my friend works for a company called 'profound' whose whole job is 'get found by ai' by spamming reddit and other talk sites ( among other things)

They've raised $155M total now with the latest at a $1B valuation [1] from Lightspeed, Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, Khosla, and NVIDIA.

And very impressive list of angels too: Guillermo Rauch (Vercel), Karim Atiyeh (Ramp), Andrew Karam (AppLovin) among others

Last I heard they're trying to reposition from AEO/GEO to "AI Marketer". No clue how that's going, I feel like the AEO/GEO stuff isn't super defensible at that valuation if for no other reason than I assume (hope) the spamming stops working.

[1] https://dealroom.co/news/126181-profound-raises-96m-at-1b-va...

SEO companies were already doing this. There were already tools applying ML to the problem before LLMs too, that would recommend places you could post relevant content, like Reddit, yahoo answers (lmao), quora, etc.