Why switch from Profound
Profound answers the question 'are we being cited?' well. This guide is for teams who now have the answer, do not like it, and need someone to change it rather than to keep measuring it more precisely.
Arise GEO vs Profound
Side-by-side table on scope, model, pricing shape and guarantees — including where Profound is the better buy. Read the comparison →
If you have a dedicated GEO owner in-house who ships entity, schema and content changes monthly, the monitoring subscription plus internal execution is a strong setup. Keep it.
Signals it is time to move
- →The dashboard has shown a flat or falling citation rate for two or more quarters.
- →Recommendations are read but never implemented because nobody owns deployment.
- →You cannot tell whether the cause is retrievability, entity ambiguity or content structure.
- →Competitors appear in answers on queries where your page is objectively better.
The migration, step by step
Roughly six weeks end to end. Steps run in order; the change freeze overlaps the handover deliberately.
- Step 01You · Day 1–2
Export the probe history and the query set
Your tracked prompt list is the asset, not the subscription. Export every tracked query, the engines each was run against, the citation and mention history, competitor share-of-voice, and any sentiment scoring. Keep it as CSV — this becomes the continuity baseline so the switch does not reset your trend line to zero.
- Step 02Us + you · Week 1
Audit the query set for commercial relevance
Most AI-visibility subscriptions end up tracking 30 to 50 vanity prompts containing the brand name. Cut those. Rebuild the set around 100 to 300 unbranded buying questions a real prospect would type — comparison, 'best X for Y', pricing, integration and problem-first phrasings. Fewer than 100 and normal model variance swamps the signal.
- Step 03Us · Week 1–3
Establish why you are not being cited
A monitoring tool tells you the citation rate; it cannot tell you the cause. We check the three usual ones: the target pages are not retrievable or not indexed, the brand entity is ambiguous to the models, or the content carries no extractable answer passages. The remediation is completely different in each case.
- Step 04Us · Week 2–4
Fix technical eligibility before touching content
Confirm AI crawlers are not blocked in robots.txt or by the WAF and bot-management rules, that key pages render server-side or are prerendered, that canonicals are self-referencing, and that response times are sane for a fetch-and-summarise agent. Publishing into an unretrievable site produces a flat line.
- Step 05Us · Week 3–5
Anchor the entity graph
One canonical Organization node with a stable @id, sameAs pointing to the profiles you actually control, a named Person entity with knowsAbout for author-level pages, and Product or Service nodes referencing the Organization node rather than repeating it. Ambiguous identity is the most common reason a model summarises you without naming you.
- Step 06Us · Week 3–8
Ship atomic answer blocks on pages already indexed
For each high-value query, a 40 to 60 word self-contained answer directly beneath a question heading, on a page that already ranks and is topically relevant. This is consistently the fastest lever on citation share — movement usually shows within 30 to 60 days on long-tail and comparison queries.
- Step 07Us · Ongoing, from week 4
Re-probe against the imported baseline
Run the same query set, on the same engines, at the same cadence, several times per cycle to control for model output variance. Because you imported the history in step one, the comparison is genuinely like-for-like rather than a fresh start that flatters the new vendor.
What to keep, not bin
Risks and how we contain them
| Risk | Mitigation |
|---|---|
| The AI visibility trend line resets and you lose the comparison | Import the exported probe history as the baseline so the new measurement continues the same series. |
| Query set changes make before/after meaningless | Keep the original tracked queries running unchanged alongside the expanded set for one full cycle, then retire the vanity prompts. |
| Expecting citation movement in two weeks | Long-tail and comparison queries typically move in 30 to 60 days; head terms take one to two quarters. Anything faster is usually model variance rather than progress. |
Frequently asked
Should I cancel the tool when I hire you?+
Not necessarily. Some clients keep it deliberately as an independent scoreboard on our work, which is a reasonable thing to want. Others fold measurement into the engagement and drop the subscription. Either works.
Why is my citation rate flat despite good content?+
In most audits it is one of three causes: the target pages are not retrievable by the crawler or agent, the brand entity is ambiguous so the model paraphrases without attributing, or the content has no self-contained passage to lift. Diagnosing which one comes before any content work.
How long until citation share moves?+
Thirty to sixty days on long-tail and comparison queries once answer blocks and schema ship. One to two quarters on head terms, where off-site corroboration and entity authority dominate.
