7 Best Profound Alternatives for AI Visibility (2026)

Short answer: Profound no longer sells a self-serve brand plan. As of 26 September 2026 its pricing page shows a free 7-day Trial and a custom-priced Enterprise tier, nothing in between. If you want Profound’s job done with a credit card, the best Profound alternative is Peec AI at $95/mo for 50 prompts across 3 models. On a tight budget it’s Otterly.AI at $29/mo. If you need Profound-grade depth, SSO and SOC 2, stay with Profound and book the demo.

Two weeks ago most “Profound alternatives” pages, this one included, were arguing about a $99 Starter plan that only tracked ChatGPT. That plan is gone. So the question changed from “is the cheap tier good enough” to “do I want to go through sales at all.” Here’s what each option actually costs today, with receipts.

Quick pick

What Profound costs now: the change log

Nobody else ranking for this query shows the change with dates, so here it is. Sources are Profound’s own page and Wayback Machine captures of it.

So the self-serve tiers disappeared sometime between 14 and 26 September, right around the raise. That tracks with who Profound sells to now: it says it serves over 1,000 enterprise brands and 16% of the Fortune 500, and has raised more than $335M since 2024. A company with that customer list doesn’t need a $99 plan. You’re the one who needs to decide whether you need them.

Pricing and coverage matrix

Every price below was checked on the vendor’s own pricing page on 26 September 2026 (as of September 2026). “Engines” means the AI platforms tracked at the entry tier. I didn’t run a hands-on prompt test for this update; this is a pricing and packaging comparison, and I say so on purpose because most lists claiming “we tested” don’t show you anything.

The per-prompt arithmetic. Divide price by prompts and the self-serve options land close together: Otterly Lite works out to $1.93 per prompt a month ($29 / 15), Peec Starter to $1.90 ($95 / 50), and Otterly Standard to $1.89 ($189 / 100). Scrunch Starter is the outlier at about $0.86 ($300 / 350 on monthly billing), which is why it wins on volume. Semrush Starter is $3.30 per prompt ($165.17 / 50), but you’re mostly paying for the SEO suite and getting AI prompts thrown in.

Engines change the math too. Peec counts every prompt on every model every day, so Starter produces 4,500 AI answers a month (50 x 3 x 30). Otterly Lite at 15 prompts on 4 engines is 1,800. More answers per prompt means less noise per data point, which matters more than people think (more on that below).

The 7 best Profound alternatives

1. Peec AI: the closest self-serve replacement

Berlin-based Peec is the tool most people land on after bouncing off Profound’s demo form. Starter is $95/mo for 50 prompts, 3 models of your choice, unlimited users and daily tracking; Pro is $245 for 150 prompts and Advanced $495 for 350 with multi-country tracking and Looker Studio. The standout for agent-heavy teams: Peec says its MCP server is on all paid plans at no extra cost, so Claude or Cursor can query your visibility data from day one.

Tradeoff: 3 models at every self-serve tier. Tracking Claude, Grok or DeepSeek needs Enterprise, and the full REST API is Enterprise too.

2. Otterly.AI: the cheapest serious entry

Otterly Lite is $29/mo for 15 prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot, with unlimited team members and daily tracking. Standard at $189 gets you 100 prompts plus API, MCP and a Looker Studio connector. Annual billing takes 15% off.

Tradeoff: 15 prompts is a sample, not a strategy. Claude, Gemini and AI Mode are paid add-ons, and Lite has no API or MCP at all.

3. Scrunch: most prompts per dollar

Scrunch Starter is $250/mo on annual billing or $300 monthly for 3 users, 350 custom prompts and page audits, covering ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and Overviews, and Meta. There’s a 7-day trial with no card. Sitecore announced it acquired Scrunch on 3 June 2026.

Tradeoff: it’s now part of an enterprise CX company. If you’re a Sitecore shop that’s a plus. If you’re a 10-person startup, watch where the roadmap goes.

4. Semrush: if you already pay for it

Semrush Starter is $165.17/mo billed annually, tracks 50 prompts daily across Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, and includes MCP access. The cheaper SEO plan ($117.33 annually) has AI visibility reports but no tracked prompts and no MCP. Adobe closed its $1.9B acquisition of Semrush on 29 April 2026.

Tradeoff: 50 prompts is thin next to Scrunch or Peec Pro. Great as an add-on to SEO work you already do there, a weird reason to become a customer.

5. Ahrefs Brand Radar: if Ahrefs is already in your stack

Brand Radar’s AI Visibility index starts at $199/mo for 83 prompts a day and 2,500 checks a month, across all platforms including Claude, with overage at $0.02 per check. One catch: a Claude prompt burns 8 checks per update, so Claude-heavy tracking eats the allowance fast. Custom prompt packs start at $50/mo, and existing Ahrefs plans include 5 to 20 prompts for free. That’s about $0.08 per check at the base allowance. We broke down the rest of the suite in our Ahrefs alternatives guide.

Tradeoff: it’s a research product bolted onto an SEO tool. Deep data, but you still have to go and look at it.

6. RunAgents: when you want to be told, not go look

Every tool above answers a question when you open it. RunAgents watches continuously and pushes a real-time alert to Slack, Discord, Telegram or email when something moves: a competitor starts getting cited for a query you owned, your AI share of voice drops, a rival changes its pricing page, or a robots.txt change blocks an AI crawler. It covers AI citations and brand mentions per engine, AI share of voice and sentiment, plus the SEO, competitor and email deliverability signals the AI-only tools skip. It runs over MCP, so your agents get the same data inline.

That’s also how we’d keep the change log above current: the competitor-pricing-diff signal watches pages like Profound’s and flags the diff when it changes.

Tradeoff: if AI answer depth is your whole job, Profound and Peec go deeper on prompt volume and citation forensics. We wrote the honest head-to-head in RunAgents vs Profound.

7. Google Search Console and GA4: the free floor

Not an AI visibility tool, and it belongs on this list anyway. Search Console and GA4 are free and first-party. They won’t tell you how ChatGPT describes you. They will tell you your real clicks, queries and referral traffic, which is the ground truth every paid tool is estimating. Set them up before you buy anything else.

Profound vs Peec AI: the verdict

These two get compared more than any other pair, so here’s the short version.

Pick Profound if you need 9 engines, security review sign-off and a dedicated team, and you have the budget to talk to sales. Its enterprise traction is real: Walmart, Comcast and Estée Lauder are on the customer list.

Pick Peec if you’re a startup or agency that wants to be running this afternoon, cares more about 3 engines done well than 9 done expensively, and wants your agents on MCP without an Enterprise contract. For most pre-seed to Series B teams, that’s the answer. If Peec isn’t quite it either, see our Peec AI alternatives list.

How to choose (the parts other lists skip)

Count answers, not prompts. AI answers aren’t deterministic. Ask ChatGPT the same question twice and you can get different brands cited. A tool that runs 50 prompts on 3 models daily gives you 90 samples per prompt a month; one that runs weekly gives you about 13. Fewer samples, noisier trend line. Before you buy, ask the vendor how often each prompt runs and whether a “drop” is one bad sample or a real shift.

Decide dashboard vs alert. Dashboards are fine if someone opens them weekly. Most small teams don’t. Ask every vendor one question: “If a competitor displaces us in ChatGPT on Tuesday, how do I find out, and when?” If the answer is “you’ll see it in the dashboard,” price in the human who checks it.

Check seats and workspaces. Peec, Otterly and Profound’s Trial give unlimited users. Scrunch Starter caps at 3. Agencies still get a self-serve Agency Growth plan at Profound, metered per client workspace; get the per-workspace quote in writing and put it next to Peec’s agency option before signing anything.

Remember what AI tracking can’t tell you. Visibility in AI answers is downstream of whether AI crawlers can reach your pages and whether you rank in the first place. Our GEO vs SEO breakdown covers where the two overlap.

FAQ

Does Profound still have a $99 plan? No. The $99 Starter and $399 Growth brand plans were on the pricing page on 14 September 2026 and gone by 26 September. Brands now get a 7-day free Trial or custom Enterprise pricing.

What’s the cheapest Profound alternative? Otterly.AI Lite at $29/mo, or $25/mo billed annually. Search Console and GA4 are free but don’t track AI answers.

Can a seed-stage startup still use Profound? For a week, yes: the Trial runs 50 prompts daily for 7 days on ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews. After that it’s a demo and an Enterprise contract. Use the trial to benchmark your baseline, then run the same prompts in Peec or Otterly, and revisit Profound when AI discovery drives enough revenue to justify a sales cycle.

Bottom line

Profound went fully upmarket in September, and that’s a reasonable call for a company with its customer list. It just means “Profound alternatives” now mostly means “AI visibility tools I can buy today.” Peec for self-serve depth, Otterly for budget, Scrunch for volume, your existing Semrush or Ahrefs if you already pay for them, and Search Console underneath all of it.

If what you actually want is to hear about it the moment a competitor takes your spot in ChatGPT, or changes its pricing page the way Profound just did, that’s what RunAgents does: real-time alerts on AI citations, share of voice and competitor changes, piped to Slack and to your agents over MCP. Set up your first competitor watch and let the next pricing change find you.

Prices checked on each vendor’s pricing page on 26 September 2026. Pricing in this category moves fast; confirm at checkout.