AI Search / GEO / LLM Visibility
Profound: what it does, what it costs
Answer engine optimisation for brands treating AI visibility as a programme.
Profound at a glance
Every row is a verified field or an honest absence. A row is dropped rather than filled with an em dash, so the length of this table says how complete the record is.
| What it is | Answer engine optimisation for brands treating AI visibility as a programme. |
|---|---|
| Category | AI Search / GEO / LLM Visibility |
| Best suited for | AI visibility is a funded programme rather than a metric someone checks monthly |
| Starting price | From $99/month billed yearly (Starter); Growth $399/month billed yearly |
| Free plan | No |
| Free trial | Offered on Growth through the vendor's "Try for free" flow; length is not stated on the pricing page |
| Main strength | Its own prompt-volume dataset, rather than only measuring the prompts you supply |
| Main limitation | Starter tracks ChatGPT only, with no exports and no API |
| Evidence | Primary-source researched |
| Closest alternatives | Otterly.ai, Peec AI, Scrunch |
| Pricing checked | 18 August 2026 |
| Record checked | 18 August 2026 |
What Profound is
Profound measures how AI assistants describe a brand, publishes its own dataset of what people actually prompt, reads the AI crawler and agent traffic hitting your site through CDN-level integrations, and runs agents that draft optimisation work. It is the most complete answer-engine platform in this directory, and the one whose self-serve tiers least resemble the product people describe.
Two capabilities are genuinely hard to get elsewhere. Prompt Volumes is a dataset of real assistant prompts rather than a list you supply, which changes the exercise from "am I mentioned for my prompts" to "what is being asked at all". And Agent Analytics reads AI crawler and referral traffic through Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly, AWS, Vercel and Netlify, server-side truth about which assistants fetch your pages, not an inference from answers.
The catch is the packaging. Starter at $99 a month tracks ChatGPT only, with one seat, no exports and no API. Nine-engine coverage, more than 100 prompts, API access and multiple brands all sit behind an Enterprise contract, so the published prices describe a narrower product than the marketing does.
Profound in context
Profound is the AI-visibility platform built for teams that have already confirmed AI search matters and want the deepest available data on it. Where tools like Otterly.ai at $29 answer the question “are we mentioned,” Profound at $99 to $399 answers “how often, by which models, when answering what kind of prompts, and which of our pages are the crawlers actually reading.”
Prompt Volumes is the feature that most clearly separates Profound from the rest of the category. Rather than only tracking the prompts a user supplies, it maintains its own dataset of what people actually ask AI assistants — the AI equivalent of keyword research. Knowing that a particular question is asked 50,000 times a month across ChatGPT changes how that prompt gets prioritised, and no other tool in this directory publishes that data.
Agent Analytics reads AI crawler traffic through CDN integrations — Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly, AWS, Vercel, Netlify, WordPress — across unlimited domains. This is server-side evidence of which assistants are fetching pages, how frequently, and which pages they request. It is the closest thing to a log file analysis for AI search, and it provides a direct measurement that answer tracking alone cannot: a model might mention a brand without ever having crawled its pages (using cached or syndicated data), and a model that crawls a page daily might never cite it.
The Starter plan tracking ChatGPT only, with no exports and no API, is a deliberate constraint that positions the lower tier as an evaluation entry rather than a production tool. The jump to Growth at $399 adds two more engines, exports, and API access. Anyone whose requirements include multi-engine tracking and programmatic data access is realistically buying Growth or Enterprise from the start.
What you can use it for
- Track how ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews describe your brand against named competitors
- See which prompts people actually run in assistants, from a dataset rather than a guess
- Read which AI crawlers fetch your pages, at CDN level, across unlimited domains
- Report AI-search visibility with all-time history rather than from the day you signed up
The features that matter for SEO
Each one says what it does and the SEO job it serves. A vendor feature list without that second half tells you nothing you could not read on their own site.
Answer Engine Insights
Tracks brand presence, sentiment and competitor comparison across up to nine named AI platforms.
The core measurement. Nine-engine coverage including Claude, Grok and DeepSeek is the widest here, on Enterprise.
One engine on Starter, three on Growth.
Prompt Volumes
Provides Profound's own dataset of what people ask AI assistants.
The only feature in this category that answers "what is being asked" rather than "how do I score on what I chose to track". That is a research input, not a reporting one.
Agent Analytics
Reads AI crawler and referral traffic through Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly, AWS, Vercel, Netlify and WordPress integrations, across unlimited domains.
Server-side evidence of which assistants fetch your pages and how often, the closest thing to a log file for AI search.
Profound Agents
Generates and optimises content, metered in credits.
Useful for the mechanical part of an optimisation backlog. 100 credits a month on Starter is a small allowance.
Profound Sheets
Runs agents at scale in a spreadsheet surface.
Batch work (auditing several hundred URLs for extractability) without building the pipeline yourself.
ChatGPT Shopping visibility
Reports product-level visibility inside ChatGPT Shopping.
Relevant to ecommerce catalogues rather than SaaS, and Enterprise-only.
All-time history
Retains the full history of tracked answers on every plan.
Means the data starts the day you sign up rather than the day you upgrade, which matters for a surface with no other historical record.
Pricing and limits
Starting price: From $99/month billed yearly (Starter); Growth $399/month billed yearly Checked 18 August 2026 Vendor’s own pricing page
| Plan | Price | What it includes |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | $99 /mo Billed yearly, advertised as two months free |
|
| Growth | $399 /mo Billed yearly, advertised as two months free |
|
| Enterprise | Custom |
|
Strengths and limitations
Strengths
- Its own prompt-volume dataset, rather than only measuring the prompts you supply
- Agent Analytics reads AI crawler and referral traffic at CDN level, across unlimited domains
- All-time history on every plan, in a category where retention is often tied to tier
- Enterprise coverage extends to nine engines including Claude, Grok and DeepSeek
Limitations
- Starter tracks ChatGPT only, with no exports and no API
- One seat on Starter and two on Growth, where several rivals sell unlimited users
- Prompt coverage above 100, and engines beyond three, require an Enterprise contract
- The company publishes neither a headquarters address nor a founding date
- Agent credits are a second currency to manage alongside prompts
Who it is for, and who should skip it
Worth it if
- AI visibility is a funded programme rather than a metric someone checks monthly
- You want prompt-demand research, not just presence reporting
- You can act on CDN-level agent traffic data
Skip it if
- You need more than one engine on a small budget
- You need exports or an API without an Enterprise contract
- You are an agency needing multiple brands on a self-serve plan
Alternatives to Profound
Each one answers when it is the better choice, which is the only thing a list of competitors is useful for.
- Otterly.ai Choose it when you want to start measuring for $29 a month across four engines, and can live with 15 prompts.
- Peec AI Choose it when you want daily tracking with unlimited users and country coverage included, at a mid price.
- Scrunch Choose it when you want the site audit and the answer tracking treated as one loop rather than two products.
Sources and verification
Last verified 18 August 2026 22 days ago
Pricing 18 August 2026 Plans 18 August 2026 Features 18 August 2026 Company 18 August 2026
- Profound pricing Pricing page verifies pricing, plans, limits, features checked 18 August 2026
- Profound careers Company verifies company checked 18 August 2026
Questions
How much does Profound cost?
Starter is $99 a month and Growth is $399 a month, both billed yearly, as of 18 August 2026. Nine-engine coverage, API access, exports beyond CSV and JSON, and more than 100 prompts require an Enterprise contract with no published price.
What does Profound track that other AI visibility tools do not?
Two things. Prompt Volumes is its own dataset of what people actually ask assistants, rather than only reporting on prompts you supply. And Agent Analytics reads AI crawler traffic through CDN integrations, which is server-side evidence rather than an inference from answers.
Is Profound worth it over a cheaper tracker?
If AI visibility is a funded programme and you can use prompt-demand data and CDN-level crawler analytics, the extra capability is real. If the requirement is "tell me whether we are mentioned across four engines", a $29-to-$205 tracker answers that for a fraction of the price.