Profound
Read how your brand appears in AI answers, and the traffic AI agents send to your site.
A Profound connection gives a playbook's functions Profound's MCP server. Sign in to Profound and allow access, or give a Profound API key; either way the connection reads the data of the organizations you belong to.
Available on Auto Cloud and on self-hosted runtimes.
What a playbook can do with Profound
- Read your brand's visibility in AI answers, the citations those answers give, their sentiment, and the prompts that bring your brand up.
- Read the traffic AI agents send to your site.
The connection reads; Profound's server offers nothing to change.
Profound's MCP server lists its own tools when a function runs, and once you connect, your agent lists them with list_connection_tools.
An example workflow
A weekly brief on AI visibility beside search visibility. A schedule trigger runs the workflow on Monday. A lookup function reads last week's visibility, citations and sentiment from Profound, and a second lookup function reads last week's clicks and impressions by page from a Google Search Console connection. A computation function lines the two up by topic. A reasoning function reads the table with the team's positioning notes in its prompt and writes which topics AI answers cite you for, which they cite a competitor for, and which pages the agents' traffic lands on, and proposes one page to improve. An interaction function sends the brief to the content lead through a Slack or Outlook connection, and the run's history in Studio keeps every figure.
How to connect Profound
- Sign in to Profound and allow access. The consent screen shows the permissions listed below.
- Give a Profound API key. Make a key in the Profound platform: select your organization's name at the top left, then Settings, and under Account, API Keys. In the Create API Key banner, name the key, choose when it expires and select Create API Key. API keys come with Profound's Enterprise plan, and a key reaches the data of every organization you belong to. Copy it now: Profound shows it once.
Then:
- Ask your agent to connect Profound to Auto, or open Settings, Agents, Connections in Auto Studio and choose Profound.
- On the Studio page, check the service and its access, choose which playbooks may use the connection, and approve it. Give a key or a client secret there, never in a conversation with your agent.
- Have your agent check one small read through the connection before a function depends on it.
What it needs
- A Profound account in the organization. An API key needs Profound's Enterprise plan; the sign-in does not.
- Your agent connected to Auto and signed in as you, with permission to change your organization, if your agent adds the connection.
- On a self-hosted runtime, nothing to register: Profound's authorization server takes a client Auto names by its metadata document or registers itself, or one you registered.
Permissions Auto asks for
By sign-in:
- Read the unique identifier of the Profound account that connects.
- Keep access to Profound when nobody is signed in.
With a key: a key carries the permissions it was made with; the steps above name those Auto needs.
Good to know
A key reaches every organization you belong to, so make it from an account that belongs only to the organizations the playbook should see, or sign in instead. What a function reads is kept in the run's history, where people with access to the playbook can read it.