Profound review 2026: pricing, features, and alternatives
Profound now sells enterprise marketing agents with AI search as one channel. Public tiers, what Enterprise adds, accuracy caveats, and how it stacks up against dedicated platforms.
Quick verdict
Profound is a large, well-funded vendor that now sells marketing agents for AEO and SEO, content and demand, and PR, with AI search tracking as one channel among several. The two public plans are $99/mo (ChatGPT only) and $399/mo (three engines), both billed yearly. The Profound people talk about is Enterprise, with contracts starting around $40k a year. We rank it #6, below Promptwatch, AthenaHQ, and Scrunch AI, because buyers who want a dedicated AI visibility tool get more of that job from those three for less money and less setup.
What Profound does
At its core Profound still runs scheduled prompts across ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Claude, then reports citation share, share of voice, and competitor cite rates by prompt cluster. On Enterprise that extends to ten engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Gemini, Copilot, Claude, Grok, Meta AI, DeepSeek, and AI Mode.
The asset that sets it apart is Prompt Volumes, a dataset that estimates real query demand per prompt. Knowing which prompts people actually ask, and how often, is the right way to pick what to track, and few vendors have anything comparable.
What changed is the positioning. The homepage now leads with agents for AEO and SEO, content and demand, and PR. That makes sense for a vendor of this size ($96M Series C at a $1B valuation in February 2026, G2 4.6/5 and a Winter 2026 category Leader badge, per our listing). It also means you are buying a broad marketing program, and the AI-search tracker is a component of it.
Pricing
Public pricing only appeared in June 2026, and both public tiers are annual only.
| Plan | Price | Includes |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | $99/mo, billed yearly | ChatGPT only, 50 prompts, 1 seat |
| Growth | $399/mo, billed yearly | 3 engines, 100 prompts, 3 seats, 7-day trial |
| Enterprise | Custom, from about $40k/year | Up to 10 engines, full Prompt Volumes, agents, API, SSO, SOC 2 |
The gap between Growth and Enterprise is where most buyers get stuck. Ten engines, the full Prompt Volumes dataset, the agents, and API access all sit behind the sales conversation. Starter is a taste of the dashboard, not a working tracker for a brand that shows up across more than one assistant.
Strengths
Engine coverage on Enterprise is the deepest in the category per our listing, and it includes engines several rivals skip, such as Meta AI and DeepSeek.
Prompt Volumes is a meaningful piece of intelligence. Most trackers ask you to guess which prompts matter; Profound gives you a demand estimate to start from.
For a large organization that wants one vendor running agents across PR, content, and search, the breadth of the agent program is the point, and the company has the scale to support an enterprise rollout.
Limitations
Gating comes first. Everything Profound is known for is Enterprise only, and the published number for Enterprise is a floor of about $40k a year rather than a price.
Data trust comes second. G2 reviewers on our listing document citation counts that did not match manual ChatGPT checks, and one 2.5/5 review cites dashboard confusion, inconsistent numbers, and unclear onboarding. Reddit threads question whether simulated-prompt sampling gives more than directional data.
Setup is heavy. Plan on one to three months before the numbers are reliable enough to act on, with a dedicated owner. The public tiers come with a 7-day trial on Growth, which is short for a platform that takes that long to learn.
Several layers are absent from what Profound publishes: AI crawler logs, visitor analytics that tie AI referrals to conversions, a content pipeline that publishes to Webflow or Framer through a review inbox, and Reddit or forum monitoring.
How it compares
| Profound | Promptwatch | AthenaHQ | Scrunch AI | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Our ranking | #6 | #1 | #2 | #3 |
| Entry paid plan | $99/mo, billed yearly | $95/mo | $295/mo ($245 annual) | $250/mo annual ($300 monthly) |
| Free tier or trial | 7-day trial on Growth | Free Explore; 7-day trial on Essential and Professional | Free tier, about 300 credits | Not published |
| Engines on entry plan | ChatGPT only | All monitored models | 9 | Not published |
| Engines at the top | 10 (Enterprise) | ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, Llama, DeepSeek, Mistral, Copilot, AI Overviews, AI Mode | 9 | Up to 9 (Enterprise) |
| Crawler data | Not published | Agent Analytics crawler logs, from Professional | Not published | Crawler traffic analytics; AI-optimized pages served to crawlers |
| Traffic and conversions | Not published | Visitor analytics with conversions | GA4, Shopify, Webflow revenue attribution | Not published |
| Action or content layer | Marketing agents (Enterprise) | AEO articles from Professional; automated Content Agent from Business | Action Center | Agent Experience Platform |
AthenaHQ has the stronger data-to-action workflow through its Action Center, with credits that burn faster than the calculator suggests. Scrunch AI has the most unusual lever, serving AI-optimized page versions directly to crawlers, and its roadmap now answers to Sitecore after the June 2026 acquisition.
Promptwatch is the one we would trial first if the goal is AI visibility specifically. It monitors every engine on every paid plan from $95/mo, so there is no three-engine ceiling to negotiate past. Agent Analytics, from the $245/mo Professional plan, logs ChatGPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot hits and maps the crawl-to-citation path, which is the evidence you need when a page is not getting cited. Visitor analytics connects AI referrals to conversions, the number an enterprise team will need to justify a $40k contract anyway. Prompts carry search volumes and query fan-outs, so demand data comes with the tracker instead of behind an Enterprise contract. Business ($579/mo) adds the automated Content Agent that publishes to Webflow, Framer, or WordPress.
Verdict
Profound fits a specific buyer: an enterprise marketing team with budget north of $40k a year, a person who can own the platform daily, and an appetite for agents across PR and content as well as search. For that buyer the dataset and engine coverage are real advantages.
For everyone else, the public tiers are too narrow and Enterprise is too heavy. A team that wants to know where it stands in AI answers, why, and what that traffic is worth should start with a Promptwatch trial and compare. Our Profound alternatives page and the full ranking cover the rest.
FAQ
How much does Profound cost?
Starter is $99/mo and Growth $399/mo, both billed yearly. Enterprise is custom, starting around $40k a year.
Which engines does Profound track?
ChatGPT only on Starter and three engines on Growth. Enterprise covers up to ten: ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Gemini, Copilot, Claude, Grok, Meta AI, DeepSeek, and AI Mode.
Does Profound have AI crawler logs?
Not in the materials used for our listing. Promptwatch's Agent Analytics covers that, from the Professional plan.