Profound
Enterprise-grade analytics for AI search visibility
- Category
- AEO Tools
- Pricing
- No free tier; plans from $99/mo (Starter, ChatGPT-only) to $399/mo (Growth, 3 engines); custom Enterprise pricing
- Best for
- Profound is best suited to enterprise and well-funded mid-market marketing, content, and PR teams — especially those already investing seriously in SEO/content operations — who need the broadest engine coverage, agentic content production, and traffic attribution in one platform, and who have budget for a $400-$5,000+/month tool.
- Official site
- www.tryprofound.com
- Last updated
- August 2026
Profound was founded in 2024 by James Cadwallader and Dylan Babbs, a team with backgrounds spanning AMD, Microsoft, Datadog, Uber, and OpenAI. The company raised a $20M Series A led by Kleiner Perkins (with Khosla Ventures, NVIDIA's NVentures, and South Park Commons participating), followed by additional growth funding, and now serves large brands including Ramp, MongoDB, Indeed, US Bank, DocuSign, and Walmart. The platform runs structured prompts against AI engines daily and analyzes brand mentions, citations, sentiment, and competitive presence in the responses.
Profound's core differentiator is the breadth and depth of its monitoring data combined with an agentic layer (Profound Agents and Aim) that goes beyond passive tracking into automated content generation, optimization, and workflow orchestration at scale. Where many AEO tools stop at dashboards, Profound explicitly positions itself as feeding insights into an always-on content production pipeline, plus it tracks AI-driven referral traffic back to a brand's own domains via CDN/hosting integrations (Akamai, Cloudflare, Vercel, Fastly, AWS, GCP), a capability few competitors match.
Profound is best suited to enterprise and well-funded mid-market marketing, content, and PR teams — especially those already investing seriously in SEO/content operations — who need the broadest engine coverage, agentic content production, and traffic attribution in one platform, and who have budget for a $400-$5,000+/month tool. Smaller teams, solo marketers, or anyone wanting a lightweight, flat-fee visibility checker should look elsewhere, since Profound's entry tier is narrow (ChatGPT only) and its real value only shows up once you're paying for Growth or Enterprise.
Key features
Answer Engine Insights
Core monitoring layer tracking brand and competitor mentions, citations, sentiment, and ranking across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, and Claude depending on plan tier.
Prompt Volumes
Surfaces what real users are actually asking AI engines, similar in spirit to keyword research but for conversational AI queries.
Profound Agents
Credit-metered AI agents that generate, optimize, or update content aimed at improving AEO performance; complexity of the agent determines credit cost.
Agent Analytics
Tracks AI-crawler visits and AI-sourced referral traffic to a brand's domains, unlimited domains on every plan, with direct integrations into hosting/CDN providers.
Aim
A projects and orchestration layer (Enterprise-only) for coordinating larger, multi-workstream AEO campaigns across teams.
Shopping
Tracks brand visibility specifically within ChatGPT Shopping results, available on Enterprise plans.
Profound Sheets
A spreadsheet-style interface for running Agents at scale across many prompts or content pieces at once.
Platform Integrations
Native integrations with Google Analytics, Akamai, AWS, Cloudflare, Fastly, GCP, Netlify, Vercel, and WordPress to connect AI visibility data to existing marketing stacks.
Pricing breakdown
Starter
- ChatGPT tracking only
- 50 prompts tracked, ~1,500 responses/month
- 100 Agent credits/month
- 1 seat, email support
Growth
- 3 Answer Engines tracked (e.g. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews)
- 100 prompts tracked, ~9,000 responses/month
- 400 Agent credits/month
- 3 seats, CSV/JSON exports, email support
Enterprise
- Up to 9 Answer Engines tracked
- Custom prompt volume and multi-market/language support
- Custom Agent credits, API access, SSO/SAML + SOC2
- Dedicated Slack support and 24-hour SLA
Pros and cons
Pros
- Profound consistently ranks as having the deepest, most granular AI visibility dataset in third-party comparisons, which matters for teams that need to defend AEO investment with hard numbers.
- The Agents/Aim layer means insight and action live in one platform instead of requiring a separate content tool, which shortens the loop from 'we're invisible on Perplexity' to a published fix.
- Agent Analytics is a genuinely differentiated feature: tracking actual AI-referred site traffic (not just mention counts) via CDN-level integrations gives marketers a real ROI signal.
- Enterprise customers get real infrastructure (SSO/SAML, SOC2, dedicated Slack, 24-hour SLA) that larger orgs require for procurement approval.
- Strong, well-known customer roster (Ramp, Walmart, MongoDB, DocuSign) lends credibility that many newer AEO entrants lack.
- Fast, well-documented onboarding — the vendor claims instant setup, and the platform ships pre-built prompt sets by industry to reduce time-to-value.
Cons
- The entry-level Starter plan tracks ChatGPT only, which is a meaningful gap for a category whose whole pitch is multi-engine visibility — buyers often have to jump straight to the $399/mo Growth tier for real coverage.
- Pricing scales fast: independent reviewers report enterprise deployments commonly land between $2,000 and $5,000+/month once seat counts, engine coverage, and Agent credit needs grow, well above the advertised entry price.
- Reported G2 ratings and review counts are inconsistent across different G2 listing pages for Profound (figures cited range from roughly 300 to over 1,000 reviews at 4.5-4.6/5), making it hard to cite one authoritative number.
- Profound has no visible Capterra review presence as of August 2026, so buyers evaluating outside G2 have little independent data to cross-check.
- The sheer volume of data and agent configuration options creates a real learning curve; several reviewers note it rewards dedicated analytical users more than casual marketing generalists.
- Agent credit consumption and overage handling require active account management — estimating the right credit package ahead of time is non-trivial and often needs a Profound account team consultation.
What reviewers say
Profound holds a generally strong reputation on G2, including a Winter 2026 Leader badge in reviewer roundups, with users consistently praising data depth and support quality. Its Capterra and broader review-site footprint is thin, which is common for a two-year-old enterprise-focused category leader whose buying process is largely sales-led rather than self-serve discovery driven.
Frequently praised
- Depth and granularity of AI visibility data compared to competitors
- Responsive, knowledgeable customer support and account teams
- Fast pace of platform improvement and new feature shipping
Frequently criticized
- Steep learning curve given the volume of data and configuration options
- Occasional bugs and slow data exports reported by some users
- High and fast-escalating cost, especially moving from self-serve to Enterprise
- Thin, inconsistent third-party review coverage outside of G2
Alternatives to Profound
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Compare →Frequently asked questions
Is there a free plan for Profound?
No. Profound has no free tier; the cheapest self-serve option is the Starter plan at $99/month (billed annually), and it only tracks ChatGPT.
How much does Profound cost?
Starter is $99/month, Growth is $399/month (both billed annually), and Enterprise is custom-priced — third-party reports put typical enterprise deployments between roughly $2,000 and $5,000+/month depending on engine coverage and seats.
Which AI engines does Profound track?
Depending on plan, Profound can track ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, and Anthropic Claude — up to 9 engines on Enterprise.
How is Profound different from Scrunch AI or AthenaHQ?
Profound differentiates on data depth and its agentic content layer (Profound Agents, Aim) built for large enterprise teams; Scrunch AI adds dedicated hallucination detection and an Agent Experience Platform; AthenaHQ offers a genuinely free entry tier and a more accessible credit-based pricing model.
Does Profound have an API?
API access is not available on Starter or Growth; it is included on the Enterprise plan.
How does Profound's Agent credit pricing work?
Profound Agents consume credits each time they run, with cost scaling to task complexity; Starter includes 100 credits/month, Growth includes 400 credits/month, and Enterprise packages are custom-sized with an account team's help.
Ready to try Profound?
Head to the official site to explore pricing and start a free trial where available.
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