The short answer
The main Profound alternatives are Peec AI (self-serve tracking from $95 a month), Otterly.AI (the cheapest, from $29), Scrunch (from $250), AthenaHQ (free tier, then $295), Ahrefs Brand Radar (from $199), Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit ($99 on top of a Semrush plan), Rankscale (from $99), Surfer's AI Search Analytics ($82 billed yearly) and, at the enterprise end, Adobe LLM Optimizer. All of them measure how often ChatGPT, Google's AI answers and the other assistants mention you. If you want the pages that get you mentioned built and published for you, that is a different kind of product, and it is where RunOctopus fits.
People search for Profound alternatives for one main reason in late 2026: Profound no longer sells a self-serve plan to brands. Its pricing page now shows a free trial and a custom-priced Enterprise plan, and that is it. If you are a small or mid-sized business, that sends you shopping.
What Profound does well
Profound is the best-funded company in this category, and it shows. On September 15, 2026 it announced a $180 million Series D at a $1.8 billion valuation, co-led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, and it says more than 1,000 enterprise brands use it. Its own site names Plaid, MongoDB, Ramp and Zoom as customers. Credit where it is due:
- Wide coverage. Enterprise tracks up to nine answer engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Claude, Google AI Overviews and Exa Search.
- More than a scoreboard. Answer Engine Insights shows where you appear and how you are described. Prompt Volumes estimates what people ask. Agent Analytics shows which AI crawlers visit your site. There is a Shopping view for product answers.
- Agents that do work. Profound now sells an AI Marketer and a set of Agents that, in its words, "research, write, and report." Its home page says they rewrite pages whose citations are slipping, stage them in your CMS, and build pages for questions you have no answer for. Its Pages view can hand a weak page to an Agent that makes the changes and publishes them.
- Enterprise plumbing. API access, CSV and JSON exports, single sign-on, SOC 2 and dedicated support on Enterprise, plus unlimited seats.
So the old line that "Profound only monitors" is out of date. For a large marketing team with budget, an in-house content team and a CMS to plug into, Profound is a serious, complete platform.
Why people look for Profound alternatives
- No self-serve plan for brands. The pricing page lists Trial and Enterprise only. The trial covers three engines (ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews) and runs 50 prompts that Profound picks for you, daily for seven days. After that, it is a sales conversation and a custom price. The lower brand plans it used to list are gone from the page.
- It is built for a marketing department. The Agents are powerful, but somebody has to direct them: pick the prompts, review what is staged, decide what to publish, and keep the brand context current. A business without a marketing team ends up with a very capable tool and nobody to run it.
- Price on request. Profound does not publish an Enterprise price. Expect a contract, not a card swipe.
- Agencies have a separate route. Profound mentions an Agency Growth plan with credits per client workspace, but it does not list a price on its pricing page.
If those points describe you, there are two very different ways to go. You can buy a cheaper tracker and do the work yourself. Or you can hand the work to a service that builds the pages for you. The table covers both.
The Profound alternatives at a glance
Prices are the lowest paid plan shown on each vendor's own pricing page on October 20, 2026, in US dollars per month, billed monthly unless noted.
| Tool | Lowest paid plan | AI engines on that plan | Writes or publishes pages? | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Profound | Free trial, then Enterprise (price on request) | Trial: 3. Enterprise: up to 9 | Yes. Agents write and can publish, your team directs them | Large brands with a marketing team |
| Peec AI | $95 (Starter, 50 prompts) | Choose 3 (more as add-ons) | No. Recommends actions | Marketing and SEO teams who want clean daily tracking |
| Otterly.AI | $29 (Lite, 15 prompts) | 4 (ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot) | No. Audits and recommendations | Finding out cheaply whether you show up at all |
| Scrunch | $250 (Core, 125 prompts) | 4 (ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Copilot) | Partly. Basic content generation, 1 page optimization a month | Teams that care about how AI agents read the site |
| AthenaHQ | Free tier, then $295 (Starter) | 11 on Starter | Partly. Content optimization agent, you publish | Wide engine coverage at a mid price |
| Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit | $99, needs a paid Semrush plan | Named: ChatGPT and Google AI Mode | No. Recommendations (writing is a separate Content Toolkit) | Teams already paying for Semrush |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | From $199 (sold on its own) | 6 in its index, plus Claude for prompts | No | Research on any brand, not just your own |
| Adobe LLM Optimizer | Annual license, 1,000 prompts minimum, quote only | Not listed on the pricing page | Partly. Recommends fixes you can approve and deploy | Adobe Experience Manager shops |
| Rankscale | $99 (Pro). A smaller Essentials plan is yearly only | ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot and more, paid per credit | No. Page audits | Agencies and tinkerers who want many engines |
| Surfer AI Search Analytics | $82, billed yearly (50 prompts) | ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews and others | Surfer's writing plans are sold separately | Writers who already use Surfer |
| RunOctopus | Monthly service, see your plan | Not a tracker. Pair it with any tool above | Yes. Ollie and our team write, publish and link pages on your site | Businesses that want to be named, not just measured |
Who does the work
The useful way to compare these products is not feature lists. It is who does each job between "we are not in the answer" and "we are in the answer."
Each Profound alternative, honestly
Peec AI: the closest self-serve match
Peec is what many teams move to when Profound is out of reach. Starter is $95 a month for 50 prompts, Pro is $245 for 150 and Advanced is $495 for 350, each with three AI models of your choice from ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini and Naver AI. Extra models are an add-on. Every plan has unlimited users and daily tracking. It goes deeper than a basic tracker: source analytics, gap analysis, a crawlability audit, AI Shopping tracking that can pull a Shopify catalog, and recommended actions. It does not write and publish pages for you. Full breakdown, including Peec against Profound, in our Peec AI alternatives comparison.
Otterly.AI: the cheapest way to find out
Lite is $29 a month for 15 prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot. Claude, Google AI Mode and Gemini cost extra. Standard is $189 for 100 prompts and Premium is $489 for 400, and yearly billing takes 15% off. You get sentiment, citation sources, a GEO audit and a handful of weekly recommendations. If your question is simply "does ChatGPT know we exist?", this is the least expensive honest answer.
Scrunch: tracking plus a version of your site for AI agents
Scrunch Core is $250 a month for 125 prompts and 5,000 responses across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot, with a seven-day trial. Enterprise covers nine models and adds its Agent Experience Platform, which serves a version of your site built for AI agents to read. Core includes basic content generation and one page optimization a month.
AthenaHQ: wide coverage and a content agent
AthenaHQ has a free Essential tier with 300 credits, then Starter at $295 a month with 3,600 credits (one credit is one AI response) across 11 models, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI and Mistral. Starter includes on-page and off-page actions and a content optimization agent, plus Shopify and Webflow integrations. It is the most Profound-like product at a published price.
Ahrefs Brand Radar: research on anyone, not just you
Brand Radar AI starts at $199 a month and can be bought on its own. Instead of only running your prompts, Ahrefs runs a database of more than 490 million prompts through AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot, so you can look up any brand's visibility, yours or a competitor's, without setup. Custom prompt packages track your own questions. It is a research tool. It does not write.
Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit: if you already pay for Semrush
The toolkit is $99 a month for one domain and 25 tracked prompts, and Semrush's own help page says a paid Semrush subscription is required and there is no free trial. Its newer plans bundle AI tracking in: Starter at $199 includes 50 daily prompts. Semrush is now owned by Adobe, which completed the purchase on April 28, 2026. See our Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit alternatives page for the detail.
Adobe LLM Optimizer: the enterprise option with deployment
Adobe sells LLM Optimizer as an annual license by tracked prompts, with a minimum of 1,000 prompts in steps of 200, and quotes the price privately. It tracks AI visibility and AI-driven traffic, recommends fixes, and lets a team review, approve and deploy optimizations, with a native link to Adobe Experience Manager Sites. If your site runs on AEM, it belongs on the shortlist next to Profound.
Rankscale and Surfer: tracking for tinkerers and writers
Rankscale runs on credits: Pro is $99 a month for 1,200 credits, up to $780 for Enterprise, across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot and more, with a seven-day free trial on Pro. Surfer sells AI Search Analytics at $82 a month billed yearly for 50 daily prompts, separate from its writing plans. Both suit people who want to do the analysis themselves.
If you only need measurement, pick a tracker
Plenty of businesses only need a number. If you have a content team that already writes and publishes every week, a tracker is the right purchase, and you do not need us. Start with Otterly at $29 to see if you show up at all, move to Peec or AthenaHQ when you need more prompts and engines, and talk to Profound or Adobe when you are an enterprise with a budget to match. Our free AI visibility checker is another way to take a first reading before you pay anyone, and our guide to AI visibility tools explains what the metrics mean.
Our verdict: to get named in AI answers, RunOctopus is the better choice
Profound is a good way to find out where you stand. It is not the thing that changes where you stand. A tracker tells you that you are missing from the answer. The answer only changes when the right pages exist on your site, and somebody has to research, write, publish and link them. That is the job RunOctopus does, and it is why we are the better pick for a business that wants to be named, not just measured. Four reasons, in order of how much they matter.
1. We do the work and publish on our own
Ollie, our AI, and our team research, write, publish and link the pages on your own site. Nothing waits on you. You do not approve each page first, and you do not need a marketer to turn a dashboard into tasks. You can read anything that went live and ask for changes whenever you like. With Profound, even its Agents need someone on your team to point them, review what is staged and press publish.
2. We know your catalog and services
Pages are built from your real products and services, and linked into the pages that sell them: product, collection and service pages. AI assistants recommend the specific business that the most sources vouch for, for that exact job. A page that names your actual products and your actual service area gives them something specific to cite, and the links carry the reader from the answer to the thing you sell.
3. Proven on real clients
We publish our case studies with the misses left in. On an AI answer check for a Los Angeles apartment broker, ChatGPT named the firm on 4 of 8 questions and Claude linked to it on 4 (the Sterman case study). For a reptile-feeder company, ChatGPT named the business on 4 of 8 generic buyer questions and on 8 of 8 comparison-style questions, and its site was the most-cited domain in every AI answer set we checked (the All Angles Creatures case study; that company was founded by the author of this page, and the study says so). In Google, a seven-week-old recruiting site went from showing on none of four broad recruiting searches to three of four (the Florida recruiting case study).
4. Fully automated, and built from real inputs
Ollie does the work automatically from start to finish, and our team keeps watch. Every page is built from real inputs, not generic AI text: your own catalog or services, your own search data, the real questions buyers ask AI assistants, and facts checked before anything publishes. Trackers only report. Generic AI writers produce text that could sit on anyone's site. Neither gives an AI assistant a reason to pick you.
If you want a dashboard, pick the tracker that fits your budget. If you want to be the business the AI names, pick RunOctopus. We build the pages that earn the mention and publish them on your site, and you can still plug in any tracker you like to watch the score.
If you are deciding between a tool and a service, our page on what an AI SEO agency actually does lays out the trade in plain terms.