NEW YORK, July 07, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Profound announced Ads Studio at Zero Click New York, the company’s fourth AI Marketing summit bringing together leaders shaping the future of marketing for the era of AI.
For years, marketers have treated organic and paid marketing as complementary parts of the same strategy. As AI platforms become a primary destination for product discovery, recommendations, and purchasing decisions, that relationship is extending into a new channel: AI Search advertising. With Ads Studio in Profound, marketers can manage the relationship between organic and paid marketing in AI Search from one place.
The market is moving quickly. Earlier this year, OpenAI began testing advertising before expanding access to a broader set of advertisers. What started as a limited rollout has rapidly evolved into a global advertising platform, creating new opportunities for brands to reach consumers directly inside AI-generated conversations.
Yet marketers face a fundamental challenge. Traditional advertising metrics were built for search engines and websites. AI Search operates differently. Users ask detailed questions, explore topics through multi-turn conversations, and receive synthesized recommendations rather than a list of links. As advertising enters these environments, marketers need new ways to understand where their ads appear, whether those placements are relevant, and how they compare against competitors.
Ads Studio was built to answer those questions. Powered by Profound’s dataset of more than 1.9 billion real-user prompts, Ads Studio gives marketers visibility into ad performance in real user conversations in ChatGPT. This helps marketers measure the relevance of their ad placements, understand competitive positioning, and automatically optimize campaign performance.
“Marketers spent years optimizing keywords. AI advertising is forcing them to optimize conversations,” said James Cadwallader, Co-founder and CEO of Profound. “An impression doesn’t tell you whether an ad belonged in the conversation, whether the user had intent, or whether the placement was actually relevant. Ads Studio gives marketers a way to measure what relevance looks like in AI Search and use those insights to generate and launch new ad campaigns from within Profound.”
The launch comes as AI platforms rapidly evolve from answer engines into commercial platforms. As advertising becomes a larger part of AI Search experiences, marketers need measurement frameworks and generative ad creation designed specifically for conversational discovery.
Introducing a New Measurement Framework for AI Search Advertising
In addition to traditional paid marketing metrics, Ads Studio introduces two new metrics designed specifically for AI Search.
Paid Share of Voice
Paid Share of Voice measures how frequently a brand’s advertisement appears relative to competitors within AI conversations that contain a sponsored result. This is calculated for each given topic, category, or prompt set. Marketers can benchmark their visibility against competitors and identify where rivals are capturing paid visibility.
Paired with Profound’s organic visibility data, this metric helps answer questions such as:
- Which topics are competitors spending on?
- Where are you winning or losing compared to your competitors?
- Which topics have low competitor spend that you can capitalize on?
- Where can strong organic performance reduce the need for paid spend?
- Where can weak organic performance increase the need for paid spend?
Ads Relevance Score
AI Search advertising is fundamentally different from keyword advertising because ads appear within the context of each unique conversation.
Ads Studio measures relevance across three dimensions:
- Audience match: Is the user in the audience this ad targets?
- Actionability: Does the ad answer what the user wanted and does it match their intent?
- Brand relevance: Is the advertiser’s brand and category relevant to the conversation?
These signals are combined into a single Relevance Score that helps marketers understand whether their ad dollars are being spent on the right conversations.
Ads Studio also benchmarks a brand’s Relevance Score against industry peers, helping advertisers understand how they compare to competitors within their category.
In addition to topline scoring, marketers can analyze individual ads, identify high-volume placements with low relevance, and review examples of the conversations that triggered specific ads, giving teams insight into how their ads are actually surfacing beyond the number of impressions or clicks.
Turning Insights Into Action
Ads Studio extends beyond measurement. Using Profound’s Prompt Volume dataset of more than 1.9 billion real-user prompts, marketers can identify high-value topics and real user conversations relevant to their business, and directly generate ads using these insights.
Ads Studio helps marketers create, evaluate, and optimize advertising creative based on their organic visibility, Paid Share of Voice, and Relevance Score. Ads Studio can create and score hundreds of candidate ads, evaluate relevance and brand fit, and recommend the strongest headline, description, and context hint before launch. This approach allows marketers to build campaigns using the same conversational context that drives visibility within AI Search.
“One of the biggest questions marketers are asking today is not simply whether they should advertise in AI Search, but how to do it effectively,” said Cadwallader. “The opportunity is clear. The challenge is understanding which conversations matter, how to reach the right audience, how to stay cost-efficient, and how to create advertising that actually belongs in those interactions. Ads Studio helps answer those questions.”
Ads Studio follows the same philosophy that has guided Profound’s organic AI Search platform: curate in-depth analytics, then take action based on data. Marketers can understand performance, identify opportunities, and then use those insights to improve advertising outcomes.
Ads Studio is available today through an invite-only beta program for existing customers. Customers can reach out to their Profound team today to request access. If you’re not yet a Profound customer, you can stay in the loop by submitting your information here: https://www.tryprofound.com/ads-studio-waitlist
About Profound
Profound is the marketing platform for the era of AI. Thousands of teams use Profound’s Agents to understand, control, and scale how they appear across AI Search. Trusted by Target, Figma, Walmart, Ramp, MongoDB, Chime, and U.S. Bank, Profound arms visionary marketers with the tools to win the zero-click internet.
Learn more at www.tryprofound.com
Media Contact
Layla Baradaran
Media@tryprofound.com
