Growth Strategy in the Age of AI Search: Lessons from Profound’s Nick Lafferty

Building growth in an established market is hard enough. Building growth in a category that barely existed two years ago is a different challenge entirely, especially as AI Search continues to reshape how businesses approach digital marketing.

Nick Lafferty, Founding Marketing Engineer at Profound, has helped the company become one of the most recognised names in AI Search by combining proprietary data, educational content, industry events, and a relentless pace of execution.

Nick joined Charlie Marchant, CEO of Exposure Ninja, on The Growth Leaders Series podcast to discuss the growth strategy behind Profound’s rise, how modern marketing teams should be structured, and why the businesses moving fastest are gaining an advantage in the AI Search era.

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Velocity Is a Moat in AI Search

One of the most important things Nick wants marketing teams to understand about AI Search is that the rules of speed are completely different here compared to traditional Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

In Google, it can take weeks or months before a piece of content starts to perform. In AI Search, that timeline has collapsed. Nick has published content that was cited by answer engines within two days.

For challenger brands, this creates a genuine window. The businesses that can publish fast, update existing content quickly, and move without getting stuck in internal approval cycles are the ones building AI Search visibility right now. Larger brands that recognise the opportunity but are slowed by legal, brand, and compliance processes face a real competitive risk from faster-moving players.

The Growth Strategy Behind Profound

Profound’s growth strategy starts with a simple question: how do you turn proprietary data into a marketing engine?

As a business operating in an entirely new category, Profound has access to something most brands do not: millions of AI Search prompts and billions of citations across major LLMs. For Nick, the challenge was never a lack of information. It was figuring out how to package that information and get it in front of the right people.

“Immediately when I joined, the roadmap for go-to-market was basically how do we take our data and insights and then just build systems and processes and plumbing to talk about it.”

That idea became the foundation of Profound’s growth strategy.

Rather than relying on traditional demand generation tactics, the team focused on turning proprietary data into content, research, social media discussions, events, and educational resources. Every new insight creates another opportunity to contribute to the conversation around AI Search and help marketers understand what is changing.

The approach works because the content is difficult to replicate. While competitors can share opinions, Profound can back its perspective with data gathered from millions of prompts and billions of citations.

For Nick, building growth in a new category is ultimately about making the unfamiliar understandable.

“I’d prefer to market a new product in a new sector than market a new product in an existing sector. Mostly because the go-to-market motion is much more straightforward. It’s educational. It’s teaching. It’s like, ‘What is this thing? Why does it matter?'”

The education piece is important, but it is powered by something more valuable: original insights. By consistently transforming proprietary data into useful content, Profound has built a growth engine that strengthens its authority every time it publishes.

The Layered Mentality Around AI Search for Different Business Sizes

Not every brand needs to solve the same AI Search problem. What Nick has found through running demos, meeting CMOs, and working with brands of every size is that priorities stair-step up depending on where a business is.

“It kind of stair steps up based on company size.”

• Visibility is the starting point for smaller businesses. Are they being mentioned in AI responses at all?
• Citations become the focus at the mid-market level. It is not just about being mentioned. It is about whether a brand’s domain is being cited most often in its category, giving it narrative control over how its space is described.
• Sentiment is the next layer. When someone asks an LLM how two brands compare, is the response positive or negative?
• Accuracy is the priority at enterprise and Fortune 100 level. At that scale, it is less about whether you are mentioned and more about whether the detail is correct: the right product specs, the right positioning, the right attributes when an investor or analyst searches a brand name.

Understanding where your business sits in this framework is one of the most useful starting points for deciding where to focus AI Search Optimisation investment first.

How to Make the Internal Case for AI Search Investment

Getting leadership to prioritise AI Search is one of the most consistent challenges facing marketing managers and SEO leads inside larger organisations. Nick’s advice is direct: stop leading with data and start leading with the problem.

“SEOs get so in the weeds and so technical, and they wanna send their boss a gigantic spreadsheet of all the keywords and impressions that they pulled. Once you get to the director or VP level, they don’t really care. They care about the problem of: Is my hair on fire right now or no?”

The most effective internal pitch follows a clear structure: here is the emergency, here is the evidence, and here is exactly what we need to do to fix it. Nick saw a large enterprise brand use almost this exact approach in the Profound office.

“The most effective people internally are the ones who are best at telling their boss that something is on fire, and then you also tell them, ‘But it’s okay. I found this solution, and here’s what we need to do to fix it.’ There was a very large company who was in the Profound office last week who used more or less the exact same analogy — ‘We have to go to our team and tell them that this is a true emergency, that we’re losing in AI Search, where our biggest competitor is winning.'”

The skill of communicating problems and solutions clearly to senior stakeholders is different from the skill of doing the work itself. But it compounds just as much. The marketers who learn to frame urgency and present solutions in the same breath are the ones who earn the budget and backing to actually move things forward.

What a Modern, Lean Marketing Team Actually Looks Like

Nick’s team hiring model centres on the generative marketer: a term he credits to writer and marketer Emily Kramer. Someone who has depth in two or more areas and uses AI and agentic tools to extend what they can individually produce.

“My personal vision is that teams become a bit more like generalists who can do many, many different things. Emily Kramer has this concept of a gen marketer or a generative marketer — she calls it someone who’s kind of like a pie-shaped marketer. If you have experience in like two categories, then you find ways to use AI and agentic systems to really scale and enable yourself.”

Nick gave a concrete example. He wanted to run personalised one-to-one ABM ads on LinkedIn, with each ad showing the target company’s logo. Doing that manually for 100 companies would take 10 to 30 hours. He opened Claude Code, gave it a list of companies, asked it to download their logos and insert each one into a template image. A couple of hours later, he had 100 personalised ad variations ready.

“I had spit out like 100 different variations of this image with all these different company logos swapped in there, and probably saved myself 10, 20, 30 hours of manual work. It’s like reframing what’s possible, how quickly you can move, and then how do you build your marketing bench with people who can just do way more things like that at scale.”

That is the mindset he hires for: not someone who defaults to raising a design ticket, but someone who asks what the fastest route to the output actually is.

If you want to get hired by people who think this way, Nick’s advice is simple: do the work in public.

The best hires he has made came through his network or through finding people on LinkedIn who were not just doing interesting things, but talking about them openly.

“The people that are world-class, they’re doing the thing, and they’re talking about it instead of just doing the thing and not talking about it. There are probably many more people out there who have similar attributes, but if you don’t talk about it, if you don’t share your things on social, LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, no one knows about it.”

What This Means for Your Growth Strategy

Nick Lafferty’s approach at Profound is a practical case study in what it looks like to build a growth strategy purpose-built for the AI Search era. The core lessons apply regardless of sector or size:

• Move fast. Content gets cited within days. Speed is now a strategic variable, not just an operational one.
• Lead with data and education. In a new or shifting category, teaching your market is a growth strategy in itself.
• Know your AI Search maturity level. Whether you are focused on visibility, citations, sentiment, or accuracy depends on where your business is. Nail one before moving to the next.
• Hire generative marketers. Teams that use AI to extend individual capability will consistently outperform those built around narrow specialisms.

If you want to build an organic growth strategy that delivers qualified leads and measurable revenue in the AI Search era, we can help. Book a consultation call with our team, and we’ll provide recommendations based on a review of your marketing, website, and goals.

About The Growth Leaders Series

The Growth Leaders Series is a mini podcast series from Exposure Ninja. In each episode, Charlie Marchant sits down with a growth leader from one of the world’s most innovative brands to explore how marketing leaders are adapting to changes in search, AI, demand generation, and brand growth.