Profound

2 articles

Handdrawn editorial illustration on a cream background split into three panels: on the left, a dashboard with a gauge and bar chart labelled tool; in the middle, three people standing together labelled agency; on the right, a friendly robot wearing a headset talking with a person labelled agent — the three layers of improving AI search visibility
AI SearchAI SearchAEO

AI Search Tool vs Agency vs Agent: Which Do You Actually Need in 2026?

There are three ways to improve your AI search visibility, and they're layers of the same stack, not rivals: a tool (Peec, Profound) measures where you stand; an agency executes the optimisation work with people; an agent — an AI-search agent — does the recurring volume under human review. A tool changes your understanding, not the answer. An agency changes the answer but costs the most and moves at human speed. An agent does the volume at mid-market cost with humans owning quality and strategy. In 2026 most teams keep a tool and add one execution layer — the real decision is which one.

Marco Lobo
Marco Lobo·6 Jun 2026·7 min read
Handdrawn editorial illustration on a cream background: an AI-search dashboard of charts and a magnifying glass on the left feeds through a funnel in the centre, which sorts into three citation chips — a review star, a community comment, and a reference source — that flow into an AI answer speech bubble on the right; the path from dashboard data to AI citations
AI SearchAI SearchPeec

From Peec or Profound Data to AI Citations: A 5-Step Playbook (2026)

Your Peec or Profound dashboard tells you where you're invisible in AI answers, but a visibility score is an outcome, not an instruction. Turning the data into citations is a five-step job: read the gap reports rather than the vanity metric, turn the cited sources into a third-party target list, fix the pages that are retrieved but not cited, build the off-site footprint the data points to, then re-measure the delta on a cadence. The highest-leverage move is the source/domain gap report — the third-party sites citing your competitors but not you. Most of the work lands off your own domain and has to recur, which is the gap between owning a dashboard and moving its numbers.

Marco Lobo
Marco Lobo·6 Jun 2026·7 min read