The short version: Profound is an enterprise AI visibility platform that goes deep on one surface, how answer engines talk about your brand, and now writes content off the back of it. RunAgents is a monitoring layer that watches six marketing surfaces, AI search being one, and pushes you an alert when something changes. If AI search is a whole function at your company and you can sign an enterprise contract, pick Profound. If you’re a small team and the bigger risk is something breaking while nobody’s looking, that’s the job we built RunAgents for.
We make one of the two products, so discount this accordingly. Everything about Profound below was checked on its own site on 26 Sep 2026 and is linked, so you can verify it.
Profound changed in September. Most comparisons haven’t caught up
Two things happened in mid-September 2026, and most “Profound review” pages you’ll find are now wrong about both.
- New money. Profound raised a $180M Series D at a $1.8B valuation, co-led by Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins.
- No more self-serve brand plans. The $99 Starter and $399 Growth plans are gone. Profound’s pricing page now lists two options for brands: a free Trial (50 prompts, run daily for 7 days, on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, no exports) and a custom-priced Enterprise plan. Agencies still get a self-serve option, Agency Growth at $99/mo plus $399/mo per client workspace, as of September 2026.
So “Profound’s $99 tier vs X” isn’t a comparison you can make any more. For a brand, Profound means Enterprise, which means a sales conversation.
The 30-second verdict
| Your situation | Pick |
|---|---|
| Enterprise brand, a dedicated AEO/GEO owner, procurement in place | Profound |
| AI answers drive a big share of pipeline and you want content agents acting on it | Profound |
| Agency running AI visibility for several clients | Profound Agency Growth, or a cheaper AEO tool |
| Seed to Series B, one or two marketers, no dashboard owner | RunAgents |
| You need SEO, competitors, brand & keyword mentions and email watched too, not just AI answers | RunAgents |
| You want your coding or marketing agent to ask “what changed?” over MCP without an enterprise contract | RunAgents |
Alert coverage: what each tool tells you without you asking
This is the table no other review has, and it’s the real difference between the two. “Tracked” means the data exists if you go and look. “Alert” means the tool pushes the change to you.
| Change event | Profound (Enterprise) | RunAgents |
|---|---|---|
| You drop out of an AI answer you used to appear in | Tracked; push alerts on this not documented | Alert |
| A competitor starts appearing in AI answers | Tracked (competitor analysis) | Alert |
| How AI engines describe you shifts (sentiment) | Tracked | Alert |
| New content or citation opportunities | Surfaced (its AI Marketer “proactively identifies opportunities”) | Not a focus |
| You lose an AI Overview or other SERP feature | AI Overviews citations tracked | Alert |
| Organic rankings or traffic drop | Not listed | Alert |
| Competitor changes pricing or homepage messaging | Not listed | Alert |
| Competitor ships (changelog, GitHub activity) | Not listed | Alert |
| Your robots.txt starts blocking AI crawlers | Bot activity shown in Agent Analytics | Alert |
| SPF, DKIM or DMARC breaks, or you land on a blacklist | Not listed | Alert |
“Not listed” means we couldn’t find it on Profound’s product or pricing pages, not that it can’t be built on request. And the “not documented” cell is a real gap in public information: Profound’s pricing page says its AI Marketer proactively surfaces opportunities on Enterprise, but doesn’t say whether losing a citation you used to hold triggers one. Ask on the sales call. It’s the question that decides whether a small team can actually run the tool.
What each one is
Profound is an AI visibility and content platform. Answer Engine Insights tracks how nine engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Copilot, DeepSeek, Claude, Google AI Overviews and Exa) describe your category, with citations and sentiment. Around that sit Prompt Volumes, Agents, a Context Manager, Agent Analytics, ChatGPT Shopping tracking and a FactCheck agent. The CEO describes customers using its Agents to “research, write and report.” It’s sold to enterprises; its homepage says it’s trusted by a third of the Fortune 100.
RunAgents is marketing monitoring for devtools and AI-native startups. It watches six surfaces in real time:
- AI search: citations and brand mentions per engine, AI share of voice, answer position, sentiment, competitor AI visibility.
- SEO: ranking and traffic changes, SERP feature ownership including AI Overviews, keyword gap, backlink gap.
- Competitors: pricing, messaging and changelog diffs, GitHub activity.
- Brand & keyword mentions across AI answers.
- Email deliverability: SPF, DKIM and DMARC checks, blacklist monitoring.
- Technical health: robots.txt and AI bot access, JavaScript rendering gaps, schema depth, Core Web Vitals.
Changes land in Slack, Discord, Telegram or email, in the dashboard, and over MCP so an agent in Claude or Cursor can ask what moved.
The overlap between the two products is one surface out of six.
How a RunAgents alert works
We re-check each signal on its own refresh cycle and compare it with the last reading. When it moves, you get the before, the after and the source: the engine and prompt where your citation disappeared, the old and new copy on a competitor’s pricing page, the DMARC record that stopped passing. No weekly report to remember to open.
The same history is what the MCP server reads. Ask your agent “what changed on our AI visibility this week?” and it answers from the diffs, not from a fresh scrape. For which MCP servers pair well with that, see best MCP servers for marketing teams.
Where Profound is better
Not close on these, and we’d rather you hear it from us.
- Engine coverage. Nine engines on Enterprise, including DeepSeek, Copilot and Exa. We don’t match that breadth inside AI search.
- Doing, not just watching. Profound’s Agents research, write and report on AI visibility work. RunAgents tells you what changed and hands the data to your agents. It doesn’t write your content for you.
- Prompt Volumes. Profound says it analyzes billions of real user conversations to show what people actually ask. We have nothing equivalent.
- Enterprise readiness. Custom regions, CSV and JSON exports, full API access, SSO/SAML, unlimited seats, a documented MCP server, and a balance sheet that just took on $180M. We’re a small company. If vendor risk is on your procurement checklist, weigh that honestly.
Where RunAgents is better
- It interrupts you. Profound surfaces opportunities. RunAgents pushes changes, including the bad ones, across all six surfaces. For a team without a full-time AEO owner, that’s the difference between a tool that gets used and one that gets forgotten.
- Everything that isn’t an AI answer. A money page losing rankings, a competitor quietly cutting prices, a DMARC record breaking after a DNS change. None of that shows up in an AI visibility dashboard, and all of it costs more than a lost citation usually does.
- No sales call. Since September, Profound’s only self-serve path for a brand is a 7-day trial. RunAgents is self-serve.
Feature comparison
Profound column checked against its pricing page and homepage on 26 Sep 2026.
| Profound (Enterprise) | RunAgents | |
|---|---|---|
| AI answer tracking | Deep, 9 engines | Covered |
| Citation and source analysis | Strong | Covered |
| Sentiment | Yes | Yes |
| Competitor benchmarking in AI answers | Yes | Yes |
| Brand mentions in AI answers | Yes | Yes |
| Content agents that write and publish | Yes (Agents) | No |
| Real prompt volume data | Yes (Prompt Volumes) | No |
| SEO rankings, SERP features, keyword and backlink gap | Not listed | Yes |
| Competitor pricing, messaging, changelog, GitHub | Not listed | Yes |
| Email deliverability (SPF/DKIM/DMARC, blacklists) | Not listed | Yes |
| Technical health (robots.txt, rendering, schema, CWV) | AI bot analytics (Agent Analytics) | Yes |
| Push alerts on changes | Opportunities surfaced; change alerts not documented | Yes, on every surface |
| MCP server | Yes (docs) | Yes |
| Buying motion | Sales-led; free 7-day trial | Self-serve |
Who should not buy RunAgents
- If AI visibility is your entire job. Buy Profound Enterprise. You’ll use the depth. The rest of the category is in best AI visibility tools.
- If you want an AEO tool at a startup price and nothing else. Peec AI and Otterly are the usual answers, compared in Profound alternatives.
- If you need content produced, not monitored. Profound’s Agents do that. We don’t.
- If you’re an enterprise with strict vendor requirements. We’re small. That’s a real risk for you.
Can you use both?
Yes, and it’s a reasonable setup for a Series B team where AI search is already a meaningful channel. Profound for depth and content on AI answers, RunAgents for alerts on the other five surfaces. If AI search is one channel among several and you can’t justify an enterprise contract yet, start with the breadth and the alerts, then add depth when the channel earns it.
FAQ
Does Profound still have a $99 plan? Not for brands. As of 26 Sep 2026, Profound’s pricing page lists a free Trial and custom Enterprise pricing. The $99 figure now belongs to Agency Growth, plus $399/mo per client workspace.
Which has better AI visibility data? Profound. More engines, prompt volume data and deeper citation analysis. RunAgents covers AI search as one of six monitored surfaces.
Does Profound track competitors? Yes. Its Enterprise plan analyzes how your brand and competitors appear in AI platforms. What it doesn’t list is monitoring competitors outside AI answers, like pricing pages, changelogs or GitHub.
Do both have MCP servers? Yes. Profound documents an MCP server, and its pricing page lists full API access on Enterprise only (the Trial has none). RunAgents exposes every surface over MCP.
Bottom line
Profound answers “how do AI engines see us, and what should we publish about it?” better than anyone, and it’s priced and sold for enterprises that have someone whose job that is. RunAgents answers “what changed across our marketing, and do I need to act?” for teams that don’t.
If you’re a small team and the thing that keeps biting you is finding out late (the lost citation, the competitor’s new pricing, the broken DMARC record), set up RunAgents on your domain and competitors and let the first alert tell you whether it earns its place.
Profound pricing, plans and funding checked on 26 Sep 2026 from the pages linked above. Vendors change plans often, Profound included, so verify before you buy.