The news: Generative engine optimization and marketing intelligence company Profound launched Ads Studio at Zero Click New York, the company announced Tuesday.

• The studio includes a paid share of voice tool that measures how often a brand’s ad appears compared with its competitors in AI conversations with sponsored results. This tool answers questions about what topics competitors are focusing on and where organic performance indicates the need for reduced or increased spending.
• An ads relevance score tool measures campaigns across three dimensions: Actionability, which determines whether the ad matches user intent; brand relevance, which assesses whether the brand and category is relevant to the AI conversation; and audience match, which determines whether the user is a part of the ad’s target audience.
• Ads Studio is built on Profound’s prompt volume dataset, which includes over 1.9 billion user prompts.

Why it matters: The move emphasizes how quickly the AI search market is evolving, with Profound’s announcement pointing to developments like OpenAI’s ongoing ad pilot. But as AI search rapidly evolves, marketers are left questioning how to make an impact in a nascent format with unclear guidelines and glaring challenges.

• Brands have limited influence over when and how their ads appear in AI search environments. For example, Google search campaigns include AI Overview ads automatically, giving advertisers little control over placement details or whether they’re reaching the right consumers.
• That lack of control is compounded by limited transparency into AI search ad performance. Advertisers often struggle to see how their ads are being displayed or measure their effectiveness, making it harder to refine strategy and optimize campaigns.
• These issues raise the risk of overcommitting to AI search advertising before the format matures, leading to wasted marketing spend.

Implications for marketers: Profound’s launch could address some of AI search advertising’s measurement gaps by offering a clearer view of where competitors are gaining visibility and where spend should shift—and other ad tech vendors are likely to follow, positioning themselves as bridges between advertisers and still-developing AI search platforms. Without proof of the effectiveness of these tools, marketers should continue using a range of tactics to prepare for an AI search-driven future.

Marketers are already improving crawlability for AI search tools (62%), tracking and measuring AI-driven traffic and citations (60%), and creating LLM-friendly content formats (58%), per Branch. Deepening these efforts while building campaigns around prompt-level audience intent and conversational creative will help brands move with AI search as it becomes more operational, even as broader standards remain limited.

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