Citino teamDisclosure. Citino, which publishes this guide, makes an AI visibility tool; it is listed last. Facts about every product come from its own pricing, product or documentation pages, checked on 19 October 2026.
What Profound does well
Profound is the largest company in the category. It announced a $180 million Series D at a $1.8 billion valuation in September 2026 and names customers such as Target, Walmart, Figma, Ramp and MongoDB. Its strengths:
- Breadth: up to 9 engines on Enterprise, plus ChatGPT Shopping.
- Agents: AI Marketer agents that propose and produce content.
- Prompt Volumes: estimates of what people ask AI assistants, built on licensed consumer panel data.
- Enterprise readiness: SSO, SOC 2, exports and an API on Enterprise, and a GA4 integration.
For a large brand with the budget, it is a strong default.
Why teams look for an alternative
From Profound’s own pricing page and articles, the usual reasons:
- No public self-serve price. Beyond the free trial, Enterprise is custom and sold through a demo.
- The trial is fixed. It uses 50 preset industry prompts you cannot edit, for 7 days, on 3 engines.
- No margin of error. Numbers are shown without a range.
- No per-fix verdict. Profound records which engines cite a page after it is published; it does not describe testing a change against competitors or noise.
- Scale you may not need. Smaller teams can pay for platform depth they will not use.
The alternatives at a glance
| If you want… | Look at | Starting price |
|---|---|---|
| A published self-serve price | Peec AI, Scrunch | $95/mo; $300/mo |
| Built-in optimisation agents | AthenaHQ, Goodie | Free / $295/mo; $295/mo |
| An enterprise tool with a published method | Evertune | $60/mo billed annually |
| An enterprise suite you may already own | Semrush Enterprise AIO, Conductor | On request |
| The lowest cost to start | Otterly.AI, LLMrefs | $29/mo; $79/mo |
| Margins and a verdict on each fix | Citino | $39/mo |
Peec AI
Best for: mid-market teams and agencies who want clean daily tracking at a published price.
Starter $95/mo (50 prompts), Pro $245/mo (150), Advanced $495/mo (350), unlimited users, three engines per plan with more as add-ons. Its Impact view marks when an action was done, so you can compare before and after. See Peec AI alternatives for its trade-offs.
Scrunch
Best for: teams who want enterprise-grade coverage with a public price.
Seven engines on every plan, including Claude and Meta. Starter $300/mo ($250 annual, 350 prompts, 3 users), Growth $500/mo, Enterprise custom. Its Agent Experience Platform serves AI-optimised pages to AI bots. Scrunch is now part of Sitecore, which matters if you already run Sitecore.
AthenaHQ
Best for: teams who want agents that act, on a smaller budget.
A free Essential plan, and Starter at $295/mo with 3,600 credits (one per answer) across 11 engines, a content optimisation agent, on-page and off-page actions, and GA4, Search Console, Shopify and Webflow integrations.
Goodie
Best for: brands who want agents plus attribution.
Core $295/mo (110 prompts, 5 engines), Pro $999/mo, Enterprise custom, with agents for content, technical fixes, llms.txt and outreach, AI crawler analytics, and revenue attribution on Enterprise.
Evertune
Best for: large advertisers who want transparency about sampling.
Evertune publishes how its margin of error falls as each prompt is asked more times, combines API access with the consumer apps, and offers an Ads Agent. Starter $60/mo and Pro $800/mo, billed annually.
Semrush Enterprise AIO and Conductor
Best for: enterprises standardised on an SEO platform.
Semrush’s Enterprise AIO and Conductor’s AI Search Performance both sell on request and connect AI visibility with their wider SEO data. Semrush’s self-serve AI Visibility Toolkit starts at $99/mo per domain for teams that want to test first.
Otterly.AI and LLMrefs
Best for: getting started cheaply.
Otterly.AI starts at $29/mo (15 prompts) with unlimited brands and seats; LLMrefs lists one $79/mo plan with 500 prompts and up to 10 engines.
Citino
Citino is ours, so weigh this accordingly.
Citino is built around proof rather than breadth. Every number carries a 95% margin of error bootstrapped over prompts, and every fix gets a verdict, net of the median change of your competitors, once an engine has read the changed page. Citino drafts fixes on every plan, and from 150 prompts up its team works the gap queue with you. Pricing is by prompts only, from $39/mo for 20 prompts to $569/mo for 500, with three engines included (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity), Gemini, Google AI Mode and Claude as add-ons, and unlimited brands and seats. Above 500 prompts is Enterprise.
Its limits next to Profound: fewer engines (no Copilot, DeepSeek or Exa), no prompt-volume data, no shopping tracking, and a much younger company.
How to decide
If you are leaving Profound for price, compare answers per month (prompts × engines × runs) across the tools above. If you are leaving for proof, ask each vendor to show a past change and how the tool judged whether it worked. The checklist is in how to choose an AI visibility tool, and the full field is in the best AI visibility tools in 2026.