The AI visibility UAE brands have been treating as a side experiment just became a $1.8 billion business. On 15 September 2026, Profound raised $180 million in a Series D co-led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, valuing a two-year-old company at $1.8 billion and taking its total funding past $335 million. Profound sells one thing: software that tells a brand how often ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity mention it, and what to change so they mention it more. Over 1,000 enterprise customers already pay for that answer, including more than a third of the Fortune 100.
Read the round as a price signal rather than a startup story. Enterprises are no longer asking whether AI search matters. They are buying instruments to measure it, the way they bought rank trackers in 2010 and social listening in 2015. For UAE businesses the practical question is narrower and more urgent: can you say, today, how often an AI assistant names your company when a buyer in Dubai or Abu Dhabi asks for a recommendation in your category? If the honest answer is no, you are competing on a channel you cannot see. This article covers what happened, what the underlying data actually shows, and what to do about it without a $1.8 billion platform.
In this article
- What Profound’s $180 million round actually signals
- The traffic behind a $1.8 billion valuation
- The AI visibility UAE brands are not yet tracking
- AI recommends the brands it already remembers
- Why the UAE market raises the stakes
- Five moves that build AI visibility without a $1.8 billion platform
- Frequently asked questions
What Profound’s $180 million round actually signals
Profound announced its $180 million Series D on 15 September 2026 at a $1.8 billion post-money valuation, co-led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, with Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Saga Ventures, Evantic and South Park Commons joining. The round landed less than seven months after a $96 million Series C. Revenue tripled in the six months between them. That is the shape of a category being formed, not a company being funded.
The customer list is the part worth reading twice. Comcast, The Estée Lauder Companies, Walmart, Royal Bank of Canada, Zoom, ServiceNow, MongoDB and Figma are all named. These are organisations with mature SEO programmes, large agency rosters and no shortage of analytics. They bought a separate tool anyway, because their existing stack could not answer a simple question: what does the machine say about us?
“Profound started as an analytics platform. Today, they’re using our Agents to research, write, and report.” James Cadwallader, CEO, Profound
The product line tells you where the category is heading. Alongside AI Search analytics, Profound now ships Context Manager, an Ads Studio for AI search placements, and an agent called AI Marketer that refreshes stale content on its own. Measurement was the wedge. Execution is the business. Any UAE marketing team planning its 2027 budget should assume the same two-stage pattern: first you find out where you stand in AI answers, then you change the content and data that decide it.
The traffic behind a $1.8 billion valuation
Sceptics have a fair point when they note that AI assistants still send a small slice of raw traffic. SE Ranking tracked 101,574 websites across 250 countries from January 2025 through April 2026 and found AI platforms account for 0.32% of all website visits, up from 0.24% a year earlier and 0.02% in 2024. That is a 16x rise in two years from a very small base.
Two things make that number misleading if you stop there. First, the split between assistants is moving fast, so a strategy built around one of them ages badly. Second, AI answers shape decisions long before anyone clicks, which means the visit count understates the influence by a wide margin.
| AI platform | Share of AI referral traffic (2026) | Year-on-year traffic growth |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 74.78% | +27% |
| Gemini | 11.56% | +231% |
| Perplexity | 7.23% | Slight decline |
| Copilot | 3.51% | +31% |
| Claude | 2.62% | +320% |
Source: SE Ranking AI traffic study, 101,574 websites, January 2025 to April 2026.
Gemini grew 231% and Claude 320% while ChatGPT’s share of the AI referral pool fell from 79.74% to 74.78%. ChatGPT is still the giant. It is simply no longer the whole market, and a brand optimised for one model’s habits is exposed when buyers move to another. We wrote about that fragmentation in the context of local search in our piece on how Gemini names a different local winner 93% of the time.
The AI visibility UAE brands are not yet tracking
Here is the gap that makes a $1.8 billion valuation rational. Scribewise and Scrunch surveyed 602 full-time marketing and PR professionals in the United States between 19 May and 2 June 2026. Some 91% said they had an AI search strategy. Then the researchers asked what those teams actually measure, and the confidence collapsed.
| AI search metric | Marketers not tracking it | What you lose without it |
|---|---|---|
| Share of voice against competitors | 71% | No idea whether a rival is being recommended instead of you |
| Brand sentiment inside AI answers | 70% | Wrong or dated claims about your pricing and service go uncorrected |
| AI bot traffic to your site | 67% | You cannot tell whether crawlers reach your key pages at all |
Source: Scribewise and Scrunch, “Moving fast, flying blind: 2026 AI search survey”, 602 respondents, +/- 4% margin of error.
Budgets are already moving even where measurement is not. Conductor’s 2026 AEO/GEO investment report, based on 250-plus enterprise leaders, found companies put an average of 12% of digital marketing budget into answer engine optimisation during 2025, and 94% intend to increase that in 2026. Money is flowing into a channel that seven marketers in ten cannot benchmark. That is the arbitrage, and it closes quickly.
Want to know what the assistants say about your brand right now? Ask the Rothian Digital team for an AI visibility baseline and we will run your category prompts across the major models.
AI recommends the brands it already remembers
There is a harder reason to start now rather than next year. Research from geoSurge tested 66 commercial questions across nine industries, running each prompt 60 times over 12 days and collecting 3,960 model responses that fired 13,281 follow-up search queries. The finding was blunt. Models ran searches for brands they already knew 3.2 times more often than for brands they did not.
In numbers: a model searched for a familiar brand 55.7% of the time, and for a brand outside its top ten just 17.4% of the time. Memory came first, retrieval came second. If a model does not already associate your company with the category, it frequently never goes looking for you, which means no amount of well-structured content on your site gets read in that answer.
That is a compounding advantage for whoever establishes presence first, and a compounding penalty for whoever waits. It also reframes what this work is. Building AI visibility is not a technical fix applied to a website at the end of a project. It is brand building, entity building and content engineering running together, which is exactly how our SEO and content strategy teams structure the work.
Why the UAE market raises the stakes
The UAE is not a follower market on this one. Microsoft’s AI Diffusion Report 2026 ranked the Emirates first in the world for adoption, with 70.1% of the working-age population using AI tools, the first economy anywhere to pass 70%. Internet penetration sits above 99% across roughly 11.3 million users. Your buyers are already asking a model before they ask a search engine.
Set that against a digital ad market worth about $2.64 billion in 2026 and growing 15.2% year on year. Budget is expanding into channels where the first recommendation is made by software. A UAE brand that is invisible to assistants is paying more for paid clicks to recover demand it could have earned in the answer itself.
Three UAE-specific complications
- Bilingual answers. A query in Arabic and the same query in English often return different companies. Most brands audit only one.
- Local entity confusion. Free zone entities, trade names and branch names create several versions of one business. Models merge or split them unpredictably.
- Thin third-party coverage. Many UAE categories have few independent review sites or trade publications, so models lean harder on directory listings and your own structured data.
Five moves that build AI visibility without a $1.8 billion platform
You do not need enterprise software to start. Most of the AI visibility UAE teams are missing comes down to three things: a baseline, a repeatable prompt set, and content that answers questions in the form a model can lift. Run these in order.
| Move | What it looks like | Signal that it worked |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Build a prompt set | 30 to 50 buying questions in English and Arabic, run monthly across ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity | A mention rate you can chart, per model |
| 2. Fix the entity | One legal name used consistently across the site, schema, directories and social profiles | Assistants describe you correctly without hedging |
| 3. Open the gates | Check robots.txt and firewall rules for GPTBot, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot and ClaudeBot | AI crawler hits appear in your server logs |
| 4. Write extractable answers | Direct answer first, specific figures, sources cited, FAQ schema on every commercial page | Your wording starts appearing in AI answers |
| 5. Earn third-party mentions | Trade press, regional directories, comparison pages and credible partner sites | Models cite sources that name you, not only your own domain |
Move three catches more UAE sites than you would expect. Aggressive bot blocking at the CDN, added years ago to stop scrapers, now quietly excludes the crawlers that feed AI answers. Check it before you spend a dirham on content. Move four is where most of the compounding happens, and it is the same discipline we set out in our guide to machine readable content for UAE websites.
One caution on expectations. Nobody can guarantee a citation in an AI answer, and any agency that promises one is selling you a story. What you can do is measure your position, remove the technical blocks, publish sources worth quoting, and build the third-party footprint that model memory rewards. Do that consistently and the mention rate moves.
Frequently asked questions
What is AI visibility?
AI visibility is how often, and how accurately, AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity name your brand when someone asks a question in your category. It is measured by running a fixed set of prompts repeatedly and recording mention rate, sentiment and which sources the model cited. It sits alongside search rankings rather than replacing them.
Why did Profound raise $180 million?
Profound announced a $180 million Series D on 15 September 2026 at a $1.8 billion valuation, co-led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, less than seven months after a $96 million Series C. Its revenue tripled in six months and it serves over 1,000 enterprise customers, including more than a third of the Fortune 100. The round funds an expansion from AI search analytics into content and advertising execution.
Is AI visibility worth budget for a UAE business when AI sends only 0.32% of traffic?
Yes. The AI visibility UAE brands build pays off for two reasons. The 0.32% figure counts clicks, not influence, and most AI answers resolve a question without a click at all. And the trend is steep: AI referrals rose 16x between 2024 and 2026, with Gemini up 231% and Claude up 320% year on year. In the UAE, where 70.1% of working-age adults use AI tools, the influence arrives earlier than the traffic does.
What is the difference between GEO, AEO and SEO?
SEO optimises for ranked links on a results page. AEO, or answer engine optimisation, optimises for being the answer itself. GEO, or generative engine optimisation, targets citation inside AI-generated responses. In practice the three overlap heavily: clean technical foundations, clear entity data and well-structured content serve all of them, which is why they belong in one programme rather than three.
Do AI models favour brands they already know?
Yes. geoSurge analysed 3,960 model responses across 66 commercial questions in nine industries and found models searched for familiar brands 3.2 times more often than unfamiliar ones, 55.7% of the time versus 17.4% for brands outside the model’s top ten. Brand awareness and third-party mentions therefore influence AI answers before on-page optimisation gets a chance to.
How do I check whether AI crawlers can reach my site?
Review robots.txt for GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot and ClaudeBot, then check your CDN or firewall rules, which often block bots independently of robots.txt. Confirm in server logs that those user agents are fetching real pages and receiving a 200 response. Many UAE sites block them unintentionally through older anti-scraping settings.
How much are companies spending on answer engine optimisation?
Conductor’s 2026 report, based on more than 250 enterprise leaders, found an average of 12% of digital marketing budget went to AEO in 2025, and 94% planned to increase that share in 2026. Mid-market UAE businesses typically start much smaller, with a monthly audit and a content workstream, then scale once the mention rate shows movement.
Should UAE brands run their prompt tests in Arabic as well as English?
Yes. The same buying question asked in Arabic and English frequently returns a different set of recommended companies, because the sources available to the model differ by language. Testing only in English hides half of your exposure in a market where both languages are used daily for commercial research.
The window is open, and it is closing
A $1.8 billion valuation for a two-year-old company is a market telling you where attention is going. The useful part is not the number. It is the reason behind it: thousands of large brands discovered they could not answer a basic question about their own visibility, and paid to fix that. UAE businesses are working in the world’s most AI-adopting consumer market, with most competitors still unmeasured. The AI visibility UAE brands establish this year is the memory models carry into next year, so build the baseline now, while being first still counts for something.
Find out what AI says about your brand
Rothian Digital runs AI visibility baselines for UAE businesses: your category prompts tested across ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity, in English and Arabic, with the technical blocks and content gaps mapped against your competitors. You get a mention rate you can track, and a plan to move it.
Sources
- TechCrunch: AEO startup Profound hits unicorn valuation, raises $180M Series D, 15 September 2026.
- Profound: $180M Series D at $1.8B valuation, 15 September 2026.
- SE Ranking: AI search traffic study, 101,574 websites, January 2025 to April 2026.
- Scribewise and Scrunch: Moving fast, flying blind, 2026 AI search survey, 602 respondents.
- Conductor: The State of AEO/GEO in 2026 CMO Investment Report.
- geoSurge: AI searches what it remembers, 3,960 model responses.
- Gulf News: UAE tops world in AI adoption in 2026, Microsoft AI Diffusion Report.
