Profound Review and Alternatives for AI Visibility in 2026

Short answer: pooled across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, Profound is the AI visibility platform named most often when they answer AI-visibility buyer questions in the Machine Relations Index question library, though not first on every engine. In the Index answer ledger, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and ChatGPT named Profound in 338 of 1,583 answers (21.4%), more than any of the ten vendors we counted, and in 153 of 260 answers (58.8%) to "best AI visibility tool" questions. Those are library prompts, not measured buyer demand. ChatGPT, for one, named Profound in only 26 of its 405 answers and named Ahrefs in more. Buy it if you need enterprise-grade prompt tracking, server-log agent analytics and prompt-volume research in one contract. Look at alternatives if you need transparent self-serve pricing, a tool inside an SEO suite you already run, or if your real gap is the third-party coverage that decides who gets recommended.

Updated November 4, 2026 on Index release of November 3, 2026; the changes since the October 13 version are in What changed since October 13. This is an evaluation built on citation data, not the feature grid. Every vendor in this category publishes a feature grid. What a buyer cannot get from a grid is how the product and its maker actually show up in the answers engines give to buyers like you. The Machine Relations Index measures that daily across six AI engines, and it is the evidence under each heading below. The Index is a related-party measurement, published by Machine Relations Research and created by AuthorityTech's founder, so its method and files are linked rather than taken on trust.

If you are comparing enterprise suites rather than point tools, read our BrightEdge AI visibility review and the Conductor alternatives guide. This page answers one question: should you buy Profound, and if not, what instead?

Key numbers

• Named most. Of the ten vendors we counted, pooled across 1,583 answers from four engines to AI-visibility buyer questions, Profound was named in 338 (21.4%). Semrush was next at 273 (17.2%), then Peec at 263 (16.6%) and Otterly.AI at 262 (16.6%); Peec and Otterly.AI are one answer apart.
• Strongest on lists. Profound's own site ranks 1st of 837 cited sources on "top AI visibility tools" questions and 10th of 616 on "best tools" questions.
• Weaker on evaluation. On "is it worth it" questions the same site ranks 75th of 708, tied with 19 other domains. On those library prompts, engines cite other sites.
• Named off other people's pages. In 303 answers that named Profound and cited any source, 222 (73.3%) cited only sites other than Profound's own.
• Uneven by engine. Gemini named Profound in 151 of 360 answers (41.9%). ChatGPT named it in 26 of 405 (6.4%).
• Scale. Profound announced a $180 million Series D at a $1.8 billion valuation on September 15, 2026, co-led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, and says it serves more than 1,000 enterprise brands.

Profound evaluation at a glance

Buyer rubric	Our read on Profound	What to make the vendor prove
Data accuracy	Structured prompt runs per Profound; we did not test its accuracy, and the accuracy of any blended score is yours to verify	Raw answers, timestamps, engine, locale and how a name is matched in each answer
Model coverage	Up to nine engines on Enterprise; three on Trial	Which engines are in your contract, not on the capability list
Agent analytics	A real strength, built on server logs rather than JavaScript tags; not unique to Profound	Bot verification on your own CDN logs, and a failed-crawl example
LLM optimization	Agents that rewrite and stage pages, plus outreach drafts	One finding traced to a shipped change and a measured result
Prompt volume	A panel-based dataset Profound describes as more than 1.5 billion conversations; modeled, not a census	Which panels, which regions, and how volumes are projected
Citation analysis	Sources, co-citation and uncited-prompt detection	A source-level export you can reconcile yourself
Metrics	Visibility, share of voice, sentiment, position and citations	Cited and named reported as separate outcomes

What the citation data says about Profound

The Index release used here is the November 3, 2026 release, covering 35,433 monitored answer runs across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity from May 10 to November 3, 2026. Profound's domain, tryprofound.com, was cited in 119 of those runs, which puts it at rank 137 of 35,666 observed domains in the Index's published order (three domains tie at 119 cited runs). All 119 cited runs are in one category, AI Visibility and GEO, and the rate varies sharply by the kind of question the buyer asks.

Buyer question shape	Cited runs	Observed runs	Citation rate	Standing among cited sources
Top lists	43	235	18.30%	1st of 837
Best tools	37	284	13.03%	10th of 616
How buyers choose	23	282	8.16%	5th of 699
Comparisons	7	301	2.33%	51st of 585 (8 tied)
Is it worth it	6	307	1.95%	75th of 708 (19 tied)
Problem-first research	3	301	1.00%	115th of 682 (44 tied)

Read that table as a funnel. Profound's own content is what engines reach for when a buyer asks for a list, and the rate falls from 18.30% on lists to 1.95% on "is it worth it." Both rates are pooled across six engines on a fixed question library, so they are not any one engine's rate and not buyer behaviour. When the buyer moves to "how do I choose" and "is it worth the money," engines cite YouTube, Reddit, HubSpot and smaller agency and vendor sites instead. That is not a flaw in Profound's content: on "is it worth it" prompts Profound's own site was cited in 1.95% of runs, and we did not measure other sellers.

The second cut comes from the Index answer ledger, which records the text of each answer as well as its sources. We counted how often each vendor's name appears in the answer text itself, on the four engines whose captured answers are clean prose.

Vendor	Answers naming it, of 1,583	Best-tools answers, of 260	Top-list answers, of 217
Profound	338	153	110
Semrush	273	127	74
Peec AI	263	113	95
Otterly.AI	262	123	72
Ahrefs	191	93	45
Scrunch	91	41	45
AthenaHQ	76	32	21
BrightEdge	40	12	13
Conductor	22	10	6
Evertune	21	3	16

The ten vendors were chosen in advance. Other names appear in the answers too (SE Ranking in 97 answers, Writesonic in 63, Rankscale in 50 and Siftly in 42, matched the same way), and Profound is named in more answers than any name we counted. On this question library Profound is named most, but the lead is not uniform: on top-list questions Peec is named in more answers than Semrush or Otterly.AI, and Peec and Otterly.AI are one answer apart overall. The name match is clean: the capitalized word "Profound" appeared in 0 of 26,662 answers from the same engines in every other category on the same panel, so the count is the vendor and not the adjective. AthenaHQ is counted by its full name ("AthenaHQ" or "Athena HQ"); the October 13 page's 63 also counted the bare word "Athena", and the same strict rule gives 52 for that date.

What changed since October 13

The October 13 version read the October 13, 2026 Machine Relations Index release and the ledger through October 12. The ledger and the release have both grown since, and the later snapshot contains the earlier one.

Measure	October 13 snapshot	November 3 snapshot
Runs citing tryprofound.com	91 of 24,496	119 of 35,433
Overall standing	143rd of 30,093 domains	137th of 35,666 domains
Top lists	2nd of 706	1st of 837
Best tools	9th of 517	10th of 616
Answers naming Profound	240 of 1,128 (21.3%)	338 of 1,583 (21.4%)
Naming order after Profound	Semrush, Otterly.AI, Peec	Semrush, Peec, Otterly.AI
AthenaHQ named by full name	52	76

Read the table as two snapshots, not a trend. The later sample is larger, includes every earlier answer, and has its own pool of cited domains, so a better or worse rank, or a share that barely moved, does not show that Profound's standing improved or slipped. The share of answers naming Profound is about one in five in both snapshots. Where a shape's rank has ties, the two versions handled them differently, so the tied shapes are left out. The Series D announcement landed on September 15, before both snapshots, so it does not explain either.

Profound product names: Answer Engine Insights, Prompt Volumes, Agents, and the retired Actions and Conversation Explorer

Profound has renamed or folded several products since 2025, and buyers still ask about them by their old names. This is what each name points to on Profound's own site, checked November 9, 2026.

Name you may be evaluating	What it is now	Evidence on Profound's site
Answer Engine Insights	Profound's monitoring product: visibility score and share of voice, sentiment and keyword themes, the sources cited in answers, and FactCheck, which lists inaccurate claims about your brand with their sources	The Answer Engine Insights page
Conversation Explorer	The earlier name of Prompt Volumes. It described the same licensed consumer-panel data and the same keyword and topic volumes across AI platforms	The archived Conversation Explorer page from August 2025; the old address now redirects to Prompt Volumes
Actions	Launched in July 2025 as data-driven content briefs. Its feature page now returns a not-found error, and Profound's own launch post links its content-brief feature to Agents	The Actions launch post and the current Agents page
Agents, Context Manager and AI Marketer	The current layer that drafts briefs, rewrites pages and runs outreach workflows, grouped under AI Marketer in Profound's navigation	The Agents, Context Manager and AI Marketer pages

So an evaluation of "Profound Actions" today is an evaluation of Agents and AI Marketer (the LLM optimization section below), and an evaluation of "Conversation Explorer" is an evaluation of Prompt Volumes (the prompt volume section). Ask the sales team which of these names are in your contract, because credits and plan limits attach to the current products.

Data accuracy

Profound says it runs structured prompts across AI platforms and analyses where and how a brand appears, tracking citations, sentiment, ranking and competitive presence, per its pricing page FAQ. That is the standard method in this category, and it is sound at the prompt level in principle. We have not tested Profound's own capture, and we dropped a third-party hands-on review we cited in October because that page has since changed and no longer says what we quoted.

The accuracy risk sits one layer up, in how raw answers become a score. Two traps are worth testing in any demo:

1. Source labels read as mentions. On Google AI Mode and AI Overviews the captured answer text interleaves Google's own source chips with the prose. A tracker that matches brand names on that raw text will count names the answer never wrote. The Machine Relations Index strips that layer before counting a name, which is why the vendor-naming table above uses the four chat engines only.
2. Cited and named merged into one number. Profound's own record shows why this matters: of the 303 answers that named Profound and cited any source, 81 cited Profound's own site. Being named and being cited can be different outcomes with different causes.

Ask Profound to export fifty raw answers behind one visibility score and reconcile them yourself.

Model coverage

On Enterprise, Profound lists capability for up to nine answer engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Anthropic Claude, Google AI Overviews and Exa Search. The free Trial covers ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, 50 unique prompts run daily for seven days, from a recommended prompt set you cannot customize. Copilot matters more than most buyers assume, because Microsoft grounds Copilot's web answers through Bing when web search is on. Confirm Copilot is in your contract, not only on the capability list.

The citation data adds a reason to insist on per-engine reporting. Engines treat the same vendor very differently:

Engine	Answers naming Profound	Answers read	Share	Last run in the window
Gemini	151	360	41.9%	2026-10-26
Claude	87	409	21.3%	2026-11-02
Perplexity	74	409	18.1%	2026-11-02
ChatGPT	26	405	6.4%	2026-11-02

A blended visibility number averages those away. Your own brand may show a spread like this too, and the engine your buyers use most may be the one where you are weakest; the only way to know is to measure it per engine. The Gemini window ends a week earlier than the others, and the release manifest flags Gemini's collection health, so read its row as a snapshot.

Agent analytics

This is a real strength for Profound, but not one it holds alone. Agent Analytics reads server logs through integrations that Profound's pricing page lists as Akamai, AWS, Cloudflare, Fastly, Google Analytics, Google Cloud Platform, Netlify, Vercel and WordPress, rather than a JavaScript tag. Profound says it separates verified AI bots from spoofed crawlers, attributes human visits that arrive from AI search, and benchmarks page-level citation performance against more than two million pages in its network. The pricing page lists Agent Analytics on the free Trial as well as Enterprise.

Peec AI's pricing page, read the same day, lists a crawlability audit of 40+ AI bots' robots.txt status, AI referrals, crawl insights (which bots hit which pages, how often and with what status code) and CDN and log integrations (Vercel, Cloudflare, AWS CloudFront, Google Cloud CDN, WordPress, Akamai, a generic webhook and CSV/CLF upload) on every plan, from its $95 Starter tier. Scrunch and Otterly.AI each list agent-traffic analytics in their site navigation, which we did not test. So the comparison is not log-based against none. The differences to test are the ones Profound documents and we did not find described on Peec's pricing page: bot verification against spoofing and the cross-site benchmark, and whether either matters at your traffic level.

Log-based measurement is the right design. AI crawlers are several distinct agents with distinct rules: OpenAI documents OAI-SearchBot as the crawler for ChatGPT search results and GPTBot as the one for training, Anthropic documents separate agents for training, user retrieval and search, and Cloudflare classifies AI crawlers, AI search bots and user-directed assistants as different categories. A tool that reports one "AI traffic" line hides that. The trade-off is setup: the analytics depend on a CDN or log integration your engineering team has to approve. We have not tested any vendor's bot classification.

LLM optimization

Profound has moved from dashboard to doer. Its AI Marketer rewrites pages it judges to be losing citations and stages them in your CMS, drafts new pages for unanswered questions and writes sponsored-answer creative; the rewrite agents work on pages you own. It also describes finding earned-media opportunities and drafting personalized correction requests to publishers repeating outdated facts, per its home page and Series D announcement. We tested none of this. Agents run on credits, and the credit volume is set in the Enterprise contract.

In Profound's own record the pages the engines cited were mostly somebody else's: in 222 of the 303 answers that named Profound while citing sources, none of the cited pages were Profound's. The most frequent were therankmasters.com (44 answers), seranking.com (43), otterly.ai (42), nicklafferty.com (40), youtube.com (39) and reddit.com (39); some are other vendors' own sites. That is one brand's pattern in one category and one question library, not a rule for yours. Ask the vendor which share of your own recommendations comes from pages you control before you buy credits to rewrite them.

Prompt volume

Prompt Volumes is Profound's most distinctive dataset: keyword and topic volumes with intent classification and filters by platform, age range and income, plus Prompt Research Reports drawn from what Profound describes as more than 1.5 billion real AI conversations. Peec AI shows a coarser relative-demand score from 1 to 5 for each tracked prompt on every plan, so the question is how much resolution you need.

Profound's own explanation of where the data comes from is specific, and it is the vendor's description, not something we have audited. It says it licenses conversations from multiple double-opt-in consumer panels of real answer-engine users; that the data is anonymized, aggregated and scrubbed of personal information under GDPR and CCPA; that it starts from tens of millions of real prompts a month, with the scale elsewhere on the page given as hundreds of millions of prompts a month from millions of active users; that it applies statistical modeling it says corrects for demographic and geographic biases and scales volumes to the full population; and that data is refreshed weekly. Prompt Volumes covers ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, not all nine engines Enterprise tracks, and lists coverage in the US, Canada, Italy, Brazil, Germany, Australia, Spain, South Korea, France and the UK.

Read that as what it is: a licensed panel, modeled up to the market. That is a reasonable way to get demand data when no engine publishes its own, and also the reason the volumes are estimates. The panels are not named on the pages we read, the two scale figures on those pages are not reconciled, and the bias correction is Profound's model. Ask which panels and regions cover your market, how the projection is validated, and then check the priority it produces against your own Search Console and Bing data before you act on it.

Citation analysis

Citation analysis sits inside Answer Engine Insights, Profound's monitoring product. It covers sources cited across answers, co-citation mapping that shows which competitors appear beside you, and uncited-prompt detection that finds questions where a competitor's page is cited and yours is not. Its pricing page now lists all-time history, CSV and JSON export and API access under Enterprise and none of them on the Trial, so confirm each is in your contract.

The analysis tells you which third-party pages engines cite in your category. Acting on that list is a different job, covered in the last section.

Metrics

Profound reports visibility score, share of voice, sentiment, position and citations by platform. Those are the right families. The test is whether each is reported per engine and whether citation and naming stay separate. We have shown elsewhere that a rising citation count does not prove your brand is named, and the ledger above shows the two moving apart for Profound itself: most answers that name it cite pages that are not its own.

Pricing

Per Profound's pricing page, read on November 4, 2026, there are two plans for brands, plus a self-serve Agency Growth plan for agencies (400 credits a month per client workspace; no price shown). Trial is free with limited AI Marketer credits, 50 unique prompts run daily for seven days on three engines, one language and one region, Agent Analytics for unlimited domains, five Prompt Volumes searches, and no history, export or API. Enterprise is custom: AI Marketer credits for your whole team, a tailored prompt tracking plan, up to nine engines, dedicated support, SSO and SAML, SOC 2 compliance, all-time history, CSV and JSON export and API access. G2's partner page for Profound lists 4.5 out of 5 across more than a thousand reviews, read November 4, 2026; we could not open G2's own review pages, so we do not summarize the criticisms in them.

Where Profound is strong

• Named most in our question library. The naming data above is the clearest evidence we can offer of how engines handle the category, and Profound leads it, with the caveats stated there.
• Breadth of engines on the Enterprise plan, including Copilot, DeepSeek and Exa.
• Agent analytics built on logs, with bot verification and a network benchmark that Profound documents, and available on the free Trial.
• A panel-based prompt-volume dataset. Profound's volume claims are stated above; we did not compare other vendors' panels.
• Capital and momentum: TechCrunch reported the Series D came less than seven months after a $96 million Series C.

Profound alternatives and competitors

The vendors below are the ones AI engines name alongside Profound, ordered by how often the Index ledger found them named in answers to AI-visibility questions (the counts are in the naming table above).

Alternative	Best fit
Semrush AI Toolkit	Teams that want AI visibility inside the SEO suite they already run
Peec AI	Teams that want published self-serve pricing, from $95 a month for 50 prompts and three models, with crawl insights (capped by plan, 4.5M bot visits on Starter) and CDN or log integrations on every plan
Otterly.AI	Monitoring-first buyers who want simple reporting
Ahrefs Brand Radar	Teams already on Ahrefs for links and content research
Scrunch	Brands that want monitoring plus agent-facing pages and AI traffic analysis
BrightEdge	Enterprise SEO teams that need source and agent diagnostics
Conductor	Enterprise SEO programs that want AI reporting in the same workflow
Evertune	Brands that want AI visibility and advertising in one platform

Where the named count is low, the vendor may still be the right fit; it was named in fewer of the library's answers, which is not the same as being a weaker product. For the enterprise suites in depth, see the BrightEdge review, the BrightEdge vs Semrush comparison and the Semrush alternatives guide.

Who should buy Profound

• An enterprise marketing team that needs daily prompt tracking across most engines and will use the API.
• A site large enough that crawler behaviour and AI referral traffic justify a log integration.
• A team with content capacity, where agents that draft and stage work save real hours.

Who should look elsewhere

• Teams that need a published price for a brand plan before a sales call.
• Teams that want AI visibility as one tab inside an existing SEO suite.
• Anyone expecting the software to put them on the lists engines read. Profound can show you those lists; the pages on them belong to other people.

Where earned media still fits

Profound's own record points the same way, in this category and this question library. The most-named vendor is named, in most answers that cite anything, while the engine cites someone else's page. The pages doing that work were vendor blogs, roundups, videos and community threads written by people who are not Profound. That is consistent with engines putting a vendor on the shortlist when other credible sites already discuss it in the category, though the Index records outcomes, not causes.

The same mechanism may decide whether your brand is recommended; measure it for your category before you assume it. A tracker, Profound included, measures that outcome and can tell you which third-party sources your category runs on. Getting your company into those sources is earned media: coverage in the publications and reviews engines already cite. Machine Relations is the discipline that treats that as one system, measured by the Machine Relations Index. AuthorityTech is the earned-media practice that applies it for clients.

Buy the measurement tool that fits your team. Then fund the part of the answer the tool can only watch.

Sources and method

Citation standings come from Machine Relations Index release of November 3, 2026, window May 10 to November 3, 2026, read on November 3, 2026 from the public file at machinerelations.ai/data/machine-relations-index.json (artifact sha256 c812e2190baa56ca4bce7c1cdde4be26e043f518f9e3cf0765480c83aacdd1af, archived unchanged as an Internet Archive copy of the artifact with an identical manifest copy), the tryprofound.com profile and the AI Visibility and GEO segment pages. Cited runs and observed runs per question shape are the artifact's own strata fields; ranks order the domains cited at least once in a shape by cited runs, with tied domains sharing the best rank, which can differ from the tie handling in the October 13 version, so only untied ranks are compared across snapshots. Vendor-naming counts come from the Index answer ledger (internal export of November 3, 2026, 08:10 UTC): the 1,583 successful answers from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity to publicly scored AI Visibility and GEO questions on the current panel, run dates July 8 to November 2, 2026, except Gemini, whose last run in the export is October 26, with Markdown links, URLs and bare domain strings removed before matching each vendor name (so a name that appears only in a cited link's title is not counted: ChatGPT's count is 26 under this rule, not 28). The ledger holds answer text that the public file does not, so these counts can be checked by us but not recomputed by readers. Before applying the rules to newer runs we reproduced the October 13 version's counts exactly from the same export (1,128 answers; Profound 240, 113 on best-tools and 72 on top-list questions; 217 answers naming Profound and citing a source, 156 citing none of Profound's own pages; 0 of 16,874 other-category answers on the same panel), so the two snapshots use one method. The October 13 column's 91 cited runs and its untied shape ranks (2nd of 706 and 9th of 517) reproduce from the ledger; its 24,496 total runs and 143rd of 30,093 overall standing are the October 13 page's published figures, which we could not recompute because that release file is no longer served. The November 3 snapshot contains the October 13 answers, and Gemini's collection health is flagged in the release manifest, so a difference between snapshots is not a trend. The panel's earliest run date for these four engines is July 8, 2026, not May 10 as the October 13 version stated. Vendor capabilities and prices were read on November 4, 2026 from Profound's pricing page, Prompt Volumes, Agent Analytics and home page, its Series D announcement, Peec AI's pricing page and the other vendors' home pages. G2's own review pages returned 403 to our requests, so the rating comes from G2's partner page for Profound. A citation or a name in an answer is an observed outcome; it does not show what caused it. The Index is published by Machine Relations Research and created by Jaxon Parrott, AuthorityTech's founder; it is a related-party measurement, not an independent audit.

The version of this page published September 29, 2026 used the v2.0 release; the October 13 update used v2.1 release 2026-10-13; the changes since are tabulated under What changed since October 13.

FAQ

Is Profound worth it? For an enterprise team that will use daily multi-engine tracking, log-based agent analytics and prompt-volume research, it is a strong candidate, and, pooled across four engines, it is the vendor named most often in our question library. Smaller teams or teams that want a published price should compare Peec AI, Otterly.AI or the AI features in Semrush and Ahrefs first.

What are the best Profound alternatives? By how often AI engines name them on AI-visibility questions in our library: Semrush, Peec AI, Otterly.AI, Ahrefs Brand Radar, then Scrunch and AthenaHQ. Enterprise SEO teams should also evaluate BrightEdge and Conductor.

How much does Profound cost? Profound offers a free seven-day Trial and custom Enterprise pricing quoted by its sales team, plus a self-serve Agency Growth plan for agencies whose price is not shown, per its pricing page on November 4, 2026.

What happened to Profound Actions and Conversation Explorer? Conversation Explorer is the earlier name of Prompt Volumes, and its old address now redirects there. Actions launched in July 2025 as content briefs; its feature page now returns a not-found error, and Profound's own launch post links the content-brief feature to Agents, part of what Profound now groups as AI Marketer. Both were checked on Profound's site on November 9, 2026.

What is Profound Answer Engine Insights? It is Profound's monitoring product: how often your brand appears in AI answers (visibility score and share of voice), how answers describe it, which sources they cite, and FactCheck, which lists inaccurate claims about your brand with their sources. Evaluate it on the data accuracy and metrics tests above.

Which AI engines does Profound track? On Enterprise: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Claude, Google AI Overviews and Exa Search. The Trial covers ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews.

Where does Profound's prompt-volume data come from? Profound says it licenses conversations from multiple double-opt-in consumer panels of real answer-engine users, anonymized and aggregated, and models them up to the wider market, correcting for demographic and geographic bias. It is a panel estimate, not a census, the panels are not named on the pages we read, and we have not audited it.