Profound review: what it does, pricing, and its main competitors

What Profound is

Profound describes itself as an AI marketing platform for winning visibility in AI search. On its homepage the product is split into two halves:

• Monitor: Answer Engine Insights (how AI answers mention and cite you), Prompt Volumes (what people ask AI, which Profound says is based on analysis of real user conversations), Shopping, and Agent Analytics (how AI crawlers and agents hit your site).
• AI Marketer: agents and a Context Manager that use that data to find work, draft content and send it for approval.

It also lists citation analytics, benchmarking, sentiment, fact checking, and enterprise controls such as role-based access, SCIM and SOC 2 support.

Profound is a New York company backed by large venture firms. Its own newsroom announced a $35 million Series B led by Sequoia Capital in August 2025, with Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures, Saga VC and South Park Commons also in the round. It has raised more since; we have kept later figures out of this review until they are confirmed from a primary source.

Profound pricing

Profound's pricing page shows two plans and no published monthly price for the paid one.

Both plans include unlimited seats. The pricing page FAQ also mentions a self-serve agency plan, but it does not list a price for it, so we have not quoted one here. If you need a number for budgeting, you will have to talk to their sales team.

Strengths

• Engine coverage. Up to nine answer engines on Enterprise is among the widest lists we have seen published by a vendor in this category.
• Prompt demand data. Prompt Volumes tries to answer a question most tools skip: which prompts are people actually typing, not just which ones you chose to track.
• Crawler visibility. Agent Analytics shows how AI bots and agents reach your site, which helps when you suspect a robots.txt or CDN rule is blocking them.
• Built for large teams. Unlimited seats, SSO, role-based access and API access are what procurement teams at large companies ask for.
• Content workflow. The AI Marketer side means you are not limited to reports; the platform proposes and drafts work.

Limitations

• No public price for paid plans. You cannot compare cost per prompt with other tools without a sales call.
• The free trial is narrow. Seven days, a recommended prompt set you cannot customize, and three engines. It shows the product, but it will not tell you much about your real visibility.
• It is a platform, not a fix. Profound shows where you are missing and can draft content, but someone on your side still has to change robots.txt rules, add schema, fix entity data and publish pages. For many small and mid-sized businesses that is the hard part.
• More than most small teams need. If you have one site and a handful of competitors, enterprise features like SCIM and multi-region tracking add cost without adding much value.

Who Profound is for

Profound fits large brands and enterprise marketing teams that already have SEO and content people, want data across many AI engines and regions, and have budget for an enterprise contract. Agencies managing several large clients may also fit, depending on the agency plan terms.

It is a weaker fit for a local business, a small SaaS company or an ecommerce store that wants to know "are we showing up in ChatGPT, and what do we change?" without hiring someone to act on a dashboard.

Profound competitors compared

These are the tools buyers most often compare with Profound. Prices are what each vendor showed on its own pricing page when we checked on 21 October 2026.

For a longer list, see our roundup of AI visibility tools.

Platform vs done-for-you: where we fit

We are listed in the table above, so to be plain about it: we are not a Profound competitor in the software sense. Profound, Peec, Scrunch, Otterly and AthenaHQ are monitoring and analytics platforms. You log in, you see the data, and your team decides what to do.

Our AI search optimization services work the other way round. You start with a free AI visibility audit. On the $299/month plan, month one fixes what the audit found: AI crawler access, schema, llms.txt, entity data and content gaps. After that we keep optimizing and monitor up to 50 prompts a month across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. There is a 3-month minimum, or $2,990 a year. Sites over 500 pages get a custom quote.

If you have an in-house team and want the deepest data, a platform like Profound makes sense. If you want an AI SEO agency to do the work, a platform alone will not get it done.

How to choose

1. Decide who will act on the data. If nobody on your team has time to implement changes, a dashboard will sit unused.
2. Count your prompts and engines. Most tools price by prompts multiplied by engines. Write down the 20 to 100 questions your buyers ask and the engines that matter in your market.
3. Check the free tiers first. Profound, AthenaHQ and Otterly offer free trials or tiers. Run your own prompts where the trial allows it.
4. Ask for the price in writing. For custom-priced tools, get the per-prompt cost so you can compare like for like.

If you are still learning the basics, our guide to generative engine optimization explains what these tools are measuring.