Ask ChatGPT where to buy a decent travel backpack and it won't hand you ten blue links to sort through. It'll just tell you. One answer. Maybe two brands mentioned. Maybe none of your favorites show up at all.
That shift is exactly what a company called Profound is betting its future on. And this week they made a move that tells you how fast this is becoming real money: they're opening a Singapore office to cover Southeast Asia, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.
I've spent plenty of time wandering around Singapore's Central Business District, and I can picture exactly the kind of building they'll land in — glass tower, good coffee downstairs, air conditioning turned up way too high. But the location isn't really the story. The story is what it means that a company built around tracking "AI visibility" thinks Asia Pacific is worth a dedicated team.
Here's the setup. Profound started as a tool that tracks how brands show up inside AI-generated answers — ChatGPT, Gemini, that whole world. Co-founder and CEO James Cadwallader calls AI "the new front door to every business." Bold claim. But think about your own habits. How often lately have you asked an AI chatbot to just tell you what to buy, where to eat, or what gear to pack, instead of digging through search results yourself?
Profound's own numbers back up the trend, at least a little. They looked at 1.8 million anonymized Singapore conversations with ChatGPT and Gemini between January and September 2026, and found a 23% increase in the share of conversations involving researching, comparing, or buying products. That's a relative jump in share, not 23 percentage points, and it measures conversations, not purchases. Worth noting, because numbers like that get rounded up into bigger claims real fast.
So what's actually changing for brands? In old-school search, you climb a ranked list. In AI search, there's no list. The AI just picks who gets mentioned, who gets compared, and who gets left out entirely. That's a different game. A marketer can't just optimize a page and hope for a higher spot — they have to influence whether the AI brings them up at all.
Profound's office opening in Q4 2026, with more than 15 local hires planned over the next year, is them betting that Asia Pacific brands will need help figuring that out. Some New York staff are even relocating for a year to help get things running. That's a real commitment, not a press release stunt.
What I find interesting is how this pulls formerly separate departments into the same room. Profound has expanded past simple tracking into something called AI Marketer, which coordinates competitive analysis, content updates, and ad campaigns, plus a "Context Manager" meant to feed a brand's own information into those AI workflows. Their October partnership with Bazaarvoice connects visibility tracking to actual product reviews, so if an AI system is skipping your brand, you can trace it back to missing or weak source material.
That's the real lesson here, and it applies whether you run a company or just want to understand what's happening to the internet you use every day. Visibility inside an AI answer is not the same as a sale. It's not even the same as a good recommendation. A brand can get mentioned and still get mentioned badly. So the smart move — for marketers, but honestly for anyone evaluating any new tool — is to separate "are we showing up" from "is this actually working."
I've learned that lesson the hard way more than once, usually by getting excited about a shiny new tool before asking what it's actually measuring. Same principle applies whether you're picking a GPS app for a 4,000-mile road trip or a marketing platform for your business. Ask what the number really tells you before you build a strategy around it.
Singapore becoming a regional AI-search hub doesn't prove Asia Pacific brands have this figured out. It proves one company thinks the opportunity is big enough to show up in person and build a team around it.
The next good question is simple: when the front door to every business becomes a chatbot answer, who's actually watching what it says about you?
Source: ContentGrip
See also our earlier piece: California's Campaigns Just Got a New Spokesperson. It's Not Human.
