NEW YORK, August 26, 2026 — Influencer, the world’s largest independent creator marketing agency, today announced a breakthrough partnership with Profound, the marketing platform for the AI era, to launch and lead Creator-First AEO. As answer engines increasingly decide which brands are visible in the conversation, make the shortlist, and earn the recommendation, Creator-First AEO puts creators at the center of how brands win in AI search, turning trusted creator experiences, recommendations, and content into signals that strengthen how brands are understood and recommended by AI.

Influencer defines Creator-First AEO as the discipline of shaping the signals, conversations and content AI systems rely on to understand and recommend brands. By linking creator influence to measurable AI visibility, Creator-First AEO helps turn cultural relevance into brand authority.

Profound and Influencer bring this discipline to life by combining their capabilities and establishing creator content as the new source of brand authority. Profound provides the intelligence, revealing how AI understands a brand, where competitors hold an advantage, which prompts shape consideration and what evidence drives recommendations. Influencer turns those insights into action through creator-led programs, building the content and signals AI systems are more likely to surface, trust and recommend.

This model fundamentally expands creator marketing’s influence, reaching consumers and the AI systems helping with their decisions. It moves brands from content production to evidence production, using creator reviews, comparisons, demonstrations and real-world experiences to establish how products perform, who they serve and why they deserve to be recommended. Profound measures how that evidence changes brand visibility and representation, creating a continuous cycle of intelligence, creator activation and optimization. 

“Creator marketing has entered a new era. It now shapes what people think, trust and buy, as well as what AI understands and recommends,” said Ben Jeffries, co-founder and CEO of Influencer. “By uniting Profound’s intelligence with Influencer’s global creator capabilities, we are creating an entirely new model for how brands compete in AI-led discovery. Creator-First AEO gives brands the power to understand the answer, strengthen the evidence behind it and influence what gets recommended next.”

Profound identifies where a brand is missing or misrepresented in AI-generated answers and reveals the evidence shaping those results. Influencer uses those insights to develop creator-led programs featuring the voices, experiences and cultural context most likely to strengthen the brand’s position. Profound measures how the programs affect AI answers, citations and brand representation, enabling both companies to refine and optimize the next phase.

“AI is becoming a major gateway to brand discovery, which means marketers have to think about the information shaping AI recommendations,” said James Cadwallader, co-founder and CEO of Profound. “Creators have an important role to play because they produce the real-world experiences, comparisons and perspectives that help AI understand brands and products. By bringing Profound and Influencer together, marketers can connect that creator activity directly to how their brands appear and perform in AI answers.”

Creator-First AEO also extends creator investment from distribution to discoverability. Distribution determines who sees content today. Discoverability determines whether that content continues helping consumers and AI systems understand, compare and recommend a product long after a campaign ends. This gives each creator program a lasting role in brand discovery.

Influencer is placing Creator-First AEO at the center of its global growth strategy, with a clear ambition to define and lead the category,” added Jeffries. “As AI-generated answers become a primary gateway to discovery, consideration and purchase, creators will shape which brands earn authority, enter the conversation and win the recommendation. The brands building credible, culturally relevant evidence today will define the next era of discovery.”

‍About Influencer

Influencer is a global creator marketing agency on a mission to shape the future of marketing by humanizing brands. By placing creators at the center, the agency delivers creator-first solutions across creative, media, and commerce that connect brands with audiences through insight-driven creator campaigns built to stop the scroll and drive measurable impact.

Founded in 2015 by YouTuber-turned-entrepreneur Caspar Lee and entrepreneur Ben Jeffries, Influencer is the world’s largest independent creator marketing agency - powered by a unique ecosystem of proprietary technology, platform partnerships, and longstanding talent relationships.

As an Official Global Marketing Partner of TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, Snap, Meta, and Twitch, Influencer delivers bespoke, enterprise-level solutions powered by Waves, its AI-driven operating system. From concept to conversion, the agency blends human instinct with platform intelligence to drive measurable outcomes across the full funnel - from brand perception to performance and sales.

With 200+ team members speaking 30 languages across North America, Europe, and the Middle East, Influencer has delivered 6,000+ campaigns for leading brands including Spotify, SharkNinja, Google, Nike, Disney, and Coca-Cola.

‍About Profound

Profound is the fastest growing AI marketing platform used by 18% of the Fortune 500 like Comcast, Walmart, and U.S. Bank, and innovators like Ramp, MongoDB, and Figma. It's the workbench where marketers research, write, report, and collaborate with Profound’s AI Marketer to get their brand chosen by the Answer Engines consumers increasingly rely on. Built on 2B+ real user prompts and growing, Profound shows what people ask AI and what the models say back. Profound's AI Marketer proactively pairs that data with your business context to surface opportunities, deploy Agents, and measure the impact to improve with every use. Learn more at TryProfound.com.

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To inquire about a Creator-First AEO audit for your brand click HERE

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For any further press enquiries, please contact: raphaele.schnoll@influencer.com