Avenue Z and Profound debut live AEO brand audit at SXSW 2026 - what PR teams need to know
Mar 3, 2026 - AI-led search is changing how people discover, evaluate, and buy. At SXSW 2026, Avenue Z and Profound are co-leading a featured workshop to make that shift visible and fixable for brands.
The interactive session, "Conversation Culture: A Live AEO / AI Search Audit for Brands," will show-in real time-how generative answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity interpret, represent, and recommend brands. Registration is open to SXSW Innovation Conference attendees. Learn more about the conference at SXSW.
Why this matters for PR and communications
Zero-click answers mean fewer visits to your site and more decisions made inside AI systems. Your brand story now lives in model summaries, citations, and snippets-often pulled from sources you don't control.
The AEO (AI Search Optimization) audit focuses on the signals that drive those summaries. For comms leaders, it's a chance to spot reputational gaps early and align PR, content, and SEO around the facts AI repeats.
What the live audit surfaces
- Discoverability across answer engines for branded and category queries
- Authority signals: citations, freshness, publisher trust, and E-E-A-T proxies
- Brand accuracy and consistency across third-party sources
- Comparative presence vs. competitors inside AI answers
- Risk areas: outdated facts, missing context, or hallucinated claims
What Avenue Z and Profound are bringing
The session marks the debut of Profound's AEO Audit technology, integrated with Avenue Z's AI Search Optimization program. Profound was named one of the Best AI Tools of 2026 by G2 and ranks #1 in G2's AEO Software category. Profound supplies the data infrastructure; Avenue Z activates it across PR, performance media, content, and technical optimization.
"AI Search is the biggest platform shift in the history of marketing," said James Cadwallader, Co-founder and CEO of Profound. "As AI Agents act for consumers, brands need their own Agents influencing how they're understood and recommended."
"A lot of brands think they're doing the right things-SEO, PR, content-but it's all siloed," said Tina Fleming, Avenue Z's VP of AI Strategy. "When we unify the strategy and pull the right levers, visibility moves fast. This isn't a black box."
Jeffrey Herzog, CEO of Avenue Z, added that the partnership brings a focused operating system for AI visibility-one built to grow reputation and revenue while giving brands more control over how they appear in answer engines.
Action checklist for PR teams
- Map your "source of truth" facts: leadership bios, product claims, pricing, compliance notes-then keep them consistent across your site, newsroom, and key third-party profiles.
- Prioritize citations from high-trust domains: authoritative media, analyst notes, product documentation, and government or standards bodies where relevant.
- Update content for clarity and recency: date-stamp pages, add bylines, and use structured data so machines can verify and cite you.
- Test how AI answers common queries about your brand, category, and competitors. Log sources cited and gaps to brief PR and content teams.
- Ship press kits AI can parse: concise fact sheets, clean FAQs, and media assets with descriptive filenames and captions.
- Align PR and SEO calendars. Use launches, reports, and bylines to earn citations that reinforce the facts you want AI to repeat.
Event details
Session: Conversation Culture: A Live AEO / AI Search Audit for Brands
Leads: Tina Fleming (Avenue Z), Nick Lafferty (Profound)
Where: SXSW 2026, Innovation Track Stage
Profound will also host its Zero Click conference on the future of Search in San Francisco on April 8 and New York on June 11.
About Avenue Z
Avenue Z is a hybrid, AI-accelerated, data-first digital marketing and PR company built to move fast. Brands partner with Avenue Z to grow revenue and reputation across channels-spanning ChatGPT to The Wall Street Journal, Shopify to TikTok, Meta to Google. The agency supports leaders in consumer, tech, and finance through earned, owned, and performance media.
About Profound
Profound is the marketing platform for the era of AI. Thousands of teams use Profound's automated workflows to understand, control, and scale how they appear across AI Search. Trusted by Figma, Walmart, Ramp, MongoDB, Chime, and U.S. Bank, Profound helps marketers win the zero-click internet.
Press contact
Related resource
Want deeper playbooks and tools for comms teams working with AI? Explore AI for PR & Communications.
Your membership also unlocks:
