Josh Blyskal is a member of the founding team at Profound and leads AI Strategy & Research, focusing on how brands appear in AI search and answer engines. He joined Profound as its second employee and has helped build its Customer Success, AI Research, and Education functions.
Josh studies how systems including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and AI Mode discover, understand, compare, and recommend brands. His research draws on Profound’s large-scale datasets, including more than 10 billion AI citations and 1.5 billion real user prompts, to analyze the questions, query fanouts, product information, websites, and third-party sources that influence brand visibility in AI-generated answers.
His research has been covered or cited by publications and organizations including The Verge, BCG, Ad Age, Adweek, Search Engine Land, Business of Fashion, and Reddit. He has also worked with enterprise brands including Ramp, Indeed, U.S. Bank, G2, MongoDB, and Golin through Profound’s AEO programs.
Before Profound, Josh co-founded HubSpot’s Marketing AI practice and built HubSpot’s AI Search Grader, which has been used by more than 100,000 marketers.
Josh is a frequent conference speaker on answer engine optimization, AI search, agentic discovery, and the emerging role of AI in the customer journey. His recent and upcoming stages include MozCon, brightonSEO, TechSEO Connect, Zero Click, and SEO Shenzhen. His talks cover the state of AEO, how brands get found in AI search, the marketing engineer, and the rise of the machine customer.
