GEO Strategist

Foundation Marketing boosts Bitly's visibility in AI search. Search. A Certified Partnership With Profound Helps Foundation Turn AI Visibility Investment Into Measurable Outcomes for Brands Foundation Marketing announced it has joined Profound's inaugural Agency Certification Cohort. Every Foundation engagement can now open with the same enterprise measurement that supported Bitly's continued growth as the most cited brand in its category. The certification recognizes agencies with proven expertise in measuring and improving how brands appear across generative AI platforms. Foundation is one of 18 agencies certified in the inaugural cohort. AI has become the first place many B2B buyers research vendors, build shortlists, and increasingly make purchasing decisions. A growing share of the sources those AI answers cite is community content, led by Reddit. Foundation's April 2026 analysis of 57.2 million citations across five major AI platforms found that Reddit was the largest external source cited for B2B SaaS brands, accounting for 20.8% of all external citations. Nearly one in three external sources AI cites when helping buyers discover B2B software now comes from Reddit (30.9% of citations on unbranded discovery queries). Foundation has already proven this approach on one of the web's most competitive AI search battlegrounds. Over a 12 month engagement, Foundation transformed Bitly's Reddit presence from a dormant branded subreddit with just 38 members into an owned content engine, shifting the program's primary KPI from referral traffic to AI citation share. Measured across 218 tracked prompts in Profound, Bitly now holds: * The number one citation share among link shorteners at 11.7%, nearly double the next competitor. * A 422% increase in Reddit referral sessions over the 12-month program, from 178 to 930. * Recognition from Reddit as an official success story on its business platform. * Eight branded subreddit threads cited directly in Google AI Overviews, four holding the number one position. The full case study is published at https://foundationinc.co/case-study/bitly That same measurement discipline is now part of Foundation's core offering. Foundation now offers every client a Profound powered baseline audit at the start of an engagement, showing where the brand stands in AI answers before any strategy is set. Foundation combines those insights with strategy and execution, measuring citation share, share of voice and sentiment across the AI platforms that matter most to each client's buyers. Results are tracked against the original baseline, with continuous monitoring identifying competitive shifts and emerging opportunities. This allows strategy and investment to be aligned with measurable outcomes. Foundation and Profound know each other's work because they've experienced it from both sides of the relationship. Since 2025, Profound has trusted Foundation to strengthen its own AI visibility, while Foundation has relied on Profound's technology to measure and optimize client performance. That is the confidence behind Foundation's place in the inaugural cohort: earned through real world results, shared experience and a partnership tested in practice. "Buyers now ask AI before they ever visit a website, and those answers are increasingly shaped by community conversations," said Ross Simmonds, CEO of Foundation Marketing. "Profound shows brands where they stand today. Our job is to improve where they stand tomorrow. Together, measurement and execution create accountability. Clients can see where they started, track progress over time and invest with confidence because every strategic decision is backed by data." "Foundation has demonstrated that AI visibility is measurable and improvable when the right strategy is paired with the right data," said Trevor Pyle, Head of Growth Marketing at Profound. "They've used Profound to help clients establish a baseline, identify opportunities and track meaningful progress over time. Their work with Bitly shows exactly what's possible when measurement and execution work together, which is why we're excited to welcome them as one of our inaugural certified agency partners."

It must be a decade ago that Ross Simmonds began espousing his DREAM mantra in his marketing seminars. It stood for “Distribution Rules Everything Around Me.”Years have passed and Simmonds is still preaching about the importance of distribution, now in his new book Create Once, Distribute Forever. The book establishes concisely and effectively that distribution is the key to state-of-the-art digital marketing.Simmonds, for those of you who don’t know him, is the Founder of Halifax-based Foundation Marketing and a bit of a legend in tech/marketing circles. He’s a wonderful and witty speaker, an insightful mentor, and literally has the coolest Twitter/X handle in existence (@thecoolestcool). He’s even a congenial Philadelphia Eagles fan. (We knew there had to be at least one somewhere.)His lucid prose brings out his congeniality, but more important it delivers an impactful message to anyone interested in reaching potential clients