Profound introduces Brand Mention Guest Post abuse that will hurt

Key Takeaways:

• Profound introduced its new partnership with Noble to offer automated Guest Posts and Brand Mentions based on cited sources for a given prompt set in LLM chats Now, you can build an Agent that:

  • Knows the prompts that matter most to your brand

  • Finds the third-party sources AI platforms are citing for those prompts

  • Filters to the citations where your brand is not mentioned

  • And exports those citation domains directly to your Noble workspace

  • Then, Noble reaches out to publishers, negotiates placement, drafts content, and handles payment. You review the offers and accept with a click.

• While guest posts and sponsored posts are a common SEO tactic that is battled by Google for a long time to not let their algorithm be artificially gamed, it currently is working well, still

• However, officially introducing such a partnership and using it excessively will only lead to Google (and other search retrieval providers) further narrowing down on the extend this is allowed and will introduce counter-measures such as algorithm updates to demote mentions or manual actions to punish websites abusing it - it is the same old playbook of Google hunting down grey-hat SEO tactics that try to game their algorithm

• As an expert for SEO/GEO I can only get some popcorn and watch this strategic move of Profound in disbelief - and I do hope clients are aware of the midterm and longterm risks and downsides

• Quotes from industry experts:

  • Fiorelli: I mean… this is one of the oldest link building tactics ever in SEO. But, well, I imagine called with pretentious name of “Noble” (ridiculous name for a tool that buys mentions) it doesn’t sound as that spam tactic it actually is

  • McKenzie: Does anyone at the company have more than 18 months of experience in the search industry? We’re just speed running all the mistakes of the last 15 years

  • Mindenhall: Another company doing SEO things it really does not understand - to the point it will damage your site and cost a fortune to fix. These AI-Holes are profiting from tools that will kill your online search presence....

• You have to get props to Peec AI to get years of top-notch SEO expertise on board to not do those mistakes and risk clients' businesses

Sources:

• https://x.com/dbabbs/status/2059333858324029711

• https://x.com/gfiorelli1/status/2059374433127571574