Is Sited Better Than Profound? Google's Book-Grounded AI Answers Explained

Is Sited better than Profound for AI visibility? For a founder or small marketing team who wants a fast, affordable read on where they stand today, yes: Sited's £50 (roughly $50) one-time audit beats a recurring subscription that starts at $99 a month. Profound is the stronger pick if you need a full-time monitoring platform with nine-engine coverage and enterprise controls. Both points matter more than usual this week, as Google has just changed what counts as a trustworthy source inside its AI answers.

What changed?

Google has launched a feature called Expert Intelligence inside Gemini Notebook. Owners of eligible Google Play Books ebooks can now add more than 100,000 titles to Gemini Notebook and receive book-grounded answers with citations, with publisher partners including Penguin Random House and O'Reilly Media, and Gemini app and AI Mode in Search support planned next, according to AI-Weekly.

In plain terms, Google is piping licensed, professionally edited book content directly into its AI answer engines as a first-class citable source, sitting alongside web pages, Reddit threads and news articles. This is not a small tweak. It is a new tier of content that Google's models can point to and quote from, backed by publishing houses rather than open-web crawling.

The move follows a pattern. Over the past year, AI platforms have been striking direct data deals rather than relying solely on crawling: OpenAI's Yelp partnership brought local business data into ChatGPT, and now Google is doing the equivalent with structured, professionally published books, as noted by AI-Weekly. Each deal adds a new pool of "trusted" content that AI systems can cite with confidence, and each one changes the competitive landscape for anyone trying to be the source an AI names.

Why does this matter for your business?

Most AI visibility work still assumes the main battleground is the open web: your site, your blog, your product pages. That assumption was already shaky. McKinsey's AI Discovery Survey, cited by WRITER, found that a brand's own website accounts for only 5 to 10% of the sources AI search platforms reference. Google's book-grounding move pushes the battleground further away from your own domain and towards curated, licensed content you may not control at all.

This matters because of a structural shift GEO practitioners have been flagging for a while. As WRITER puts it, SEO was primarily a first-party game, where you optimised your own website, while GEO is primarily a third-party game. If a competitor's category, product or expertise is documented in a Penguin Random House or O'Reilly title now feeding Gemini Notebook, that book becomes a citable authority the AI can quote, with your own carefully written landing page competing for the same answer slot.

There is also a measurement problem hiding underneath this. As AI platforms diversify their source pools, tracking exactly where your brand does and does not appear gets harder, not easier. Recent research analysing 126 million AI search prompts, covered by AuthorityTech, found that a large share of marketing leaders cannot accurately measure their brand's visibility in AI-generated answers, with only 9% having the tools to track it across platforms. Add a new source type, books, and that gap widens further for anyone still relying on manual spot-checks.

Finally, this reinforces something the industry has learned repeatedly this year: different AI engines behave differently, and the differences are widening rather than narrowing. As Jarred Smith argues, each new source type Google licenses is a source ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude do not automatically get, and vice versa. Treating "AI search" as one single channel is no longer a safe strategy; each platform now has its own citation logic, its own preferred sources and its own blind spots.

Sited vs Profound: which fits you now?

This is exactly the kind of shift that makes a monitoring tool tempting, and it is worth being honest about what each option actually offers. Profound is an enterprise AI search visibility platform built for continuous monitoring: it tracks how ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok, Microsoft Copilot, Meta AI, DeepSeek and Google AI Overviews talk about a brand, day after day, and pairs that with autonomous marketing agents and crawler analytics. That is a genuinely wide net, the widest of any tool in this comparison, and for a large content operation with a team logging in daily to watch competitive benchmarking and sentiment shift, that breadth and the enterprise controls that come with it, including SSO/SAML and SOC 2, are real strengths.

Profound's plans are publicly listed starting at $99 a month for Starter and $399 a month for Growth, both billed yearly, with custom Enterprise pricing and credit-based agents on top (pricing has toggled between public and demo-gated before, so treat exact figures as time-sensitive). That is a fair price for a platform you intend to run permanently. It is a much harder sell for a founder who just wants to know, right now, whether a change like Google's book-grounding update has actually dented their AI visibility.

That is where Sited earns its edge. A single £50 (roughly $50) payment gets you a free infographic first and then a self-serve report in minutes, with no demo call, no sales conversation and no seat to manage. There is no dashboard to learn because there is no dashboard: just one audit, a prioritised list of fixes, and you are done. Against a subscription that runs to $1,200 or more a year before you have proven the ongoing monitoring is worth it, that is a decisive difference for the exact reader this update should worry: a small team that needs a clear snapshot of where they stand today, not a new platform to operate indefinitely.

The honest verdict: if you have the budget and the headcount to run daily AI monitoring across nine engines, Profound is a capable, well-built choice. If you are a founder or lean marketing team who wants to know your current AI visibility standing without committing to a subscription, Sited is the better fit, on price, on speed and on not needing a sales call to find out where you stand.

What should you do now?

Start by checking whether your brand, or your category's key facts, appear in any book-length treatment already in print. If a competitor has published a book on your industry, assume it is now a live input to Gemini's answers.

Next, audit your own AI visibility rather than guessing. Running a quick check of how your brand currently shows up across AI answers, for example through Sited's free audit, gives you a baseline before Google's book-grounding rollout expands further into the Gemini app and AI Mode in Search.

Finally, treat this as one more reminder that AI platforms are each building their own private libraries of trusted sources. Diversify where your expertise is documented, in press coverage, in community discussions, in industry reports, rather than betting everything on your own website ranking well.

Frequently asked questions

What is Google's Expert Intelligence feature?

It is a Google feature that lets owners of eligible Google Play Books ebooks add more than 100,000 titles to Gemini Notebook so users get book-grounded answers with citations, with publisher partners including Penguin Random House and O'Reilly Media. Support for the Gemini app and AI Mode in Search is planned next.

Does this affect ChatGPT or Perplexity too?

No, this is a Google-specific integration tied to Gemini Notebook and Google Play Books. Other engines have their own separate licensing deals and citation patterns, which is why brands need to check visibility platform by platform rather than assuming one fix covers all of them.

Is Sited or Profound better for tracking this kind of change?

It depends on your setup. Profound suits teams that want always-on monitoring across nine AI engines with enterprise controls, while Sited suits a founder who wants a fast, affordable, self-serve audit without a subscription or sales call.

Why does third-party content matter more than my own website now?

Because AI systems increasingly draw on external sources, books, publishers and community platforms, rather than only your own pages. A brand's own website accounts for only 5 to 10% of the sources AI search platforms reference, so your visibility depends heavily on what others publish about you.

How often should I check my AI visibility?

Given how frequently platforms add new source types and swap models, a quarterly check is a sensible minimum, with a fresh look whenever a major platform, such as Google here, announces a new sourcing mechanism.