AI search fix

Profound alternatives in 2026: 8 AI visibility tools compared

Profound's entry plan is $99 a month and tracks ChatGPT and nothing else. Perplexity and Google AI Overviews start at Growth — four times the price, at $399 — and Gemini, Claude, Copilot and Grok appear only on the custom-priced Enterprise tier. That coverage-per-dollar gap, not the billing, is what sends buyers looking. The closest like-for-like alternatives on published pricing are Trakkr ($100/month with all eight engines included), Otterly.ai (from $29/month), Geoptie (from $41/month), Peec AI, AthenaHQ, and the AI add-ons inside SE Ranking and Semrush. Prices below were read from each vendor's own pages in August 2026. No tool here, Profound included, can guarantee AI citations or rankings.

One distinction matters before comparing anything. Every tool on this page except the last one does the same job as Profound — it watches whether AI assistants mention your brand. Whether they can see your site at all is a separate question, and a cheaper one to answer.

Profound and its alternatives, entry tier compared

Tool	Entry price	Billing	Engines at entry	Free trial or tier
Profound	$99/mo Starter	Monthly, or $82.50/mo billed yearly	ChatGPT only	"Try for free" on Growth; length not stated
AthenaHQ	Free tier; $295/mo Starter	Monthly; annual 17% off	5 free, 10 on Starter — includes Gemini and Grok	Free Essential tier, no card. No timed trial
Geoptie	$41/mo	Monthly	Any 4 of 7 engines	None published; free audit tools
Mangools	Free Grader	Watcher bundled into SEO plans	3 free, 7 with an account	Free plan, no card
Otterly.ai	$29/mo Lite	Monthly, or 15% off annually	4 included; Gemini is a paid add-on	Offered; help center says 7 days
Peec AI	Not readable — prices load client-side	Monthly or annual	6 selectable, including Gemini	Self-serve; length not published
SE Ranking	€87.20/mo on annual billing	Annual, or €109 monthly	AI Overviews, AI Mode, Perplexity, ChatGPT	14 days, no credit card
Semrush	$99/mo per domain	Billed annually	ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini, Perplexity	7 days — help center says it excludes this toolkit
Trakkr	$100/mo Growth	Monthly or annual	All 8, including Gemini and Grok	14 days, self-serve
GEO Fix	Free Express Check	No card	Not applicable — checks crawler access	Free to run

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Technical blockers, missing context, weak AI-readiness signals — in one HTML report.

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Why buyers look for a Profound alternative

Three things on Profound's own pricing page drive the search, and none of them are secrets. First, the $99 Starter plan tracks ChatGPT and nothing else — Perplexity and Google AI Overviews start at Growth, and Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok and DeepSeek appear only on the custom-priced Enterprise tier. Second, the step from Starter to Growth is fourfold, $99 to $399, with no tier in between, so adding two engines quadruples the bill. Third, prompt volume is tied to the same ladder: 50 tracked prompts on Starter against 100 on Growth.

Billing is not one of the reasons, despite what several roundups claim. Profound's $99 and $399 are ordinary month-to-month prices; the annual toggle on its pricing page is optional and cheaper, at $82.50 and $332.50 a month. Nor is the product the problem: Profound tracks daily on every tier, and Prompt Volumes — panel data on what people actually ask AI assistants — plus Agent Analytics for crawler and server-log detail are included across the tiers rather than sold on top. For an agency that needs engine-by-engine control and log-level data, that is a coherent package. The alternatives below win on entry price or engine coverage, not by doing something Profound cannot.

The like-for-like alternatives

Trakkr is the closest swap on coverage: $100 a month for one brand and 50 prompts, with all eight tracked models — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, Meta AI, DeepSeek and Google AI Overviews — included on every paid plan, daily refresh, and a self-serve 14-day trial. Where Profound gates engines by tier, Trakkr does not gate them at all. Otterly.ai is the cheapest entry at $29 a month for 15 prompts across four engines, with daily tracking and unlimited seats even on that plan, though Gemini, Claude and Google AI Mode cost extra. Geoptie sits between them at $41 a month, capping every tier at any four of seven engines.

Peec AI offers unlimited seats and six selectable engines with daily tracking, but its prices load in the browser and vary by visitor region, so no figure could be read from the page in August 2026 — check it from the region you would buy from. AthenaHQ is the only one here with a genuine free tier, funded by a one-time credit grant, and its Starter plan at $295 covers ten engines including both Gemini and Grok; the catch is cadence, since AthenaHQ's documentation describes weekly scheduling rather than daily. If an SEO suite is already in the budget, SE Ranking's Core plan now bundles 100 daily AI prompts at €87.20 a month on annual billing, and Semrush sells an AI Visibility Toolkit at $99 per domain billed annually — with no trial on the toolkit itself, though Semrush documents the same reports as reachable through Semrush One, which its seven-day trial does cover.

When the problem is not tracking at all

A monitoring tool answers one question: are we being mentioned? It cannot answer why not. If AI crawlers are blocked by robots.txt or a CDN rule, every tracker on this page will faithfully report an absence it cannot explain, month after month, at $29 to $399 a month.

That is the job GEO Fix does, and it is worth being plain about the affiliation: GEO Fix is our product, and it is not a Profound alternative. Express Check tests whether GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and others can actually reach a site, whether robots.txt or a CDN/WAF rule blocks them, whether llms.txt exists and whether schema.org JSON-LD is valid, then hands over the corrected files and CMS steps. It is free to run, needs no card and no demo call, and does not track brand mentions — the monitoring plans at $39/mo and $89/mo are still a waitlist. Many teams run a readiness check first, then pick a tracker from the full ten-tool comparison linked below once crawler access is confirmed.

Frequently asked questions

What is the cheapest alternative to Profound?

Otterly.ai at $29 a month for 15 prompts across four engines, followed by Geoptie at $41 — both roughly a third of Profound’s $99 entry, and both covering more than one engine for it. AthenaHQ and Mangools have free tiers, and GEO Fix runs a free technical check, but none of those three replace daily citation tracking.

Does Profound have a free trial?

Profound offers a "Try for free" route on the Growth plan without a sales call, but does not state the trial length on its pricing page. Among the alternatives, Trakkr and SE Ranking publish 14-day trials, and SE Ranking states no credit card is required.

Which Profound alternatives track Grok?

Trakkr includes Grok on every paid plan from $100 a month with daily refresh. AthenaHQ includes it from $295, though its documentation describes weekly scheduling. Geoptie lists Grok among seven engines but caps each tier at four of them. At Profound itself, Grok is Enterprise-only, at custom pricing.

What does Profound Starter actually include?

Fifty tracked prompts against ChatGPT only, with up to 1,500 monthly responses, daily refresh, and Prompt Volumes and Agent Analytics included. Perplexity and Google AI Overviews require Growth at $399 a month. Both tiers bill month-to-month, with an optional annual discount.

Is GEO Fix an alternative to Profound?

No — it does a different job, and GEO Fix is our own product. Profound and the other tools here track whether AI assistants mention a brand over time. Express Check tests whether AI crawlers can reach and parse the site in the first place, and delivers fix files rather than a score. Teams often run both.

Will switching tools get my brand cited by ChatGPT?

No tool can promise that, and any that does is overselling. Monitoring platforms report what AI systems already say; a readiness check removes technical reasons a crawler cannot read a site. Neither controls retrieval or ranking inside ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini.

Updated 2026-08-25