Profound Review 2026: Pricing, Features, and Alternatives

Profound Review 2026: Pricing, Features, and Alternatives

Profound is the enterprise end of the AI visibility market. It has the largest brand recognition in the category, the deepest reporting, and a price structure that makes the entry plan look accessible while the plan most teams actually need costs four times as much. This review separates what you get at each level from what the marketing implies, and names the situations where a cheaper tool does the same job.

Last reviewed: August 2026. Confirm current pricing with the vendor — this category revises plans frequently.

What Profound does

Profound monitors how brands appear inside AI answer engines. You supply prompts; the platform executes them at scale, captures the responses, and reports visibility, competitive share, sentiment, and the sources feeding each answer. Two capabilities distinguish it from the mid-market tools:

• Prompt Volumes — estimates of how frequently a given question is actually asked, which turns prompt selection from guesswork into prioritisation. This is the genuinely differentiated feature.
• Agent Analytics — server-side measurement of AI agents and crawlers hitting your own domain. Rather than only asking models what they say, it observes which AI systems are reading you and how often.

Agent Analytics deserves attention because it inverts the usual approach. Most tools sample outputs. This measures inputs — and input data is where causes live.

Profound pricing

Plan	Price per month	What you get
Starter	$99 (billed annually)	50 prompts, 1,500 responses per month, ChatGPT only
Growth	$399 (billed annually)	100 prompts, 9,000 responses per month, ChatGPT + Perplexity + Google AI Overviews, one language, one region, unlimited Agent Analytics domains
Enterprise	custom	up to 9 answer engines, custom prompt and response limits, multiple languages and regions, API, SSO/SAML, dedicated Slack support

A seven-day Growth trial is available. Third-party reports in early 2026 placed real enterprise deployments between roughly $2,000 and $5,000+ per month depending on engine count, seats, and features.

Read the Starter plan carefully

Ninety-nine dollars for 50 prompts reads like the best value in the category until you notice the constraint: ChatGPT only. One engine. For a brand whose buyers use Google AI Overviews — which is most brands, because AI Overviews appear inside ordinary search results — a single-engine subscription is not a measurement of AI visibility. It is a measurement of one channel presented as a category.

The 1,500 monthly response cap tightens it further. Fifty prompts run daily across a month produces roughly 1,500 responses, so the plan is calibrated to exactly one run per prompt per day with no headroom for multiple regions or languages.

The honest reading: Starter is a trial tier with a price tag. Growth at $399 is the first plan that measures the market.

Strengths

• Prompt Volumes. The only widely available data that indicates which questions are actually being asked, rather than which questions you assume matter.
• Agent Analytics. Server-side visibility into AI crawler behaviour on your own domain — closer to cause than any output sampling.
• Engine breadth at enterprise level. Up to nine answer engines, more than any mid-market competitor.
• Multi-region and multi-language handling that actually works for global brands.
• Reporting depth. Built for stakeholders who need board-ready output, not just a dashboard.

Limitations

• The entry plan is single-engine. Priced as an on-ramp, scoped as a demo.
• The real price is $399+. Compared like-for-like against Otterly Standard ($189, four engines) or Peec Pro (~€205), Growth is expensive for what it measures — the premium buys Prompt Volumes and Agent Analytics, not more engines.
• Annual billing on self-serve plans. The advertised prices assume a year's commitment.
• Enterprise pricing is opaque. Four-figure monthly deals require a sales process and a budget approval, which is a poor fit for teams that want to start measuring next week.
• Still measurement, not remediation. Even with Agent Analytics, deciding what to change and changing it remains your work.

Who should buy Profound

A good fit for enterprise brands operating in several markets and languages, where AI visibility is reported to executives, and where Prompt Volumes genuinely changes prioritisation across hundreds of topics. If you are managing a category with dozens of product lines, the volume data alone can justify the cost.

The wrong purchase for a single-market mid-market company. At that scale, Otterly Standard or Peec Pro delivers the same practical decisions for half the price, and the money saved is better spent on the content and technical work the monitoring will tell you to do anyway.

Profound alternatives

• Otterly.ai — $29 to $489 per month, four engines as standard including AI Overviews and Copilot. Best value per engine in the category. See the Otterly.ai review.
• Peec AI — Berlin-based, from about €85 per month, strongest source attribution, EU contracting. See the Peec AI review.
• Scrunch AI, AthenaHQ — mid-market platforms with comparable feature sets and US-centric coverage.
• GEO Tool — our own product, positioned deliberately differently. We do not sell monitoring. The GEO Score evaluates whether your site is accessible, structured, and citable for AI systems at all — crawler access, answer-shaped passages, structured data, entity signals. It is the diagnostic that belongs before a monitoring contract, not instead of one.

A note on sequencing

The pattern we see repeatedly: a team buys a monitoring platform, watches a flat line near zero for a quarter, and concludes that AI search is overhyped. In the majority of those cases the site was blocking AI crawlers, or its content contained no passage a model could quote, or its structured data described something other than what the company sells. The monitoring was accurate. It was simply measuring the consequence of a fixable problem nobody had looked for.

Diagnose first. Then decide how much monitoring you need — the answer is often less than the sales conversation suggests.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Profound cost?

Starter is $99 per month and Growth $399 per month, both billed annually. Enterprise is custom, with reported deployments ranging from roughly $2,000 to $5,000+ per month.

Which engines does Profound cover?

Starter covers ChatGPT only. Growth adds Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. Enterprise covers up to nine answer engines.

Is there a free trial?

Yes — a seven-day trial of the Growth plan.

What is Agent Analytics?

Server-side measurement of AI agents and crawlers visiting your own domain, showing which AI systems read your content and how often. Growth includes unlimited Agent Analytics domains.

Is Profound worth $399 a month?

For multi-market enterprise brands, often yes — Prompt Volumes and Agent Analytics have no direct equivalent at lower price points. For a single-market mid-market company, a $189 plan elsewhere usually supports the same decisions.

What is the best Profound alternative?

Otterly.ai for cost and engine breadth, Peec AI for EU contracting and source analysis, and a citability diagnostic such as the GEO Score if you have not yet established why you are missing from AI answers.

Verdict

Profound is the most capable platform in the category and priced like it. Prompt Volumes and Agent Analytics are real differentiators that justify the premium for enterprises operating at scale. The Starter plan, however, should be read as what it is — a single-engine demo — and mid-market teams comparing on engine coverage alone will find better value elsewhere. Whatever you choose, establish that your site is citable before you commit to a year of measuring it.

Check how citable your website is for AI systems — free →