10 Best Profound Alternatives in 2026

On 15 September 2026, Profound announced $180M in new funding at a $1.8B valuation. Within days, the 2 plans a smaller team could buy with a card were gone from its pricing page: Starter at $99 a month and Growth at $399. A brand that lands there now sees a free 7-day trial on 50 prompts Profound chooses, and an Enterprise plan whose price reads “Custom”. Picture the SEO lead at a 200-person payroll software company. They had Growth in this quarter’s budget, to find out whether ChatGPT names the company when someone asks for the best payroll software for a 50-person US startup. That plan is gone, and the next step is a demo call. Most of Profound’s competitors went the other way. They publish their prices, most bill monthly, and you can start the same afternoon. This post covers 10 of them: how each one collects AI answers, what its plans charge for, and which of Profound’s 4 parts it can stand in for.

Prices and plans side by side #

Prices are each vendor’s monthly list price on 24 September 2026, with paid plans listed low to high.

How Profound works #

Profound runs your prompts through the AI apps’ own web interfaces, in a browser, the way a buyer would, once a day. Its case for doing it that way is that “API responses and front-end responses from the same model can diverge”, because the public app carries context an API call does not see (Profound vs Conductor). Each answer is then parsed for the brands named, their position, the sentiment and the pages cited.

The headline number is worth understanding before you move, because it will not match what the next tool shows you. Profound’s Visibility Score is the share of answers that name you, out of the answers that name at least 1 brand (help centre). An answer that names nobody does not count against you. A plain mention rate divides by every answer instead. So on a prompt where ChatGPT often replies with general advice and no vendor names, Profound’s score runs higher. Both are fair definitions, but a 15-point drop after a switch may be nothing more than a new denominator.

Until mid-September, a plan metered prompts, answer engines, seats and Agent credits. Growth gave 100 prompts on ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews, which works out to 9,000 answers a month (100 x 3 x 30), plus 3 seats and 400 Agent credits, for $399 a month. Starter was $99 for 50 prompts on ChatGPT alone, with 1 seat (Ryze’s snapshot from 29 August). Neither had a monthly option, so Growth meant $4,788 up front. For the payroll team, that bought 100 prompts on 3 AI apps, no Gemini, and 3 logins.

Then both plans went. The pricing page now shows 2 options for brands. The Trial runs 50 prompts daily for 7 days on ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews, with unlimited seats, but you cannot change the prompts, and there is no history, export or API. Enterprise is “Custom”: up to 9 answer engines, Claude, DeepSeek and Copilot among them, plus SSO, SOC 2, an API and exports. The trial has already changed once: on 17 September it was 10 prompts, run once, on ChatGPT only (Trakkr). Agencies keep a self-serve plan, at $399 a month per client workspace.

Profound publishes no Enterprise price. The $2,000 to $5,000 or more a month that third-party reviews quote comes from user reports, not from Profound (Arobis), so treat it as a rough guide.

Tracking is 1 of 4 things Profound does, and the other 3 are much of why enterprise teams pay for it. Prompt Volumes estimates what people actually ask AI. Profound licenses conversations from “multiple, double-opt-in consumer panels”, covering hundreds of millions of prompts a month in 10 countries, updated weekly (Prompt Volumes). Agent Analytics reads your server logs through connectors for Cloudflare, Fastly, Akamai, Vercel, AWS and others, and tells genuine AI crawlers from spoofed ones (Agent Analytics). The AI Marketer runs Agents that turn visibility gaps into content, and each Agent run spends credits.

Profound raised $180M at a $1.8B valuation on 15 September 2026, led by Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins, and says over 1,000 enterprise brands use it, 16% of the Fortune 500 among them (newsroom). It has not said why the self-serve plans went. The timing makes the direction clear enough, though. Profound is building for large marketing teams, and a payroll team of 3 on $399 a month is not that buyer any more.

G2 users rate it 4.5 from over 1,000 reviews (G2). The complaints that come up again and again are price and a learning curve, especially when findings have to reach people outside the SEO team.

• Pros: browser capture on up to 9 AI apps, Prompt Volumes from consumer panel data, Agent Analytics from server logs, unlimited seats.
• Cons: no public paid plan for brands, and the trial runs prompts you cannot change.
• Pricing: free 7-day trial, then Enterprise at a custom price.

What the alternatives can replace #

Profound does 4 jobs, and no tool in this post does all 4. Work out which ones you used, or meant to use, before you compare prices.

For most teams on the old Growth plan, the first row was the job. That is also the row where the alternatives are cheapest and most alike, so the choice comes down to how each one charges.

How the alternatives meter usage #

Every price in the first table buys a quantity of something, and the something differs from tool to tool. That matters more than the sticker price. There are 4 common units.

The simplest is prompts with the AI apps included. You pay for a number of questions, and each one runs on every AI app the plan covers. Lumirank works this way from Pro up, and so do LLMrefs and Semrush’s toolkit. Adding an AI app costs nothing within the plan, so the bill is easy to forecast.

Next come prompts with some AI apps sold separately. Otterly.AI includes 4 apps and charges $59 a month each for Gemini and AI Mode on Standard. Peec AI includes 3 and charges $85 for a 4th on Pro. The list price holds only if the included apps are the ones your buyers use. If the payroll team needs Gemini, Otterly.AI’s Standard plan costs $248, not $189.

Promptwatch sells answers instead. A plan buys prompts x 4 models x 30 days, and you spend that budget across any of its 11 models, so every extra app means fewer prompts. The last group sells credits or checks, spent per answer: AthenaHQ charges 1 credit per answer, Rankscale 0.25 to 2 credits a run depending on the app, Ahrefs 1 check per prompt, app and location. Credits are the most flexible unit and the hardest to forecast, because the AI apps you pick and how often you run them both set the bill.

To put 2 units side by side, turn both into answers a month: prompts x AI apps x runs a month.

2 more things move the price. Cadence is one. Scrunch runs daily for 14 days and then every 72 hours, LLMrefs runs weekly, and Semrush reports Perplexity weekly. Seats are the other. Lumirank, Otterly.AI, Peec AI, Rankscale and LLMrefs have unlimited users, while Promptwatch has 1, 2 or 5, Scrunch has 5, and Semrush charges per extra user.

On price alone the spread is wide. Lumirank and AthenaHQ have free plans. Paid entry runs from $20 on Rankscale to $295 on AthenaHQ. Plans with 100 to 150 prompts cost $99 to $250 a month across Lumirank, Otterly.AI, Semrush, Peec AI, Promptwatch and Scrunch, though they cover different AI apps. Every one of them lists a lower monthly price than Profound’s old Growth plan, which cost $399 a month and had to be paid a year ahead.

The 10 alternatives #

1. Lumirank #

Lumirank runs each prompt once a day on every AI model in your plan, in the countries you pick. Its pricing FAQ defines a prompt as “one question in one country”, so the same question tracked in the US and Canada uses 2 prompts. It records visibility, citations, sentiment and rank against the competitors you add.

Plans are a ladder of prompts. Starter is $29 a month for 25 prompts on 3 AI apps you choose. Pro is $99 for 100 prompts on all 6 (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews) and 2 brands, and Scale is $399 for 450. Extra countries use extra prompts, but nothing is charged per AI app or per seat, and every plan has unlimited team members. A free plan covers 10 prompts on 2 AI apps, and Pro has a 14-day trial with no card. Set against Profound’s old Growth plan, Pro has the same prompt count on twice the AI apps, Gemini included, for a quarter of the price, billed monthly.

The gaps are the other 3 rows of the replacement table. Lumirank has no prompt volume data, no crawler logs and no content agent. It does not track Claude, Grok or DeepSeek, and its pricing page lists the API, MCP server and exports as coming soon, which matters if Profound’s data fed a BI tool. Its public pages also do not say whether answers come from the apps’ web interfaces or their APIs.

• Pros: all 6 AI apps on Pro, unlimited team members, daily runs in multiple countries, monthly billing.
• Cons: no Claude, Grok or DeepSeek, no prompt volumes, crawler logs or content agent, and API and exports still “coming soon”.
• Pricing: free for 10 prompts, then $29 / $99 / $399 a month for 25 / 100 / 450 prompts.

2. Otterly.AI #

Otterly.AI queries each AI app daily, per country, “as a neutral, non-personalized user” (help centre). Plans meter prompts, and some AI apps are add-ons. Lite is $29 for 15 prompts, Standard $189 for 100 and Premium $489 for 400. ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot come with every plan. On Standard, AI Mode and Gemini cost $59 a month each and Claude $109, so Standard with all 3 added comes to $416. Seats are unlimited on every plan.

As a Profound replacement, the interesting part is Agent Analytics, shipped in August: server-log tracking of AI bots, with 200K events a month on Standard. So crawler data sits on the same $189 plan as the prompt tracking. A public API arrived in June and Claude tracking later that month, and Standard and Premium include MCP access. The GEO Audit checks single pages for on-page issues.

G2 users rate it 4.7 from 54 reviews. The common complaints are the shift from keyword thinking to prompt thinking, and a sentiment score that can be over-sensitive.

• Pros: $29 entry plan, unlimited seats, Agent Analytics from Standard up, GEO Audit, API and MCP.
• Cons: Gemini, AI Mode and Claude cost extra, and the sentiment score can be over-sensitive.
• Pricing: $29 / $189 / $489 a month for 15 / 100 / 400 prompts.

3. Peec AI #

Peec AI meters prompts and models. Its 3 plans cost $95, $245 and $495 a month for 50, 150 and 350 prompts, so a prompt costs $1.90 on the smallest plan and $1.41 on the largest. Each plan includes 3 models, picked from ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini and Copilot (model list), and a 4th costs $85 a month on Pro. Every plan has unlimited users. Claude, Grok and DeepSeek are Enterprise only, through their APIs.

It also covers part of the Agent Analytics row, with crawl insights for 40+ AI bots. In June it added SKU-level AI Shopping tracking, and in August brand fact-checking. Check 1 thing during the trial: the pricing table and the model list disagree on whether Perplexity is available below Enterprise.

Peec is a Berlin company. It raised a $21M Series A in November 2025 and, according to TechCrunch’s sources, passed $10M in annualised revenue by May 2026. It sells to the same marketing-team buyer as Profound, at a published price, which makes it a direct swap for a team that used Profound mainly for tracking.

• Pros: unlimited users on every plan, daily runs, crawl insights, AI Shopping tracking.
• Cons: 3 models per plan, a 4th costs $85 a month on Pro, and no content agent or prompt volume data.
• Pricing: $95 / $245 / $495 a month for 50 / 150 / 350 prompts.

4. Promptwatch #

Promptwatch collects the way Profound does. For ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, AI Overviews and AI Mode it drives the real apps rather than calling an API (how Promptwatch collects data). A plan buys a budget of answers, prompts x 4 models x 30 days, which you can spend across any of 11 models (response limits).

Essential is $95 for 50 prompts, Professional $245 for 150 and Business $579 for 350. Price per prompt hardly moves: $1.90, $1.63 and $1.65. Seats are metered as well, at 1, 2 and 5, and the pricing page lists no add-on, so headcount can push you up a plan before your prompt count does.

Of the 10, it is the closest to Profound in shape, since it covers 3 of the 4 rows. Next to tracking it has crawler logs (25M on Professional, 100M on Business) and a Content Agent that writes 5 articles a month on Professional and 10 on Business, and can publish them to Webflow, Framer or WordPress. API and MCP access come with every plan, where Profound keeps its API for Enterprise. What it lacks is panel-based prompt volume data.

Promptwatch is an Amsterdam company. It launched in April 2025, raised a €6M seed in July 2026 and reported €2M in annual recurring revenue by May (Sifted). One agency user who ran it for 60 days reported “more UX errors and bugs than other solutions” (Generate More). That is 1 account, so weigh it lightly.

• Pros: real-app collection on 11 models, crawler logs, an article writer, API and MCP on every plan.
• Cons: 1, 2 or 5 seats with no add-on, and price per prompt barely drops as you scale.
• Pricing: $95 / $245 / $579 a month for 50 / 150 / 350 prompts.

5. AthenaHQ #

AthenaHQ meters credits, and 1 credit buys 1 AI response. Starter covers 11 AI apps with no add-on per app: ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Copilot, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI and Mistral. That list includes Claude and DeepSeek, which Profound now keeps for Enterprise.

The credits are the catch, because every AI app and every run spends them. Starter’s $295 a month buys 3,600 credits. That is 30 prompts on 4 AI apps every day, or about 200 prompts on 4 apps once a week, or 120 prompts on 1 app daily. You set the schedule yourself, and for plenty of teams weekly is honestly enough.

AthenaHQ went through Y Combinator in early 2025 and raised a $2.2M seed. G2 reviewers rate it 4.9 from 46 reviews and name the credit system as the most confusing part. It does not publish how it collects answers.

• Pros: 11 AI apps including Claude, Grok and Meta AI with no add-ons, a free plan with $25 of credit.
• Cons: credits run out fast on daily runs across many apps, and no public word on how it collects answers.
• Pricing: free Essential, then Starter at $295 a month ($245 on annual billing) for 3,600 credits.

6. Scrunch #

Scrunch sells to the buyer Profound now wants: enterprise brands that care how AI agents read their site. It collects with “a mix of browser automation and official platform APIs” (FAQ). The 1 self-serve plan, Core, covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews and Copilot for 1 brand in 1 country. Prompts run daily for 14 days, then every 72 hours by default.

Core costs $250 a month for 125 prompts and 5 seats. Next to Profound’s old Growth plan it is cheaper and adds Copilot and 2 seats, but it runs less often after the first 2 weeks. Check 1 thing before you sign. The help centre says each platform a prompt runs on counts as 1 prompt, wich would turn 125 prompts into about 31 across 4 AI apps. The pricing page says “125 unique prompts”.

Sitecore announced it was buying Scrunch in June 2026 (Bloomberg reported $225M). Enterprise adds Gemini, Claude, AI Mode, Meta AI and Grok, plus AXP, which serves AI-optimised versions of your pages to AI agents. Core already includes bot traffic tracking and basic content generation.

• Pros: 5 seats on Core, bot traffic tracking and basic content generation included.
• Cons: no Gemini on Core, runs every 72 hours after day 14, and prompt counting is unclear.
• Pricing: Core at $250 a month for 125 prompts, Enterprise on request.

7. Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit #

The AI Visibility Toolkit meters prompts. Semrush says responses are “captured from real requests and not via any APIs of LLMs”. Daily tracking covers ChatGPT Search, AI Mode, AI Overviews and Gemini. Perplexity shows up only in the Brand Performance report, which refreshes weekly (Semrush KB).

The first 25 prompts cost $99 a month, and every extra 50 cost $60, which is $1.20 a prompt. So 125 prompts come to $219 and 225 to $339. Extra users cost extra, and Semrush’s own pages quote both $45 and $99 a month for one. Semrush One bundles the toolkit with the SEO tools, and its Pro+ plan is $299 a month with 100 prompts.

For someone leaving Profound, the useful extras are a 317M+ prompt database for finding topics, and an AI Search Site Audit that flags pages blocking AI crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot. Semrush is now part of Adobe; that deal closed on 28 April 2026. Start here if your SEO data already lives in Semrush.

• Pros: sits inside your Semrush login, audits pages for blocked AI crawlers, a 317M+ prompt database.
• Cons: Perplexity only in a weekly report, and extra users and domains cost extra.
• Pricing: $99 a month for 25 prompts, plus $60 a month for each 50 more.

8. Ahrefs Brand Radar #

Ahrefs Brand Radar is the nearest thing here to Prompt Volumes, with 1 big difference. It keeps an index of hundreds of millions of prompts (405M, 451M or 475M, depending on which Ahrefs page you read), built from People Also Ask questions and Ahrefs’ keyword data. Ahrefs runs them through the public web interfaces of AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot, logged out (methodology). So it shows where any brand appears across a huge set of questions. But those questions come from search behaviour, not from what people type into ChatGPT, and the second is what Profound’s panels measure.

To track your own prompts you add custom prompts, metered in checks: 1 prompt on 1 AI app in 1 location is 1 check, so a prompt run daily uses 30 checks a month per app. Lite ($129) includes 150 checks. Packs cost $50 for 2,500 or $100 for 7,000, and the bigger pack covers about 230 prompts run daily on 1 AI app, or 58 on 4. Access to the big AI indexes is an add-on, and Ahrefs’ own pages disagree on its price: $199 or $699 a month. The chatbot index refreshes monthly.

Ahrefs says plainly that it does not filter hallucinated links out of its data. Bot Analytics, its crawler log tool, is free in beta.

• Pros: a 400M+ prompt index for finding where you appear, Bot Analytics free in beta.
• Cons: the index comes from search data and refreshes monthly, daily tracking is metered, and the add-on price is unclear.
• Pricing: needs a paid Ahrefs plan from $129 a month, plus check packs from $50 for 2,500.

9. Rankscale #

Rankscale, from Vienna, claims 17+ AI apps and models and meters everything in credits, at a different rate per app. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and AI Mode cost 0.25 credits a run, DeepSeek 1 and Claude 2.

Plans cost $20, $99, $385 and $780 a month, and the top 3 buy 1,200, 5,500 and 12,000 credits. On Pro, 1,200 credits pay for 4,800 runs on ChatGPT or 600 on Claude. Run daily, that is 160 prompts on 1 of the cheaper apps, or 20 on Claude. The calculator shows no rate for AI Overviews, so price it during the trial.

It also runs page audits against 200+ factors, prompt research and shopping tracking, and Growth adds white-label reports and an API. Reviewers on OMR give it 4.6 from 26 reviews and mention thin docs.

• Pros: 17+ AI apps and models, unlimited seats, page audits, white-label reports and API on Growth.
• Cons: each AI app costs different credits (Claude costs 8 times ChatGPT), and the docs are thin.
• Pricing: from $20, then $99 / $385 / $780 a month for 1,200 / 5,500 / 12,000 credits.

10. LLMrefs #

LLMrefs has 1 plan at $79 a month: 500 prompts on 11 AI apps, with unlimited projects and users. That is about 16 cents a prompt, the lowest on this list by a distance. The trade is cadence. The FAQ says every keyword updates “at least once per week”, and the page frames the price as limited-time.

It starts from keywords rather than prompts. You give it a keyword and it writes the conversational prompts, which is a gentle way in if Profound’s suggested prompts were your starting point. It also has a query fan-out generator, a crawlability checker, a Reddit threads finder and an API. There are too few reviews to say much about quality, so treat it as a cheap baseline, or a second opinion next to a daily tool.

• Pros: 500 prompts on 11 AI apps for $79, unlimited users, prompts written from your keywords.
• Cons: weekly refresh, a price framed as limited-time, and no word on how it collects answers.
• Pricing: 1 plan at $79 a month.

Also worth a look #

A few enterprise-leaning tools compete with Profound more directly than most of the 10, and cost more. Evertune asks each prompt 100 times per model and reports share of voice with a margin of error, for $800 a month. Its methodology page shows why: 1 run of 1 prompt carries a margin of ±44 points, and 100 runs bring it to ±10. Gauge runs 600 prompts a day on 6 AI apps through logged-out browser sessions for $599 a month, with 5 seats and 18 articles, so tracking and content sit in 1 plan. Goodie starts at $399 and tracks shopping assistants like ChatGPT Shopping and Amazon Rufus. At the small end, HubSpot AEO is $50 a month for 25 prompts on ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.

Matching a tool to the part of Profound you used #

Start from the row of the replacement table you would miss most.

If it is daily tracking for a small team, which is what Growth sold, Lumirank, Otterly.AI and Peec AI all publish monthly prices, run daily and give unlimited users. Of the 3, Lumirank includes all of its AI apps from Pro, while Otterly.AI and Peec AI charge for apps beyond their included set. Scrunch Core is the nearest match to Growth’s shape, with 4 AI apps and 5 seats, if Gemini and daily runs can wait.

If it is crawler data, Otterly.AI’s Agent Analytics and Promptwatch’s crawler logs come with the plan, and Ahrefs’ Bot Analytics is free while it stays in beta. If it is the content agents, Promptwatch is the only one of the 10 with a full article writer. Gauge does the same outside the list.

If you want more AI apps, Claude and DeepSeek included, look at AthenaHQ and Rankscale. Both bill in credits, so decide your cadence before you compare prices. If budget is tight and weekly data is enough, LLMrefs covers 500 prompts for $79.

The payroll team from the start of this post used Growth for tracking and never connected its server logs, so the first group is its shortlist. And if Prompt Volumes is the part you rely on, nothing here replaces it. Ahrefs Brand Radar gets you a large index built from search data, which is useful, but it answers a different question. If panel data on AI prompts matters to you, or your procurement team needs SSO and SOC 2, Profound’s Enterprise plan is still worth the call.

Test 2 tools on your own prompts first #

Profound’s trial runs a prompt set Profound chooses, so it cannot tell you how Profound sees your market. If you are a current customer with a renewal due, put Profound next to 1 candidate. If not, put 2 candidates next to each other.

Ignore both tools’ headline scores while you test. Profound’s Visibility Score leaves out answers that name no brand, other tools define their own scores, and the same answers can produce 2 quite diffrent numbers. Count from the raw answers instead.

1. Write 25 prompts: 15 category questions such as “best payroll software for a 50-person US startup”, and 10 that compare you with your 2 closest rivals.
2. Load all 25 into both tools, on the same AI apps, with the US as the country.
3. After 14 days, count the share of answers that name you, per AI app, from each tool’s raw answers.
4. Each week, ask 5 of the prompts yourself in a logged-out browser from the US. Keep the tool whose record matches yours more often.
5. Look at the domains each tool shows as cited for your top prompts. If the lists mostly agree, both tools are reading the same answers.
6. Price your full prompt list, AI apps and seats on the tool you keep.