Reviewed by Harsh Desai · Last reviewed:
Profound
An AI visibility platform that tracks brand mentions in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews
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Profound is the AI visibility tracking platform Fortune 500 marketing teams use to measure how their brand surfaces in answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. The Profound team built it for the post-search era, where AI assistants summarise answers and only sometimes cite sources, and where traditional rank tracking misses where customer attention has moved. It maps what people ask AI, how often your brand appears, and what sentiment those mentions carry.
What Profound does:
- •Cross-platform AI visibility dashboard tracks brand mentions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and Bing Copilot in one view, with daily refresh.
- •Conversation Explorer shows the actual AI conversations where your brand and competitors are referenced, including the exact prompts that triggered the mention.
- •Real-time AI search volume exposes the prompt frequency data that was invisible to marketers, similar to Google Trends but for AI assistants.
- •Citation tracking identifies which third-party sources AI models cite when answering questions in your category, so you know where to push thought leadership.
- •Sentiment scoring grades each AI mention as positive, neutral, or negative so you can prioritise reputation work over raw frequency.
- •Competitive share-of-voice benchmarks your brand against named competitors across the same prompt set, refreshed weekly.
- •GEO content recommendations the Growth plan ships with optimised article suggestions targeted at the prompts most likely to surface in AI answers.
- •API access on Enterprise pull mention, citation, and sentiment data into BI tools or internal dashboards for executive reporting.
- •AI agent monitoring tracks how your site is crawled by ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity bots, with logs marketing teams can hand to engineering.
- •Custom prompt sets define the questions your customers actually ask, then watch how AI assistants answer them over time.
Pricing:
- •Growth $399/mo: three platforms (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews), 100 prompts, six optimised articles per month -- aimed at mid-market marketing teams.
- •Enterprise from $2,000/mo (custom): all 10+ tracked AI platforms, full feature access, API, dedicated support, and Fortune 500 SLAs, contact-sales billing.
- •Free trial $0 one-off: limited demo on the Profound site for marketers to sample dashboards before booking sales.
Limitations:
- •Enterprise-priced for SMBs $399/mo Growth is the floor, with most serious deployments closer to $2,000+/mo, so solo founders and early-stage startups will find this overkill.
- •No self-serve sign-up at scale Enterprise requires a sales call, and the Growth plan still nudges towards a demo, slowing teams that want to test before committing.
- •Prompt-set quality is your responsibility the dashboard is only as useful as the prompts you feed it; brands without a clear list of customer questions get noisy reports.
- •Best-fit category narrows fast Profound shines for B2B SaaS, finance, and healthcare brands; lifestyle and retail teams may find cheaper rank-trackers more actionable.
Our Verdict
Profound earns 7.8/10 because it is the most comprehensive AI visibility platform for brands that already accept GEO is a real channel and need a single dashboard to defend share-of-voice in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. The Conversation Explorer and citation tracking are genuinely best-in-class, and the dashboards survive scrutiny from marketing leadership in ways simpler rank-trackers do not.
For the Basic User, Profound is overkill. If you are running a small business or personal brand, the $399/mo Growth plan is more than most SaaS budgets, and the value sits in the dashboards a CMO would brief, not a solo operator. Free brand-mention scanning via ChatGPT-Perplexity searches handles the same job at zero cost for individuals.
For the Vibe Builder, Profound is interesting only if you sit at a venture-funded startup with $50k+/mo marketing spend and need to prove AI search visibility to a board. For everyone else, the cost-to-insight ratio favours doing your own prompt set in ChatGPT and Claude every Monday morning, then upgrading once the team grows. The platform compounds value at scale; it is wasted on a one-person operation.
Skip it if budget is under $300/mo (try a manual prompt-set workflow with ChatGPT and Perplexity instead), if you only sell to one AI ecosystem (consider just monitoring Google AI Overviews directly), or if you need raw model access for engineering work (use the AI assistants directly via OpenAI or Anthropic). For mid-market teams, Sight AI and Track My Visibility are cheaper alternatives worth a side-by-side test.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How much does Profound actually cost in 2026?
Profound's Growth plan is $399/mo and covers three AI platforms with 100 prompts and six optimised articles. Enterprise pricing typically starts around $2,000/mo and unlocks all 10+ platforms, API access, and dedicated support. Profound does not publish a self-serve free tier in 2026; expect a sales conversation before any production deployment.
What is Generative Engine Optimization and how does Profound help?
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of optimising content so AI assistants cite your brand in their answers. Profound measures the result: which AI platforms mention your brand, how often, in what sentiment, and which competitors share the same answer space. It is the analytics layer for GEO, the way Google Search Console is for traditional SEO.
Profound vs Sight AI: which AI visibility tool should I pick?
Choose Profound when you need enterprise depth: full Conversation Explorer, custom prompt sets, citation maps, and a CMO-ready dashboard worth $2,000+/mo. Choose Sight AI when you want a cheaper, mid-market starter that still tracks ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity for a few hundred dollars a month. Profound is the Bloomberg terminal; Sight is the entry-level seat.
Which AI platforms does Profound track?
On Growth Profound covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. On Enterprise the list extends to Claude, Gemini, Bing Copilot, Microsoft Copilot, You.com, and other large AI assistants -- 10+ platforms in total as of mid-2026. Profound updates its platform list as new AI search products gain traction, so the Enterprise scope keeps expanding.
Can small businesses use Profound or is it only for enterprise?
Profound is built for mid-market and enterprise marketing teams. The $399/mo Growth plan suits funded startups and brands with named competitors worth tracking; below that budget, a manual prompt set in ChatGPT and Perplexity each Monday matches roughly 60% of Profound's signal at zero cost. Use Profound when AI visibility is a board-reported metric, not before.
Is Profound free?
Yes, Profound offers a free version.
Who should use Profound?
Profound is built for vibe builders who want AI to handle the technical work and everyday users who need simple AI-powered tools. Common use cases include ai-visibility-tracking, geo-analytics, brand-mention-monitoring, competitive-share-of-voice, ai-citation-tracking.
What are the best alternatives to Profound?
Popular alternatives to Profound include Perplexity, Chatgpt, Claude. Compare features and pricing in our Growth directory to compare options.
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Profound
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