Profound Review (2026): Pricing, Features, Pros and Cons

Profound is the reference point for AI visibility software. It was the first company in the category to reach a $1 billion valuation, it has by far the most reviews on G2, and every competitor's comparison table has a Profound column. That makes it the tool most teams evaluate first — and, at $399/mo for the plan most of them would actually need, the one most teams end up not buying.

This review covers what Profound does, what each plan includes (prices checked August 2026), what users say after living with it, and who it is and is not for. We build a competing product, and the comparison section says so plainly. Everything else is based on Profound's published plans and documentation, its demos, and public user reviews — we have not run it on a paid plan ourselves.

TL;DR: Profound is the deepest measurement layer in AI search: the biggest prompt dataset, the best citation analysis, and enterprise-grade security. The Starter plan tracks ChatGPT only; three engines cost $399/mo; nine engines are a sales call. It shows you where you are missing with great precision and leaves most of the fixing to you. Buy it if you are an enterprise brand team with a content and PR function to point it at. Look elsewhere if you are a startup or a small team that needs the tool to do some of the work.

What Profound Is

Profound (tryprofound.com) monitors how brands appear inside AI assistants — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek and Meta AI on Enterprise — and reports mention rate, position, sentiment, and the sources those answers cite. Around that core it has built:

• Answer Engine Insights — visibility, share of voice and sentiment per prompt, per engine, over time.
• Citation analysis — which URLs and domains each engine cites for your prompts, and how that changes.
• Conversation Explorer — a database of real prompts people ask AI assistants (Profound cites a 1.9-billion-prompt dataset), so you can discover the questions in your category rather than guess them.
• Agent Analytics — server-log analysis of AI crawler traffic: which bots hit your site, which pages they read, and how often.
• Workflows — an execution layer that drafts content briefs and articles against the gaps it finds. Article volumes are limited per plan.

The company was founded in 2024, reported more than 700 enterprise customers including over 10% of the Fortune 500, and closed a $96M Series C at a $1B valuation led by Lightspeed in February 2026, bringing total funding past $155M. That matters for a buyer in two ways: the product will keep shipping fast, and the roadmap will keep pointing at enterprise.

Profound Pricing (Checked August 2026)

Profound publishes two self-serve plans and a custom Enterprise tier. Prices below are the annual-billing rates shown on tryprofound.com/pricing; monthly billing is higher.

Both self-serve plans come with a free trial. Starter includes 100 Agent Analytics credits a month and Growth 400; Agent Analytics itself covers unlimited domains on every tier. SSO, SOC 2 documentation, multi-company workspaces and dedicated support are Enterprise.

Three things to read into that table:

1. The $99 plan is a ChatGPT plan. It is a fair price for one engine, but most buyers arrive wanting to know what Google's AI Overviews say about them too, and that is a four-fold jump.
2. Prompt counts are modest for the money. 100 prompts on Growth is one product in one or two markets. Otterly's $189 Standard plan also gives 100 prompts across four engines; Scrunch's $300 Starter gives 350 custom prompts plus 1,000 industry ones.
3. Nine engines is not a price, it is a conversation. Everything Profound is known for — full engine coverage, personas, executive reporting — lives in Enterprise. Independent reviewers put the realistic Enterprise floor around $2,000/mo, and note that under that budget "you are probably not the customer Profound is built for."

How Profound Works Day to Day

Setup starts with a brand profile and a prompt set. You can type prompts, import them, or pull them from the Conversation Explorer, which suggests real questions people ask in your category and shows their volume. You pick the engines your plan allows and Profound begins running the prompts on a schedule, storing each response so you can read the actual answer text rather than a score alone.

The daily view is a dashboard of visibility (how often you are mentioned), share of voice against named competitors, sentiment, and a citations tab listing the domains and URLs the engines relied on. Filters cut by engine, prompt group, persona and time. Agent Analytics sits alongside it once you have connected server logs or the tracking snippet, showing which AI crawlers visited which pages and how often. Workflows takes a prompt gap and produces a brief or draft for your site, within the plan allowance.

Reporting is where the enterprise design shows: scheduled exports, executive summaries and multi-brand rollups are built for a team that presents upward. A solo user will find most of the surface area is not for them.

What Profound Does Well

The data is the deepest in the category. The Conversation Explorer is built on real prompt volume rather than prompts you typed in, which changes how you plan: you see which questions in your category are actually asked, not which ones you assumed. Citation analysis goes down to the URL and the sentence that was cited. If your job is to understand the AI answer landscape for a large brand, nothing else is as complete.

Agent Analytics is genuinely useful and mostly unique. Knowing that OAI-SearchBot fetched your pricing page 40 times last week and never touched your comparison page is the kind of signal that changes what you write. Most competitors do not have a log-level view at all.

Enterprise posture is real. SOC 2, SSO, role-based access, multi-company workspaces, dedicated success managers. If procurement is part of your buying process, Profound clears it.

It ships. G2 reviewers repeatedly cite how fast the team releases features and acts on feedback. Profound was named the Leader in G2's inaugural Answer Engine Optimization category in the Winter 2026 report, and its seller profile on G2 lists over 1,000 reviews at roughly 4.6 out of 5.

Where Profound Stops

A lot of data, not much direction. The most consistent complaint in user reviews is a version of "we know exactly where we are missing and are not sure what to do next." Profound tells you that ChatGPT cites three particular roundups for your category and you are on none of them. It does not find the author of those roundups, their contact, or write the pitch. Workflows helps with on-site content, but the off-site half — earning the mentions on the pages AI already trusts — is left to you and your PR team. That half is not a detail: Ahrefs' study of 75,000 brands found branded web mentions correlate about three times more strongly with AI visibility than backlinks do, and roughly 44% of ChatGPT citations go to "best of" list pages.

Workflows is thin at the tiers most people can afford. Reviewers describe the article allowance as a handful per month on paid plans, and the drafts as a starting point rather than a finished asset.

Cost escalates. Starter to Growth is 4×. Growth to the coverage you were probably imagining is a custom quote. Several reviews mention export limits, duplicate prompts counting against quotas, and billing friction.

Built for brand teams, not founders. Prompt libraries, personas, executive dashboards and multi-company workspaces are scaffolding a solo marketer pays for and never uses.

What Users Say

Across G2 and independent reviews, the praise clusters around depth of data, speed of shipping and responsiveness of the team; the complaints cluster around price escalation, the gap between insight and action, and dashboards that get slow with large prompt sets. Independent reviewers are consistent that Profound is overkill for solo operators, early-stage startups and most agencies, and a strong choice for enterprise teams that will use the data.

Profound vs Sightivo

We make Sightivo, so weigh this section accordingly.

The honest summary: Profound measures more, Sightivo does more with less measurement. If your team already has the content and PR capacity and needs the best possible instrument, Profound is the better instrument. If you are a startup that needs the tool to turn a low score into this week's work, that is what Sightivo is built for — with three engines rather than nine, and volumes sized for one brand rather than a portfolio.

Profound Alternatives

The short version: Peec AI for the closest like-for-like analytics at a lower entry price with unlimited seats; Otterly AI for the cheapest multi-engine dashboard at $29/mo; Scrunch AI for more engines and far more prompts at a similar mid-market price; Athena HQ for a free tier and built-in recommendations; Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit if you already live in Semrush; Sightivo if you want the tool to act on the gaps. We compare all seven by price, coverage and what they do with the data in best Profound alternatives.

When Profound Is the Right Choice

• You are an enterprise or upper-mid-market brand team and nine-engine coverage, SSO and multi-company workspaces are requirements, not nice-to-haves.
• Prompt research at scale — knowing what people actually ask across a whole category — matters more to you than acting on any single prompt.
• You already have content and PR teams and want the best measurement layer to point them at.
• Budget is not the constraint; time-to-insight is.

When to Look Elsewhere

• You need Google AI Overviews and Claude covered and cannot justify $399/mo for a single brand.
• You are a founder or a team of one to five who will do the outreach yourself and want the tool to hand you the list.
• You want unlimited seats without an Enterprise contract.
• You would rather spend the budget earning mentions than measuring their absence.

Common Questions

How much does Profound cost?

Profound Starter is $99/mo on annual billing and tracks ChatGPT only, with 50 prompts, 1,500 responses a month and one seat. Growth is $399/mo on annual billing for ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, with 100 prompts, 9,000 responses and three seats. Enterprise, which covers up to nine engines, is custom priced; independent estimates put it at roughly $2,000/mo and up. Prices checked August 2026.

Is Profound worth it?

For an enterprise brand team with a content and PR function, yes — it is the most complete measurement platform in AI search, and its G2 record backs that up. For a startup or small team, usually not: the $99 plan covers one engine, the $399 plan covers three, and neither does the off-site work that moves the numbers.

Does Profound have a free trial?

Yes. Both Starter and Growth are offered with a free trial from the pricing page. Enterprise starts with a demo. There is no permanently free plan.

What engines does Profound track?

ChatGPT on Starter; ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews on Growth; and up to nine on Enterprise — adding Google AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek and Meta AI.

Who is Profound for?

Enterprise and upper-mid-market marketing teams — CPG, financial services, retail, pharma and B2B tech are the verticals it names — that need to monitor a brand or a portfolio across every major AI assistant and have the people to act on what it finds. Profound reports serving more than 700 enterprises.

What are the best Profound alternatives?

Peec AI (analytics at a lower entry price, unlimited seats), Otterly AI (cheapest multi-engine tracking), Scrunch AI (more engines and prompts, mid-market pricing), Athena HQ (free tier, recommendations), Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit (for Semrush customers), and Sightivo (turns the gaps into pages, sources and outreach). Full comparison: best Profound alternatives.

Does Profound help you improve AI visibility, or only measure it?

Mostly measure. Workflows drafts a limited number of articles and briefs; Agent Analytics tells you what crawlers read. Profound does not identify the third-party pages to get cited on, find the people who write them, or run outreach. That is the part most teams still do by hand — or with a tool built for it.

Key Takeaways

• Profound is the most complete AI visibility measurement platform available, with the largest prompt dataset, URL-level citation analysis and log-level crawler analytics.
• The $99 Starter plan tracks ChatGPT only; three engines cost $399/mo; nine engines and every enterprise feature are custom priced.
• G2 lists over 1,000 reviews at about 4.6/5, and named it the AEO category Leader; the company reached a $1B valuation in February 2026.
• The recurring complaint is direction, not data: it shows where you are missing and leaves the earning of mentions to you.
• Right for enterprise brand teams with content and PR capacity; wrong-sized for founders and small teams, who pay for measurement and still do all the work.

If you would rather your AI visibility tool handed you the next page to write and the next person to email, see how Sightivo works or check what ChatGPT says about your brand for free first.