Profound Review: What It Does, What It Costs, and What It Won't Do
Profound dropped its $99 and $399 plans. What the AI visibility platform does, what it costs in September 2026, and where AI visibility tools stop.
Tanissh Amit
Profound is an AI visibility and marketing platform that tracks how brands appear in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and six other answer engines, then uses AI agents to research and draft content in response. It is the best-funded company in the category: on 15 September 2026, Profound announced a $180 million Series D at a $1.8 billion valuation, co-led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins. It is built for enterprise marketing teams, and its pricing now reflects that.
TL;DR. Profound's brand pricing page no longer lists the $99 Starter and $399 Growth plans quoted in most reviews published this summer. As of 16 September 2026, brands get a free one-time trial of 10 prompts on ChatGPT, or custom Enterprise pricing. Agencies can still self-serve at $399 a month per client workspace. We have used Profound at Strategi. AI visibility tools are useful for seeing who AI currently names and for setting direction, but we treat them as nice to have, not must have, and we do not rely on them for exact measurement.
What is Profound, and who is it built for?
Profound is a New York company led by co-founder and CEO James Cadwallader. It started as an analytics product. It ran a set of prompts through AI engines every day, recorded whether your brand appeared and how it was described, and logged which sources the engine cited. In other words, it tracked AI citations the way an SEO tool tracks rankings.
That is no longer how Profound describes itself. In its Series D announcement, Cadwallader said the company "started as an analytics platform," and that customers now use its agents to research, write and report. The new flagship is AI Marketer, an agent that reads your brand data, analyses AI answers and assigns work to sub-agents.
The customer list shows who Profound sells to. The company says it serves more than 1,000 enterprise brands and over a third of the Fortune 100. It names Comcast, Walmart, Estée Lauder, Zoom, Ramp and Figma among its customers.
What does Profound do?
Profound's platform has four working parts, and each solves a different problem.
Answer Engine Insights. This is the tracking core. Profound runs your prompts and reports visibility, sentiment, citations and competitor presence. On Enterprise it runs daily and can cover nine engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Claude and Google AI Overviews.
Agent Analytics. This shows which AI crawlers visit your site and how much traffic arrives from AI assistants. Crawler access is the first thing we check in any technical AI search audit. Profound lists integrations with Cloudflare, Vercel, Akamai, Fastly, AWS and Google Analytics, among others.
Agents and AI Marketer. These research, draft and refresh content using a Context Manager that stores your positioning and brand guidelines. Usage is metered in credits, and the agency plan includes 400 credits a month per client workspace.
Ads Studio. This is the newest piece. Profound says it lets teams build and manage AI search ad campaigns across OpenAI, Google and Meta ad managers, tracked with Profound's own pixel.
Profound is becoming a marketing workbench rather than only a measurement product. In our own use, the most practical value of this kind of platform is a quick read on which brands AI engines are naming in a category right now.
How much does Profound cost in September 2026?
Profound's pricing changed recently, and most published reviews have not caught up. Reviews dated as late as 29 August 2026 quote a $99 Starter plan (ChatGPT only, 50 prompts) and a $399 Growth plan (three engines, 100 prompts), both billed yearly. On 16 September 2026, neither plan appears on Profound's brand pricing page.
| Plan | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Trial (brands) | Free | 10 prompts run once, ChatGPT only, limited AI Marketer credits, no history, no exports, no API, no support. Prompts are not customisable. |
| Enterprise (brands) | Custom | Daily tracking, tailored prompt plan, capability for up to 9 engines, all-time history, CSV and JSON export, API, SSO/SAML, SOC 2, support up to a dedicated specialist with a 24-hour SLA |
| Agency Growth | Client workspaces $399/month each | 10 pitch workspaces a month (25 prompts, 3 engines, 7 days), full client workspaces with 100 prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews, 400 Agent credits, 5 seats, email support |
| Agency Enterprise | Custom | Tailored workspaces, more engines, API, dedicated partner support |
For brands, the practical entry point is now a sales conversation. Profound does not publish an Enterprise price, so budget for a negotiated contract rather than a list price. If you are building a full AI search budget, our breakdown of AI search optimization costs covers the rest of the line items.
What won't AI visibility tools do for you?
This section applies to every AI visibility tool on the market, not one product. These are the limits we run into in client work.
Tools cannot give you an exact picture of AI visibility
AI answers change between runs. When we run the same prompt twice, manually or through a tool, the overall response is often different, though some prompts do settle on a consistent answer. SparkToro found the same pattern at scale in research run with AI tracking startup Gumshoe.ai. In late 2025, 600 volunteers ran 12 prompts through ChatGPT, Claude and Google's AI 2,961 times. There was less than a 1 in 100 chance of getting the same list of brands twice.
Tools also do not show how they get to their numbers. Most run a set of queries and build their reporting on assumptions drawn from those samples. We have not seen a tool that can explain its back end clearly enough for us to treat its output as accurate. A single AI answer is a sample, not a ranking, and a dashboard built on samples is a direction, not a measurement. The 2026 AI search visibility data shows how much engines disagree with each other, too.
Tools cannot earn the sources AI engines trust
Profound's own funding announcement makes this point. It says answer engines use hundreds of thousands of sources to form an opinion of one brand, across product pages, review sites, earned media, social and industry coverage.
Most of those sources are not on your website. A tool can show you which competitors AI engines name. It cannot get your brand into the publications, communities and pages those engines draw from. That is why ranking well does not automatically make AI recommend you. Tools show you who is being named; getting named is separate work.
Paying for placement is not the same as earning trust
AI search ads are arriving, and some tools now help brands buy them. That brings back an old question from search: why rank organically if you can pay for Google Ads? The answer has not changed. Organic presence builds more trust, because the brand is being recommended rather than sponsored. It is the core idea behind the recommendation economy.
Coverage is the other problem. Paid placements sit on specific AI surfaces, while buyers research across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot and Google's AI results. An earned citation travels across all of them. A paid one stays where you bought it.
How do we measure AI visibility at Strategi?
For tracking, we prefer first-party data: Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and Microsoft Clarity. These measure what actually happened on your site rather than estimating it from sampled prompts.
Microsoft Clarity in particular shows:
the queries behind AI citations
which LLMs the visits come from
which pages are being cited
how many citations are branded versus unbranded
AI bot activity on the site
how much total traffic AI sources drive
That is attribution data no prompt sampler can produce. Here is how to set Clarity up for AI visibility.
Tools sit on top of that as a directional layer. They help us see who is currently named in a category and where to point the work. That work starts with an AI visibility audit.
Is Profound worth it?
Profound fits a specific buyer. It is built for enterprise brands with in-house marketing teams, several markets or languages, and security reviews that require SSO and SOC 2. It offers the widest engine coverage in the category, all-time history and an API.
Profound's agency plan is built for agencies pitching AI visibility, with ten pitch workspaces a month for prospect audits. If you go that route, model the $399 per client workspace, because that is the number that scales.
Whichever tool you choose, use it for direction. Measure results with first-party data, and put the budget into the work that actually changes what AI engines say about you. For a wider view of the category, see what AI SEO tools can and cannot do. If you are weighing Profound against a self-serve option, the Peec AI review covers that comparison.
Frequently asked questions
- How much does Profound cost?
- As of 16 September 2026, Profound's brand pricing page lists two options: a free Trial and custom-priced Enterprise. The Trial runs 10 prompts once, on ChatGPT only, with no history, exports or support. Enterprise includes daily tracking across up to nine AI engines, API access, SSO/SAML and SOC 2 compliance, and Profound does not publish its price. The $99 Starter and $399 Growth plans quoted in reviews from July and August 2026 no longer appear on the brand page. Agencies can still self-serve on Agency Growth, where each full client workspace costs $399 a month. Confirm current terms on Profound's pricing page before budgeting, because the plan lineup changed between late August and mid-September 2026.
- Does Profound have a free trial?
- Yes. The Trial plan gives you 10 prompts run a single time, on ChatGPT only, from a recommended prompt set based on your industry. You cannot customise those prompts, and the plan includes no history, exports or support. That is enough to see how Profound's interface works. Keep in mind that AI answers vary from run to run, so any one-time snapshot shows what happened once rather than what usually happens.
- Which AI engines does Profound track?
- Profound's Enterprise plan has capability for nine answer engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Anthropic Claude and Google AI Overviews. The free Trial covers ChatGPT only. On the agency plan, pitch workspaces and client workspaces both track ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, and wider coverage sits on Agency Enterprise. If Claude, Gemini or Copilot matter to your buyers, confirm the contract includes them, because "capability for" is not the same as "included."
- What is Profound AI Marketer?
- AI Marketer is Profound's agent orchestrator, and it was the centrepiece of the September 2026 Series D announcement. Profound describes it as an agent that scans a brand's data, analyses AI answers and surfaces opportunities. It then deploys sub-agents to do work such as refreshing content, finding earned media opportunities and analysing paid ads. AI Marketer draws on Context Manager, which stores company knowledge, positioning and working style. It runs on credits, so the volume of work it does depends on your package.
- Are AI visibility tool numbers accurate?
- AI visibility tools give useful direction, not exact measurement. Most run a set of prompts through AI engines and build their reports on assumptions drawn from those samples, and they rarely explain how their back end works. Because AI answers change between runs, the same prompt can return a different response each time. AI gives one answer, not ten links, and that answer shifts. In our client work, tool results and manual checks often differ for this reason. We use tools to see who AI engines currently name, and we measure outcomes with first-party data from Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and Microsoft Clarity. Those record real queries, citations, bot activity and AI-referred traffic.
- Should brands buy AI search ads instead of earning citations?
- Ads and organic citations do different jobs, and organic presence builds more trust. It is the same logic as search: a brand that ranks on merit carries more credibility than one that paid for the slot. Coverage matters too. Paid placements appear on specific AI surfaces, while buyers research across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot and Google's AI results. Earning citations from the sources those engines trust builds AI presence across all of them at once.
- What does a GEO agency cover that a tool does not?
- A GEO agency does the work end to end. At Strategi, that covers four areas: technical coverage, so AI crawlers can reach and read your site content coverage across your website, including the money pages new content going out presence on the other surfaces AI engines check when they fan a question out into background searches
We report progress on each of those areas in depth, backed by first-party data. Tools help with direction along the way. See how SEO and GEO work overlaps and our GEO services for the full scope.
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