Profound alternatives in 2026: five tools compared, and the one number Profound will not give you
Profound is the most complete platform in this category and it is the only one of six that publishes no rate at all. Five alternatives, read from vendor pages on 23 September 2026, on the four things you can verify before you pay: the price, the engines, the prompt count and the scoring weights.
Profound does not publish a price, and of the six vendors checked on 23 September it is the only one that does not. Its pricing page offers a seven-day trial and then one Enterprise tier priced “Custom”. Every alternative here states a rate you can read without a sales call: Otterly.AI at $29 a month, Peec AI at $95, Trakkr at $100, AthenaHQ at $295 and citeOS at $749, with a free scan and one-off audits from $299. Pick by the constraint that pushed you off Profound, not by a leaderboard.
Almost nobody searches for a Profound alternative because Profound is bad at its job. It is the most complete product in this category and the research it publishes is genuinely useful even if you never buy. People search for an alternative because they could not find out what it costs, or because they worked out that they are being sold depth they cannot staff.
This page compares five alternatives on four things a buyer can verify before paying: the price, the list of engines probed, the number of prompts per run, and the scoring weights. Everything below was read from the vendors’ own public pages on 22 September 2026 and nothing is inferred. Where a vendor states nothing, this page says so rather than filling the gap.
Disclosure. citeOS is our product, built and operated by Emergence Media. It is on this list because leaving it off would be its own kind of dishonesty, and it is marked in every table and figure. It is also the narrowest product here: useless to anyone outside crypto, and it probes fewer engines than half the list. Both of those are stated again below where they matter.
Why people leave Profound
Three reasons come up, and they point at different replacements. Sorting yourself into one of them is most of the decision.
- You cannot find the price. The pricing page, read 22 September 2026, shows a free seven-day trial running 50 prompts daily across ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews in one language and one region, then a single Enterprise tier priced “Custom”. Every specific figure circulating for Profound is somebody’s negotiated contract, not a rate. If budget approval needs a number on a page, five vendors here have one.
- It is more platform than you can staff. Conversation-level analytics, agent analytics tracking how AI crawlers traverse your site, up to nine answer engines. All real, all excellent, and all of it assumes somebody whose actual job this is. A four-person marketing team will open it weekly, read the headline number, and use about six percent of it.
- Your category is not modelled. A horizontal tool gives you a score without the context that explains it. If your buyers ask questions a generalist prompt library does not contain, the number is accurate and useless.
Note what is not on that list: engine coverage, data quality or reporting depth. Profound wins or ties on all three. If none of the three reasons above is yours, the honest recommendation is to stay.
What each vendor publishes before you pay
This is the only axis on this page that is measured rather than judged, and it is not a proxy for quality: Profound publishes the least of anyone here and is the most complete platform in the category. It measures one thing, which is how much of a vendor’s method you can inspect before you are in a sales process.
Three entries need their asterisk read out loud. Otterly’s $29 buys four engines; Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode are paid add-ons on top, and on its Premium tier Claude alone is $439 a month. Peec’s $95 lets you pick three models from six, and Perplexity and Claude are not among the six. citeOS at $749 is our Concierge tier at the founding-member rate against a $999 list, and it is the dearest recurring entry on the chart; our cheaper doors are a free scan and a one-off $299 audit, excluded here because every vendor has a trial or free tier that would muddy the comparison.
The second check is what a vendor tells you about its method.
All six publish an engine list. Five publish a price. Four publish a prompt count for a paid tier. One publishes its scoring weights, and that one is ours, so discount it to taste. The reason it is worth looking for at all is that a tool counting brand-name prompts alongside category prompts will flatter almost any brand, and without published weights you cannot tell whether yours does.
A score you cannot reconstruct is a number you are being asked to trust, not a measurement you can check.
The five, one by one
Otterly.AI is the cheapest credible entry point in the category and the usual recommendation for teams under fifty people. Lite is $29 a month for 15 prompts, Standard $189 for 100 and Premium $489 for 400, with 15 per cent off annually, daily tracking and unlimited team members on every tier. It runs inside an hour with no onboarding call. The thing to model before you buy is the engine list: four engines are included, ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot, while Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode are paid add-ons. Per month those are $9 to $149 each for Gemini and Google AI Mode by tier, and $29 to $439 for Claude. A Premium customer who wants all seven engines is paying $489 plus $737.
Peec AI is strong on the comparative question: not whether you appear, but whether you appear more than the three companies you lose deals to. Starter is $95 a month for 50 prompts and one project, Pro $245 for 150, Advanced $495 for 350 with multi-country and Looker Studio, then Enterprise at custom annual pricing, with 15 per cent off annually and unlimited users throughout. The constraint to understand is engine choice: on every self-serve tier you pick three models from six, being ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini and Naver AI. Perplexity and Claude are not among the six and arrive only on Enterprise, through the API. Extra models are $30 to $140 a month depending on tier.
AthenaHQ publishes $295 a month for Starter, which buys 3,600 credits across 11 AI models, with one credit equalling one AI response, and a 17 percent discount on annual billing. Eleven models is the widest stated coverage of anything on this page. The credit model is the thing to model carefully before committing: it is honest and legible, and it also means your bill scales with how much you actually measure, which is either a feature or a nasty surprise depending on how disciplined your prompt set is. There is a free Essential tier carrying $25 of credit to model your own consumption on first. One catch worth knowing: API access and extra credits are paid add-ons on Starter, billed on top, and their prices are not published.
Trakkr is the cheapest published rate on the page at $100 a month on Growth for 50 prompts across eight models, with Scale at $500 covering ten brands at 50 prompts each plus a REST API and white-labelling. That last tier is aimed squarely at agencies. Trakkr also publishes an open citation snapshot of 48.4 million appearances across 1,643 brands, which is a larger public dataset than our own corpus, and we would rather say that than have you find it.
citeOS is ours and is the narrow one. It runs 20 buyer-intent prompts across five engines for 100 observation points per audit, publishes every weight including the query-type multipliers that discount brand-name prompts, and sits on a ranked database of 500+ crypto editorial outlets scored on five measured signals, with pre-built competitor sets across ten crypto verticals. That outlet layer is the actual differentiator and no general-purpose platform has one. The limits, stated plainly: five engines, the fewest of anything here that states a number, against AthenaHQ at 11, Peec up to 13 on Enterprise, Profound up to 9 and Trakkr 8, and no use whatsoever to a project outside crypto. Entry is a free 60-second scan with no signup, audits from $299.
Before you shortlist anything, find out what the engines say about you today and which pages they read instead.
Scan my brand free →If you are a crypto brand, the shortlist is different
This is a category argument, not a pitch, and it holds whether or not you pick ours.
Across 39,948 citation events for 72 audited crypto brands, April to August 2026, 92.22% of citations landed on pages the brand does not own. Whether an AI engine names you is decided almost entirely on third-party pages, and in crypto those pages are a small, specific and fairly stable set: category listicles, comparison pages, a handful of community threads. The most actionable output any tool in this category produces is the list of domains that got cited instead of you. A horizontal platform will give you that list accurately and then have no ranked view of which entries on it are worth pursuing.
That is the whole gap. Not that crypto is technically special, but that knowing CryptoSlate outranks CoinDesk for citation frequency in your vertical is category knowledge a generalist has no reason to hold. Our own corpus puts Tier-1 crypto press at 0.36% of all citations against a 21-outlet mid-tier basket at 2.27%, cited 6.34 times more often. A tool without that view will send you at the wrong publications with a straight face.
And the standing caveat: we are not the only crypto-native option. Crawlux, DABLOCK, Qvery, Visoryn and XanLens all exist, ChatGPT names them, and Crawlux in particular has a token schema validator that we do not. See crypto AEO tools compared for that side of the field, and the published methodology for how our own weights work.
Five checks before you switch
- Export first, cancel second. Pull your prompt list and your full reading history out before the account closes. Prompt sets are the only asset that transfers.
- Expect the baseline to reset. AI visibility numbers are comparable only against the same prompts, engines and cadence. Your first month on a new tool tells you nothing about direction, only about position.
- Run both in parallel for four weeks if you can. The two will disagree. Engines are not deterministic and every product samples them differently. Seeing the size of the gap is worth a month of double billing.
- Check the source attribution before anything else. Every product here tracks mentions competently. They differ enormously on whether they tell you which pages earned the citation, and that list is the only output that converts directly into work.
- Ask what happens to brand-name prompts. If “what is Acme” is scored alongside “best crypto exchange”, your score will look healthy while your category visibility rots.
How this was checked
| What | How |
|---|---|
| Pricing and tier contents | Read from each vendor’s own public pricing page on 23 September 2026, with JavaScript rendered. Only figures the vendor states. Nothing inferred from third-party comparison pages. |
| Engine lists and prompt counts | Vendor pricing and product pages, same date and same method. |
| Corrections | An earlier version of this page, published 22 September, said Peec AI published no prices and that Otterly.AI could not be verified. Both were wrong, caused by a fetcher that did not render JavaScript and was silently blocked. Both vendors publish full pricing and it is shown above. |
| Two vendors dropped | Scrunch AI and Gauge appeared in the 22 September version and are removed pending re-verification. Scrunch’s packaging changed between two reads a day apart and Gauge’s figures were a month old. |
| Corpus figures | 39,948 citation events across 72 audited crypto brands, 17,276 pages and 4,395 source domains, April to August 2026. Weights and formulas on the methodology page. |
| Conflict of interest | citeOS is operated by Emergence Media, who publish this page. It is on the list and is marked in every table and figure. |
What this page does not do. It does not rank the seven or score them out of anything, because ranking products whose client results we have not seen would be an opinion dressed as a measurement. The one axis here that is measured is disclosure, and disclosure is not quality. Vendor pricing pages also change without notice, so re-check anything here before it decides a budget.
Common questions
How much does Profound cost?
Profound does not publish a price. Its pricing page, read on 22 September 2026, lists a free seven-day trial running 50 prompts daily across ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews in one language and one region, then a single Enterprise tier priced “Custom” with up to nine answer engines, SSO and SAML, SOC 2, API access and CSV or JSON export. Any specific dollar figure quoted elsewhere is somebody’s contract rather than a published rate, so treat it as a rumour until Profound states it.
What is the best Profound alternative?
It depends which constraint pushed you off Profound. Price opacity points anywhere: Otterly.AI at $29 a month, Peec AI at $95, Trakkr at $100 and AthenaHQ at $295 all publish a rate you can read without a call. Cost points to Otterly Lite at $29, with the caveat that Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode are billed as add-ons on top. Reporting shape points to Peec AI, built around named competitors. If you are a crypto or Web3 brand, a horizontal tool will get your shortlist wrong whichever one you pick.
Is Profound worth it?
For an enterprise team with a dedicated search hire, generally yes. It is the most complete platform in the category, carries the widest engine coverage, reports at conversation level rather than in prompt-level snapshots, and publishes research that is useful even if you never buy. The honest catch is that it is built and priced for a company with someone whose actual job this is. A five-person team will pay for depth it cannot staff.
Do any AI visibility tools publish their scoring weights?
Very few. Of the six vendors checked on 23 September 2026, all six published an engine list, five published a price, four published a prompt count for a paid tier and one published its scoring weights. That one is citeOS, which is ours, so weigh it accordingly. Weights matter because a tool that counts brand-name prompts alongside category prompts will flatter almost any brand, and you cannot tell whether yours does without seeing them.
Which AI visibility tool is best for a crypto brand?
A crypto-specific one, and that is a category claim rather than a pitch. The pages AI engines read for crypto questions are a small, specific set of crypto listicles, comparison pages and community threads, and a horizontal tool has no ranked view of which of them carry weight. citeOS is ours and is built for this. Crawlux, DABLOCK, Qvery, Visoryn and XanLens also exist and ChatGPT names them, so we are not the only option and never claim to be.
Does switching AI visibility tools reset my history?
Yes, and it is the cost most teams underestimate. These numbers are comparable only against the same prompt set, the same engines and the same cadence. Moving tools restarts the baseline at zero, and the first month tells you about position rather than direction. Export your prompts and your readings before you cancel, run both in parallel for four weeks if the budget allows, and expect disagreement, because engines are not deterministic and every product samples them differently.
If you want the version of this comparison written for crypto specifically, that is crypto AEO tools in 2026. For the scored general list see the best AI visibility tools, and for why two tools reporting on the same brand disagree at all, why every tool gives you a different score.
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