrics for the billboard campaign includes salespeople feeling more confident, job candidates mentioning the billboards, investors recognising the brand, friends texting photos, and competitors asking whether they should buy billboards too. These are not vanity metrics. They are signals of a kind of influence that does not resolve cleanly into a dashboard. The campaign is not being evaluated by attribution; it is being evaluated by the quality of the conversations it generates.

<h2>Marketing has always included things we could not fully measure</h2>

Long before AI search existed, marketers were already making investments they could not perfectly attribute. Brand, PR, events, podcasts, word of mouth, executive thought leadership, and out-of-home advertising all create effects that show up somewhere else. The billboard does not close the deal. It changes how people think before the deal ever begins. That dynamic is not a failure of measurement; it is a feature of how influence actually works at scale.

<h2>AI search may be similar</h2>

One of the more persistent mistakes in AEO thinking is assuming that AI visibility exists in isolation from everything else a brand does. It does not. AI models are trained on the internet, and the internet is shaped by people who create articles, research, discussions, citations, recommendations, links, and reviews. Brand building still matters, and it may matter more than ever, because the signals that shape AI representation are the same signals that have always shaped reputation. The channels have changed; the underlying logic has not.

<h2>The measurement challenge is not new</h2>

Trevor's post is really about something larger than billboards. It is about accepting that some of marketing's highest-return activities leave imperfect measurement trails. That does not make them unimportant. It simply changes how success is evaluated. The same is becoming true in AI search. Not every improvement in AI representation will be traceable to a single article, a single prompt, or a single optimisation. Sometimes dozens of small signals accumulate until the models begin representing a brand differently. The challenge is not eliminating uncertainty. It is building better ways to observe it.

<h2>AEO Updates Takeaway</h2>

Marketing has spent two decades chasing perfect attribution. AI search may be a reminder that influence has always been more complicated than a dashboard. Measurement will continue to improve, frameworks will become more sophisticated, and experiments will become more rigorous. But some of the most valuable things brands create, including trust, reputation, authority, and familiarity, will probably remain only partially measurable. There is something clarifying about one of the world's leading AI measurement companies buying billboards. Not because it is contradictory, but because it is consistent. The people building the future of measurement also understand the enduring value of things that cannot be perfectly measured.