Parsing the $35M GEO Play: What’s Real and What’s Fundraising Theater
📡 The Signal – They’re Right About the Shift
The Co-Founder of Profound, an AI tool company, just dropped a funding announcement designed to jolt every SEO-dependent CEO awake.
This isn’t just another tool launch, it’s a $35 million Series B round led by Sequoia Capital, with follow-on from Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures, Saga Ventures, and South Park Commons. These are not “let’s see if it works” investors; they’re the ones who bankroll market-makers.
Capital of this size and caliber doesn’t just validate a company, it signals to the market that GEO has moved from niche theory to enterprise-scale priority. Congratulations to the Profound team on the milestone.
The pitch has bold statements:
In 5 years, $1 trillion of commerce will shift from Google to ChatGPT.
They go further with an adapt or die challenge:
“If your company generates >$1M from SEO, you're facing an existential threat: ranking #1 on Google will soon be as relevant as ranking #1 in the Yellow Pages.”
It’s a provocative line designed to spark boardroom urgency, and for companies heavily reliant on organic search revenue, it lands hard. But like any high-drama claim, it needs to be unpacked: is this truly an extinction-level event for SEO, or the start of a long, uneven shift toward GEO where early movers have the advantage?
The metaphor here isn’t the lone prospector panning for nuggets I wrote about earlier this week, The New Gold Rush: Mining the Miners in the Age of AI SEO — it’s mining at scale. Profound isn’t courting individual SEOs — they’re going after enterprise “big cats” with the capital to stake claims before the richest seams are taken.
Unlike the Klondike gold rush, the Comstock Lode was a scaled silver mining play where industrial machinery, capital, and coordination won the day. It’s enterprise-first from the start, designed for big operators who don’t want to be left behind when the richest veins get claimed.
It’s worth noting this isn’t the only way into the GEO race. Many innovative teams — including those within brands, agencies, and smaller SaaS shops — are already mapping AI citation sources, monitoring answer outputs, and building seeding programs without a dollar of venture backing.
The difference here is scale and speed: $35M buys the ability to operationalize across multiple enterprise clients simultaneously, with the resources to secure and hold prime reference real estate before slower-moving competitors catch up.
⚙️ The Friction – Facts, Forecasts, and Fundraising Flourish
Here’s where the bold claims need context:
“700M weekly ChatGPT users” – More likely “monthly active users” converted into a weekly figure for impact.
“47% of consumers use answer engines to research purchases” – Without methodology, this could mean “ever tried it once” rather than “primary purchase driver.”
“1B+ queries daily (1/8th of Google)” – Not an apples-to-apples stat. Google queries are microbursts; ChatGPT sessions are multi-turn and slower.
“$1 trillion commerce shift” – No visible source, likely an extrapolation to impress investors - but highly possible.
“$100M brand upside” – A best-case example dressed as a universal potential.
This isn’t unusual — funding announcements are meant to magnify urgency and market size. But for operators, it’s important to separate market opportunity from marketing theater before building a plan.
💥 The Realization – The Playbook Hidden in the Pitch
Strip away the Series B sparkle and there’s a valid, executable strategy:
Monitor AI outputs – Regularly check how ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude describe your brand, products, and competitors.
Reverse-engineer AI citations – Identify the forums, niche blogs, and reference sites these engines use for your category.
Seed the sources – Contribute authentic, helpful content in those environments, aiming to replace or supplement competitor mentions.
Close the content gaps – Where your brand isn’t represented, insert credible, non-promotional contributions that AI can latch onto.
Think GEO, not just SEO – Your content strategy must feed the knowledge graph, not just the SERP.
Profound’s pitch is essentially:
“We’ll run the mine for you. You put in your share of the cash, and we’ll:
Identify the richest ground to be mined (the sources that shape AI opinions in your category).
Set up the extraction (create and place the right kind of content in those sources).
Extract the ore (secure your mentions and citations in trusted reference points).
Rinse and repeat (continually feed the sources AI relies on).”
It’s not about teaching you how to wield the pickaxe — it’s about buying into an operation that’s already industrialized the process.
The Two Workstreams You Can’t Ignore
Profound’s workflow focuses on identifying the forums, communities, and sources that answer engines trust, then seeding those spaces with authentic, valuable content.
Regardless of the tool you use (or whether you do it manually), winning in GEO requires two parallel workstreams:
Workstream 1 – Solid Structured Content on Your Own Properties
This is where you say it — publish authoritative, structured, machine-readable content that positions you as the source of truth.Workstream 2 – Inclusion in the Reference Set
This is where others say it — trusted third-party citations, industry hubs, and forum mentions that cement your authority in AI’s consensus layer.
When these independent workstreams 2 reinforce each other, you create the GEO Authority Flywheel: say it clearly → others repeat it → AI trusts you more → more inclusion → more citations → authority compounds.
And this is where the disruption begins — because most SEO teams, agencies, and tool stacks are built to win in workstream 1, but have little muscle or influence in workstream 2.
How This Disrupts the Status Quo
Internal SEO Teams
Pressure to justify budgets – Executives may reallocate SEO budgets toward GEO-focused tools or agencies, especially if boardrooms view traditional SEO as “the old channel.”
Capability gap exposure – Many in-house SEO teams have never built systematic off-site influence programs beyond link building. GEO demands different muscles (community integration, source mapping, citation seeding).
Integration challenge – GEO efforts cut across PR, social, and content teams. SEO leads who can’t orchestrate cross-functional execution risk being sidelined.
Agencies
Service cannibalization – If tools like this automate content seeding and reference monitoring, agencies may lose some of the “content placement” work that’s been high-margin.
Partnership pressure – Agencies will have to decide whether to resell GEO platforms, compete with them, or offer differentiated GEO strategies that their current tools can’t replicate.
Talent reshuffling – Agencies without strong community and influencer engagement teams may need to hire for skills more common in PR or social strategy than technical SEO.
Tool Stacks
Overlap and obsolescence – Traditional SEO tool vendors that focus on rankings, backlinks, and on-page analysis may need to pivot to include GEO metrics (AI answer monitoring, citation mapping) or risk being seen as incomplete.
Ecosystem consolidation – This could spark M&A activity where established SEO platforms buy GEO specialists to offer “full funnel” search visibility tracking.
Data pipeline shift – The metrics that matter (e.g., inclusion rate in AI answers, entity co-occurrence frequency) are different from standard SEO KPIs, which may require new integrations and reporting frameworks.
Same Fundamentals, New Battlefield
If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s built on SEO’s oldest truth:
On-site content (what you say)
Off-site validation (what others say)
The difference now:
The “page one” you’re fighting for is the AI answer layer, not the SERP.
Entity mentions and reference citations have replaced backlinks.
If you’re invisible in the reference set, there’s no “position 8” safety net — you simply don’t exist in the conversation.
This is still traditional SEO at its core, but the selection criteria and synthesis process have changed. The battlefield has shifted from ranking pages to shaping the knowledge base AI pulls from.
The Comstock Lode – Mining at Scale
The Comstock Lode changed the mining game because it proved two things:
The resource was real and worth extracting.
Extraction at scale required industrial machinery, capital, and coordination.
That’s where we are with GEO.
This $35M raise isn’t the GEO play, but it is the first highly visible, industrial-scale operation, backed by the capital and intent to secure enterprise-level claims.
And like in the Comstock days, there are still plenty of prospectors finding success with shovels and a good map — smaller tools, in-house programs, and agency-led initiatives that don’t require venture capital.
The difference is that once the deep-pocketed players roll in with steam-powered equipment, the pace and scale of extraction change. Prime ground gets claimed faster, and the cost of entry for late movers rises sharply.
I’m not here to declare SEO dead or to crown GEO the inevitable winner.
I am here to say: the ground has shifted.
If you’re in SEO, PR, content, or digital leadership, you need to:
Take a breath.
Assess where your brand stands in both buckets — your own structured content and your inclusion in the reference set.
Decide how you’ll stake your claim before the richest veins are locked up.
Disruption is coming.
Not as a tidal wave that wipes out the shore overnight, but as a steady, reshaping current that will favor the brands who act deliberately now.
Position Statement
This isn’t about endorsing or criticizing Profound. My insights focus on the broader GEO shift and the impact their $35M raise spotlights.
I’m neutral here.
I don’t have a stake in their success or failure, and I’m not advocating for or against any specific vendor. As a Global Web Effectiveness Strategist with 30 years of experience working in Enterprise Search, my goal is to help companies, whether they work with Profound, a competitor, or build their own internal capabilities, navigate this new environment thoughtfully.
These are my opinions, drawn from decades in search and strategy, meant to help leaders pause, assess, and act deliberately, not react to hype.
Fabulous piece.
I would expect nothing less from you.
good article bill. This certainly reminds me of the early days of search engine reputation management where we had and made some of the front row seats.