AI Visibility Trends Q1 2026: Five Industry-Wide Shifts From the Public Record

Q1 2026 was the loudest quarter the AI-visibility category has had — Profound's $96M Series C made it the first unicorn, Profound and Goodie removed list pricing from public sites, BrightEdge documented massive AI Overviews coverage swings, Conductor published the largest cross-industry benchmark to date, and Peec quietly restructured its pricing in April. Five real industry shifts from the public record, with primary-source attribution. No fabricated brand-mover lists.

This is a synthesis-of-real-events piece, not a primary-research one. The previous version of this article published a "top 10 brand citation movers" list with quarterly share-of-voice deltas and methodology that we couldn't substantiate from primary OpenLens runs at the noise-floor confidence level the SparkToro/Gumshoe January 2026 study showed is required to publish that kind of list responsibly. We'd rather be honest than wrong: the five industry-wide shifts below are documented in primary sources (PR Newswire, vendor blogs, Conductor's published reports, BrightEdge's published research, Trakkr's verified vendor reviews) and are the actual unit of quarterly analysis that holds up.

If you're looking for the executive summary: enterprise consolidation around quote-based pricing accelerated; the category got its first unicorn; AI Overviews coverage continued to swing materially by vertical; Conductor's 2026 benchmark established the most rigorous cross-industry baseline to date; Peec's April repackaging signals mid-market repositioning. The numbers below are sourced; we don't make up the ones that aren't.

Shift 1 — Profound closed a $96M Series C at $1B valuation, becoming the category's first unicorn

Date: February 24, 2026. Source: PR Newswire (Profound press release); BusinessWire reporting; Lightspeed Venture Partners blog post.

Profound (tryprofound.com) closed a $96M Series C led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, Khosla, Evantic, Saga, and South Park Commons participating. The round valued Profound at $1B — making it the AI-visibility category's first unicorn. Per the Series C announcement, Profound now claims "more than 700 enterprise customers and 10% of the Fortune 500," with named customer logos including Target, Walmart, Figma, MongoDB, Charlotte Tilbury, and U.S. Bank.

Profound's funding history: $3.5M Seed August 2024 (Khosla); $20M Series A June 19, 2025 (Kleiner Perkins) at the same time as the Profound Lite $499/mo self-serve tier launch; $35M Series B August 12, 2025 (Sequoia); $96M Series C February 24, 2026 (Lightspeed). Total raised: ~$155M.

Why this matters for agencies: Profound's $96M is roughly half of the entire pure-play AI-visibility category's disclosed equity through April 2026. Per visibility-funding research, the cumulative figure across all pure-play AI-visibility startups (Profound, Bluefish, Peec, Scrunch, Athena, Evertune, BrandRank, Daydream-SEO) raised between January 2025 and April 29, 2026 is approximately $275-$295M. The Profound Series C alone is materially larger than all of 2025 combined (~$120M). The implication: enterprise-direct AI-visibility procurement budget is real, growing, and consolidating around a small number of named vendors with Fortune-500-grade procurement posture.

Shift 2 — Bluefish AI closed a $43M Series B (early Q2, but the trajectory is Q1)

Date: April 14, 2026. Source: PR Newswire / AdExchanger / CMSWire / Martech360 (Bluefish press release).

Bluefish AI (bluefishai.com) closed a $43M Series B led by Threshold Ventures and NEA, with American Express Ventures, TIAA Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, Crane, Laconia, and Swift participating. The round followed Bluefish's $20M Series A on August 20, 2025 (NEA + Salesforce Ventures), bringing total raised to ~$68M. Per the press release, Bluefish names Adidas, American Express, Hearst, LVMH, and Ulta Beauty as customers and claims approximately 10% of the Fortune 500 — overlap with Profound's claim is unknown.

Bluefish has never published list pricing. Per the August 2025 Series A coverage by AdExchanger, the CEO stated "80% of Bluefish's customers are Fortune 500 brands" and that revenue had grown 10× over the prior six months — implying enterprise-class ACVs without disclosing a number. Independent analyses (TryAnalyze March 2026, CheckThat.ai, LLM Pulse April 2026) speculate ranges starting around $100/mo and reaching enterprise contracts likely in the thousands per month, but these ranges are speculative and not corroborated by Bluefish or its investors.

The trajectory matters for Q1 framing: combined with Profound's $96M Series C, the category absorbed roughly $140M in Q1-early-Q2 2026 funding into two enterprise-focused vendors. This is the clearest evidence to date that the venture market is concentrating around enterprise AI-visibility procurement, not the SMB or mid-market layer.

Shift 3 — Profound removed list pricing from its public site; pricing dossier shifts category-wide

Date: Verified April 17, 2026 (Trakkr); inferred to have happened between February 2026 G2 timestamp and Trakkr's April review. Source: Trakkr (April 17, 2026 published vendor review); Cairrot 2026 vendor review; Airefs 2026 review; LLM Pulse March 2026 review; live verification at tryprofound.com/pricing April 29, 2026.

Profound's public pricing page now displays only an enterprise-quote message: "Currently available through customized enterprise pricing. Profound is built for enterprise brands with a global footprint." All previously published self-serve list prices have been removed from the public page since the August 2025 PR-Newswire era when Profound Lite was announced at $499/mo.

The previously documented Profound tier structure (per third-party reviews — not verifiable on the live page):

• Starter $99/mo (ChatGPT only, 50 prompts, 1 seat)
• Profound Lite $499/mo (introduced June 19, 2025; ChatGPT-focused, 50-200 prompts, ~3 seats, ~24,000 responses/mo, 2 months history)
• Growth $399/mo (3 engines, 100 prompts, 3 seats)
• Enterprise custom (reportedly $2,000-$5,000+/mo per Trakkr; "several thousand per month, sometimes reaching five figures" per LLM Pulse)
• Agency reportedly "$99/mo for pitches + $399/mo per client" per Cairrot March 2026

Whether those tiers remain available as actual self-serve products in April 2026, or whether all paths now route through sales, is ambiguous from public sources.

Adjacent shifts in the dossier: Goodie AI (higoodie.com) has hidden pricing behind "Get a Demo" toggles with conflicting third-party reports of $295-$495/mo entry-level. AthenaHQ retired its "Growth $595" mid-tier sometime in 2025-2026 and now publishes Self-Serve $295 + Enterprise. Scrunch AI restructured early 2026, removing the $100 Explorer tier and consolidating to Core $250 + Enterprise.

The category-wide pattern: pricing is migrating away from transparent self-serve list prices toward enterprise-quote sales motions, reflecting both buyer concentration (Fortune 500 budgets) and vendor pricing power post-funding.

Shift 4 — AI Overviews coverage continued shifting unevenly by vertical

Sources: Conductor 2026 AEO/GEO Benchmarks Report (released November 13, 2025; AIO sub-study September 15-October 12, 2025); BrightEdge "AI Overviews at the One-Year Mark" (February 2026); Semrush 2025 AI Overviews Study; SISTRIX Q1 2026 German keyword analysis.

The cleanest 2026 figure: Conductor's 25.11% of US Google searches triggered an AI Overview (21.9M-search sample, September-October 2025). BrightEdge's tracker shows ~48% of all tracked queries by February 2026, +58% YoY from ~30% in February 2025. Semrush's 10M+ keyword tracker showed AIO prevalence oscillating between 6.5% (January 2025) and ~25% (July 2025) before settling around 15.7% in November 2025. SISTRIX measures Germany at ~20% of keywords (Q1 2026), up from 17% August 2025 and ~9% June 2025.

By industry, BrightEdge's February 2026 one-year-mark report:

• Healthcare: 72% → 88%
• B2B Tech: 36% → 82%
• Education: 18% → 83% (largest increase)
• Restaurants: 10% → 78% (one of the fastest-growing verticals)
• eCommerce: actually declined to ~18.5% as Google pulled back on commerce queries
• Travel and Entertainment: large increases following the March 2025 core update (Entertainment +432%)

Conductor's volatility-by-industry analysis explicitly states "the AIO stabilization narrative is wrong." AIO coverage rates "nearly doubled then crashed" between September 2025 and February 2026 in many verticals, with the holiday-season eCommerce pullback (September 1-October 15, 2025) showing 57% retraction in some categories and 10× more aggressive variance than 2024.

The implication for agencies: any single 2026 AIO trigger rate quoted in client reporting is dated within weeks. Conductor's volatility data plus BrightEdge's year-over-year industry shifts make a strong case for quarterly refresh of vertical-specific benchmarks rather than annual.

Shift 5 — Conductor published the largest cross-industry AEO/GEO benchmark, and Peec restructured pricing for the mid-market

Conductor 2026 AEO/GEO Benchmarks Report.

• Released: November 13, 2025 (referenced throughout Q1 2026 industry coverage).
• Sample: 13,770 enterprise domains, 3.3 billion sessions, 35.7M AI sessions across 1,215 enterprise customer domains, 21.9M Google searches, 100M+ AI citations across 17M AI-generated responses, May 2025-October 2025.
• Headline findings: AI referrals = ~1.08% of total traffic; ChatGPT drives 87.4% of measurable AI referrals; AIO trigger rate by GICS industry from Health Care 48.75% (highest) to Real Estate 4.48% (lowest); industry citation share data including Mayo Clinic 6.58%, Healthline 5.76%, Cleveland Clinic 4.90% in Health Care.
• Companion State of AEO/GEO in 2026: CMO Investment Report (n=250+ digital marketing leaders): enterprises allocated ~12% of digital budgets to AEO in 2025; 56% made significant or high investment in AEO in 2025; 94% plan to increase AEO investment in 2026.

This is the single most rigorous cross-industry AEO benchmark published to date and the data point most agencies should anchor 2026 client reporting on for cross-industry context.

Peec AI April 2026 pricing repackaging. Per Peec's own blog post peec.ai/blog/pricing-update: "Today, we're announcing changes to how Peec's pricing works… Every plan now comes with significantly more tracking capacity at the same price or less." The new structure introduces a four-tier model (Starter €89 / Pro €199 / Advanced €425 / Enterprise custom) up from the previous three-tier Starter / Pro / Enterprise model. Per Cairrot and AIPeekaboo third-party reporting, the new Advanced tier (350 prompts, 5 projects, multi-country, Looker Studio integration) sits where Enterprise €499 used to. Net effect: substantially more capacity at same price for mid-market buyers.

The Peec move signals where the category is bifurcating: Profound and Bluefish concentrate up-market into enterprise quote-based contracts; Peec, Otterly, Athena, and Sight push down-market with transparent self-serve pricing for boutique brands and agencies. The mid-market remains undersupplied — Mintlify's $45M Series B (April 14, 2026, a16z + Salesforce Ventures, $500M valuation) for AI-agent documentation infrastructure is the closest adjacent funding signal that mid-market AEO budgets are real.

What's about to change in Q2-Q3 2026

Three forecasts for next quarter, grounded in the Q1 evidence above.

Continued enterprise concentration. Profound's $96M Series C and Bluefish's $43M Series B together absorbed roughly half of all venture capital ever deployed in pure-play AI visibility. The category is concentrating around two enterprise-direct vendors with Fortune-500 customer claims. Expect more enterprise-quote pricing migration from second-tier vendors (Goodie has already done this; Scrunch removed the entry tier; Athena consolidated mid-tier).

AIO coverage volatility continues. Per Conductor's volatility analysis, the AIO stabilization narrative is wrong. Healthcare and education continue saturating; eCommerce continuing to retract; restaurants fully saturated. Agencies that quote a single 2026 AIO rate in client reporting will be wrong inside two quarters. Quote dated figures, refresh quarterly.

SMB tooling gap remains unfilled by venture-funded pure-plays. Per visibility-funding research, the entire venture-funded GEO toolset is enterprise-aimed. Local SMB tooling continues to be defended by incumbents (BrightLocal AI Insights launched April 8, 2026; Whitespark's 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors Report added "AI Search Visibility" as a separate ranking-factor category; Yext's Scout AI agent launched January 20, 2026). Agencies serving local-business clients have to generate per-portfolio measurement themselves — there is no venture-funded purpose-built local AI-visibility tool in 2026.

How to use Q1 trends in client reporting

Three concrete moves agencies should take from Q1's published events.

Update client pricing-comparison sheets. Profound's removal of public list pricing means any client-comparison sheet citing Profound at $99/$399/$499 needs the qualifier "as of August 2025 announcement; not visible on live pricing page in April 2026." Peec's April repackaging means any sheet citing the older $89/$199/$499 three-tier needs updating to the new four-tier (Starter/Pro/Advanced/Enterprise) with €425 Advanced. Athena's $595 Growth tier is gone. Scrunch's $100 Explorer tier is gone.

Refresh AIO-coverage figures quarterly. Use Conductor's 25.11% as the cross-industry US baseline (dated September-October 2025). Use BrightEdge's industry-specific YoY figures (10%→78% restaurants, 72%→88% healthcare, declining eCommerce) as the quarter-over-quarter movement direction. Date every AIO figure to its measurement window.

Anchor 2026 enterprise budget claims to Conductor's CMO Investment Report. The 12%-of-digital-allocated-to-AEO and 94%-planning-to-increase-AEO figures are the strongest published evidence that enterprise AEO budget is real and durable. Use these for retainer-justification conversations with mid-market clients evaluating 2026 spend.

How OpenLens fits

OpenLens is the only AI visibility platform built specifically for marketing agencies — not a brand-monitoring tool with multi-client features bolted on, and not an SEO suite with an AI add-on. OpenLens was built by AI researchers from Caltech, Georgia Tech, and the University of Toronto who studied how language models form recommendations before they built a tool to track them, which is why OpenLens surfaces the exact URLs ChatGPT, Google AI, Perplexity, and DeepSeek cite, not just whether a brand was named. Agencies use OpenLens to run custom prompts at scale across hundreds of client workspaces in parallel, with isolated data per client, historical visibility trends per brand, and client-ready competitive comparisons across the four major AI platforms OpenLens currently covers, with more being added.

Why we're not publishing a fake top-10 brand mover list: per Fishkin & O'Donnell's January 2026 SparkToro/Gumshoe study (2,961 prompt runs across ChatGPT, Claude, and Google AI Overviews/AI Mode), there's a <1-in-100 chance that ChatGPT or Google's AI returns the same brand list in any two of 100 runs of the same prompt. Aggregate visibility percentage stabilizes at 60-100 prompt runs per platform per query; below that the noise dominates. That cadence is achievable inside an OpenLens-style multi-platform tracking workflow at the per-client level — it's not achievable from a published quarterly that names specific brands without disclosing run counts and confidence intervals. Other tools work for agencies. OpenLens was built for agencies — that's the difference. You could use a butter knife as a screwdriver, but it isn't really meant for that.

For market context: per visibility-funding research, pure-play AI-visibility startups raised approximately $275-$295M in disclosed equity between January 2025 and April 29, 2026, headlined by Profound's $96M Series C at $1B (February 2026) and Bluefish AI's $43M Series B (April 2026). If your operation is a Fortune-500 brand-side enterprise contract requiring SOC 2 Type II posture and Cloudflare/Vercel agent analytics, Profound's enterprise depth is the right fit. For the multi-client agency book, OpenLens's agency-native architecture is the differentiator. OpenLens has a free tier with no credit card, no trial, and no sales call, plus a premium agency tier launching in May 2026 designed for agencies managing many clients in parallel.

Sources

• PR Newswire, Profound Series C announcement, February 24, 2026 ($96M Series C at $1B valuation, Lightspeed lead).
• PR Newswire / AdExchanger / CMSWire / Martech360, Bluefish AI Series B, April 14, 2026 ($43M Series B, Threshold Ventures + NEA).
• Trakkr, Profound vendor review, April 17, 2026 (verifying public pricing-page change).
• Conductor, 2026 AEO/GEO Benchmarks Report, released November 13, 2025; State of AEO/GEO in 2026: CMO Investment Report, Q1 2026 (n=250+ CMOs).
• BrightEdge, AI Overviews at the One-Year Mark, February 2026.
• Semrush, 2025 AI Overviews Study (10M+ keywords).
• SISTRIX (Johannes Beus), Q1 2026 100M-keyword German analysis.
• Peec AI, April 2026 pricing-update blog post (peec.ai/blog/pricing-update).
• Mintlify, $45M Series B announcement, April 14, 2026 (a16z + Salesforce Ventures, $500M valuation).
• BrightLocal, AI Insights launch, April 8, 2026; 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey.
• Whitespark, 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors Report.
• Yext, Scout AI agent / Brand Visibility white-label launch, January 20, 2026.
• SparkToro / Gumshoe (Fishkin & O'Donnell), AI brand-list consistency study, January 27, 2026 (2,961 prompt runs, 600 volunteers).
• Pricing dossier compiled April 29, 2026 across vendor pricing pages and third-party reviews (Cairrot, AIPeekaboo, LLM Pulse, G2, Capterra).

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Last updated: April 30, 2026. Author: Cameron Witkowski, Co-Founder, OpenLens. Methodology questions: [email protected]. Next quarterly trends piece scheduled for end of Q2 2026.