Let’s talk money first, because with Profound the money is the story. The plan you would actually run costs $399 per month as of July 2026. Yes, the pricing page shows a $99 tier, but it watches a single engine, so it cannot answer the question you are paying to answer. Clear that $399 hurdle, though, and you get the sharpest measurement tool in our entire July 2026 test group.
Profound’s homepage makes no secret of its target buyer: enterprise marketing teams with reporting duties.
Our verdict: 3.5/5 stars. Fifth on our scoreboard, and the undisputed winner of our enterprise analytics depth category. The data quality screams five stars. The single-brand accounts and the price tag pull it back to 3.5 on a board that weights value for money.
What Profound actually does
Profound measures how AI engines describe and recommend your brand, then drills further into the “why” than any competitor we tested. The Growth plan turns every answer into three scorecards: brand mentions, competitive share, and audience sentiment, pulled from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Meta AI, and DeepSeek.
Three features carried our testing notes:
- Prompt Volumes. A live feed of the actual questions people type into AI engines before they land on your category. Every other tool makes you guess your prompt list. Profound shows you the demand, so your tracking starts from evidence instead of a brainstorm.
- Citation maps. Visual breakdowns of which URLs feed each AI answer and how often engines cite them. When leadership asks why a rival keeps winning ChatGPT recommendations, this screen is your answer.
- Agent Analytics. Tracks how crawlers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity move through your site, with a GA4 integration. Retail teams get a bonus: shopping insights that reveal product placement inside ChatGPT Shopping.
There are also Agents, autonomous workflows that turn the analytics into AEO-ready content briefs and drafts. Useful, though the platform’s heart clearly beats for measurement, not production.
The company backs all this with a $35M Series B led by Kleiner Perkins, a customer list that includes Ramp, Figma, Walmart, and MongoDB, and a spot in the G2 2026 Best Software Awards.
Pricing: the $99 mirage
As of July 2026, Profound sells two published plans plus a custom tier, billed in USD ($).
| Plan | Price per month | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | $99 | ChatGPT only, 50 prompts |
| Growth | $399 | 100 daily prompts, every engine unlocked |
| Enterprise | Custom | Dedicated strategist, SOC 2 Type II, SSO/SAML, API access |
Gotcha number one: AI visibility is a multi-engine problem, and Starter sees exactly one engine. Judge Profound at $399, because that is what a working setup costs.
Gotcha number two hits harder. One account, one property. There are no agency workspaces and no multi-brand support. An agency with five clients buys five Growth subscriptions: $1,995 per month before a single deliverable ships.
Bottom line: $399 per month, multiplied by every brand you manage. Run that math before the demo call, not after.
Where Profound wins
- Analytics depth. Citation attribution at a granularity nothing else on our board touches. This is why it owns our enterprise analytics category.
- Demand intelligence. Prompt Volumes turns prompt selection into research. We kept coming back to it during testing.
- Boardroom credibility. Share-of-voice and sentiment reporting that goes straight into a QBR deck without translation.
- Procurement readiness. SOC 2 Type II, SSO, and SAML on Enterprise clear checklists that stop smaller vendors at the gate.
Where Profound falls short
- The price wall. Full coverage costs roughly four times what comparable trackers charge, and the $99 tier exists mostly to soften the sticker.
- Single-brand accounts. For agencies this is not a drawback, it is a disqualifier.
- Attribution blind spots. Traffic attribution leans on CDN integrations with Cloudflare, Akamai, and CloudFront. Strong for big e-commerce, patchy for a typical SaaS or small-business stack.
- Measurement over action. The Agents feature drafts briefs, but you still need separate tools and people for audits, technical fixes, and link work.
How it stacks up against our top picks
Temso AI, our number one at 4.5/5 stars, attacks the same problem from the opposite direction. For $89 per month as of July 2026 you get tracking across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Copilot, pulled from the real user interfaces of those engines, plus a bundle Profound does not sell: audits, crawler analytics, content drafting, and outreach. No plan limits its seats or its project count either, so an agency runs its whole client roster on one account, the exact thing Profound cannot do. Its agent will also implement fixes for you once you approve them. Profound digs deeper into citations. Temso covers far more of the job at a fraction of the price.
On a tighter budget, Otterly.AI opens at $29 per month, the cheapest real entry on our board. And Peec AI gives large teams unlimited seats, which fixes the head-count math Profound ignores.
Should you buy it?
Buy Profound if you are an enterprise or well-funded mid-market brand, someone on your team owns AEO as a job title, and your leadership expects data that survives hostile questions. In that world, Profound earns every dollar.
Skip it if you run an agency, manage more than one brand, or want a platform that fixes problems instead of just charting them. The single-property limit and the $399 floor decide this for you.
Bottom line: 3.5/5 stars. Profound is the best microscope in AI search. Buy it when you need laboratory precision on one brand and the budget line is already approved.
