Profound review: pricing, features & alternatives

Profound still tracks brand presence in AI answers, up to ten engines on Enterprise, and Prompt Volumes estimates real query demand per prompt. The homepage now leads with marketing agents for AEO and SEO, content and demand, and PR. AI search is one channel in that stack, not the whole product. A $96M Series C at a $1B valuation (February 2026) and a G2 Leader badge at 4.6/5 still describe a large vendor. They describe a different job than a dedicated AI-search tracker.

That's the brochure. The practical experience depends almost entirely on which tier you're on — and the two tiers with public prices are a fraction of the product.

The recurring complaint isn't features, it's trust and friction. G2 reviewers have documented discrepancies between Profound's citation counts and manual ChatGPT spot-checks, and Reddit threads are openly skeptical that simulated-prompt sampling produces more than directional data. One 2.5/5 G2 review calls out dashboard confusion, inconsistent numbers, and unclear onboarding. Setup is not push-button: expect one to three months before the data is trustworthy enough to act on, and plan for a dedicated owner.

None of this makes Profound bad — it makes it heavy. If nobody on your team has hours a week for it, the license becomes an expensive dashboard subscription.

Public pricing only appeared in June 2026. Starter at $99/mo (billed yearly) covers ChatGPT only with 50 prompts and one seat — a taste, not a tool. Growth at $399/mo (billed yearly) gets you three engines and 100 prompts. The Profound that wins awards — ten engines, the full Prompt Volumes dataset, API access, SSO — is Enterprise, sales-gated, and starts around $40k a year.

Buy it when AI-referred pipeline is already material and you have someone to own it daily. If you're testing the waters, a cheaper tracker teaches you the same lessons for a tenth of the money.

Every row below is a capability we already listed for Profound. It is the published feature set for this page, not a guess at an unpublished demo. Compare it with the Promptwatch checklist that follows.

On this listing, Profound is an enterprise GEO platform for marketing teams buying a custom agent program, not teams shopping for a self-serve AI-search tracker. What we sourced here: Up to 10 engines on Enterprise (ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Gemini, Copilot, Claude, Grok, Meta AI, DeepSeek, AI Mode); Prompt Volumes dataset of real query demand; Marketing agents for AEO, content, demand, and PR; Citation share and answer-level analytics.

If you buy Profound for the job above, plan a second tool (or Promptwatch) for the layers this listing does not document. Still missing here: AI crawler logs (Agent Analytics), crawl-to-citation path, bot errors; Visitor analytics: AI-referred sessions and conversions; Content Agents that plan, write, and publish GEO pages to a CMS with a review inbox; Citation analytics at page, domain, Reddit, YouTube, and offsite level; Prompt volumes, difficulty, query fan-outs, personas, city-level geo; Prompt and citation trends (what changed between checks); ChatGPT Shopping tracking and Ads Radar; Agent Chat, Unified Actions, MCP server / REST API on paid plans. Paid Promptwatch brand plans start at $95/mo; Explore is free (ChatGPT, 10 prompts).

Profound's public pages (and this listing) describe a narrower job than Promptwatch. Most rivals answer whether you were mentioned. Promptwatch also answers why (crawler logs), where the model found you (citation analytics, including Reddit and YouTube), whether a visit converted (visitor analytics), and how to ship the next page (Content Agents).

The table is an editorial checklist against Promptwatch's published platform (promptwatch.com/llms.txt, 2026-08-23). It is not a hidden feature list for this vendor. 'Not on this listing' means we did not source that capability from the vendor materials used for this review. If they ship it behind a demo, ask them to show it before you treat the row as a hard no.