AI-Native Podcast E7: Profound’s Story, the $1B Bet on the Unmeasurable

Eran Bielski hosts Assaf Elovic, ex-AI lead at monday.com, co-founder of Tavily (acquired by Nebius) and currently building the next thing, for a teardown of Profound, the startup that turned the collapse of search into a billion-dollar category in under two years.

Here’s some of what we covered:

• The spring 2026 OpenAI model update after which Priceline and Orbitz, without changing anything on their sites, vanished from between 35% and 56% of the AI answers they used to appear in.
• Why SEO software was always a small market (Semrush at $444M after 25 years, now bought by Adobe for $1.9B) and SEO services are a $93B one, and why Profound is aiming at the second.
• How the product actually works: prompt portfolios fired once a day across eight engines through the browser rather than the API, a panel of 1.5B real conversations, and server-log integrations that catch the crawlers analytics tools cannot see.
• SparkToro ran the same question nearly 3,000 times and found under a 1% chance of getting the same brand list twice, and a 2026 academic review found no AEO technique with a stable causal effect on visibility.
• The gym-membership symptom: a CMO buying four competing tools at once so they can walk into the board meeting with a dashboard, and why the product-market fit is undeniable anyway.
• The GTM that built the category from nothing: billion-citation research studies, the Profound Index, the Zero Click conference, an invented “Marketing Engineer” certification, and Reddit’s CEO quoting Profound data on a Q2 2025 earnings call.
• The Israeli angle: Brandlight and Limy competing directly, Similarweb attacking the whole sampling method from the data side, and HubSpot’s first-ever Israeli acquisition (xFunnel) becoming the $50-a-month version of the product.

Most importantly for founders, we analyze Profound’s strategy through an investor’s lens: why the move from passive dashboard to agentic marketing department is the only defensible path once measurement commoditizes at 75 euros, why switching costs here are dangerously low, and the limitation nobody has solved, that Ahrefs found the strongest correlation with AI visibility is what other people write about you, not anything on your own site.

Watch the Full Episode:

Apple Podcasts:

Available on all platforms      

About this Podcast

How do you turn a breakthrough technology into a massive company, and how can the Israeli ecosystem lead the revolution?

Welcome to the “מג’נרטים” (Meganretim) podcast, your strategic playbook for the world of AI.

In each episode, we take a leading global AI company, go behind the scenes, and break down the product moves, GTM plays, economics, and talent wars that made them a massive success—or a total failure.

No fluff, no empty buzzwords—just straight talk. We bring you the lessons, insights, and practical tools you need to build, scale, and navigate your startup.

The podcast for founders, tech professionals, and anyone who wants to understand where the real world of AI is heading.