Research &
Insights

Josh Blyskal

Profound, Head of Special Projects

Josh Blyskal leads AI Strategy & Research at Profound, where he helps enterprise brands understand and improve how they appear across AI-powered answer engines. A strategist and researcher at the forefront of Answer Engine Optimization, Josh works with leading companies including Ramp, Indeed, and U.S. Bank to translate large-scale AI-search data into practical visibility strategies for the next era of digital discovery. Before Profound, he co-founded HubSpot’s Marketing AI practice and helped build AI Search Grader, bringing together deep experience in marketing technology, search, and applied AI. Based in New York City, Josh is a frequent speaker and commentator on how AI is reshaping brand discovery, consumer behavior, and the future of SEO.

How Brave Search discovers new pages: A deep dive into the Web Discovery Project

Claude's web search runs on Brave, and 79% of its citations come from Brave's top 10 results. By reading Brave's open-source Web Discovery Project client, we traced exactly how pages enter that index: through a hard door requiring approximately 20 distributed users, or an easy door triggered by a single search on Google or Bing. The findings reveal specific, testable rules for making your site discoverable to Brave and, downstream, to Claude.

AI Search

Ryan Siddle and Josh Blyskal