Welcome back to another Chat With Sean. I’m joined by Nick Lafferty, founding marketing engineer at Profound.

Profound helps brands understand and improve how they show up across AI search - ChatGPT, Claude and the other answer engines.

We get into the biggest platform shift in marketing history, why roughly 90% of citations come from third parties, the rise of the “marketing engineer,” and the practical stuff: prompt tracking, query fanouts, citations vs mentions vs sentiment, and Nick’s hot take on how to actually build the prompts you track.

Nick discusses:

- Why this is the biggest platform shift in marketing history

- The biggest misconceptions people still have about AI search

- Why ~90% of citations come from third parties — and why AEO is a team sport

- Evolution or revolution? How SEO, AEO and GEO actually relate

- The rise of the “marketing engineer”

- What Profound does beyond prompt tracking — Fact Check, MCP server, agents

- Which brands win and which struggle in AI search

- Affiliates as gatekeepers, and why LLMs are citing LinkedIn so much in B2B

- How to report on AI visibility: inputs vs outputs

- Citation vs mention vs sentiment vs accuracy — and why each matters

- Why query fanouts matter more than tracking a million prompt variations

- His hot take: stop using keyword tools, talk to your customers

- Fixing damaging sentiment, and when to escalate to PR/crisis comms

- Where AI search is heading + what’s next for Profound

Related Source: Mike King’s brilliant breakdown of how AI Mode works — mentioned in the episode:

https://ipullrank.com/how-ai-mode-works

Connect With Nick Lafferty:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicklafferty/

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