Comparisons

Profound review: the deepest tool in the category, sold as a free trial or a custom Enterprise plan

By Arnav Mukherjee, founder of TofuBofu · September 7, 2026

Updated 13 October 2026. Profound's pricing page no longer lists the $99 Starter and $399 Growth plans this review was built around. Its pricing page, read on 13 October 2026, shows a free 7-day Trial and a custom-priced Enterprise plan. We last saw the two paid tiers on 7 September 2026 and first saw the page without them on 10 October 2026, and every section below is corrected to match.

TLDR

  • Buy it for the attribution, not the tracking. Agent Analytics reads CDN logs from Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly and six more.
  • No self-serve paid plan is listed. Their pricing page, read 13 October 2026, lists a free Trial and a custom Enterprise plan. The $99 Starter and $399 Growth tiers we read on 7 September 2026 were gone by 10 October 2026.
  • The free trial is 50 prompts a day for 7 days. It runs on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, read at their page 13 October 2026.
  • Claude is absent from the trial. On the grid we read 7 September 2026 it sat in the Enterprise column alone.
  • Right buyer: a marketing team with infrastructure. Wrong buyer: a founder who needs the answer this month.

We compete with Profound, so read this with that in mind. I'm writing it anyway because the honest version is more useful to you than the flattering one, and because the last time I looked closely at their pricing I got a detail wrong and had to correct it publicly.

Here's what happened. Profound's pricing grid puts the tier names across the top and the features down the side, and if you read the page as linear text the engine coverage lines up against the wrong columns. Our first pass concluded the mapping couldn't be pinned at all and we wrote a rule telling ourselves not to claim it.

That rule was worse than the missing fact, because it made the next person hedge a sentence we could have verified. Someone re-measured by the geometry of the grid, matching each value to its column by pixel position, and the mapping came out clean. So the September ladder further down is pinned that way, and I re-read the whole page again on 7 September 2026 before publishing this.

The short version: Profound builds the two best things in this category, and its pricing page, read on 13 October 2026, lists two ways in: a free 7-day trial or a custom-priced Enterprise plan. Whether that's a good deal depends entirely on which problem you have.

What is it, and what does it cost?

Profound is an AI visibility platform: it tracks how your brand shows up when people ask AI engines questions, and it's built for marketing teams rather than for a founder poking at it on a Sunday. Read at their own pricing page on 13 October 2026, in the brands view, there are two plans and no dollar figure anywhere on the page:

That is a different page from the one this review was first written against. When we read it on 28 August 2026 and again, screenshot-verified, on 7 September 2026, it listed two priced tiers below Enterprise:

Both prices were the month-to-month rate, and the yearly toggle advertised two months free. Both tiers were gone when we read the page on 10 October 2026. We do not know the day they came down, only that it falls between 7 September and 10 October 2026. Profound was quote-only for most of its life before those tiers appeared, and on the 13 October 2026 page its only paid plan is a quote again. The trial is described as the step "before getting a demo", so a small team reading that page finds no paid plan it can buy without one.

Agent Analytics is the best thing in the category

This is the part I'd pay for, and I'd rather say so than bury it. Every tool in this category, ours included, is good at telling you whether an engine mentioned you. Almost none of them can tell you whether that mention sent a human to your website. AI referral traffic is hard to see: the referrer is often stripped, the visit lands as direct, and your analytics file the most valuable traffic you have under nothing.

Profound's answer is to go under the analytics layer and read the infrastructure. Agent Analytics lists integrations with Akamai, AWS, Cloudflare, Fastly, Google Analytics, Google Cloud Platform, Netlify, Vercel and WordPress, across unlimited domains.

If your site already sits behind one of those, you have the raw evidence sitting in logs and Profound turns it into attribution. That's the right architecture for the problem, it's expensive to build, and it's better than what we ship. We tag AI referrals without cookies and count conversions, which works and is a smaller idea.

The second thing worth the money is Prompt Volumes, which they describe as seeing what users are prompting AI answer engines. Demand data for prompts barely exists. Keyword tools tell you what people type into Google, and there's no equivalent for what people ask ChatGPT, so most of this category, again including us, infers buying questions rather than observing them.

Anyone selling real observation of that is selling something scarce. Their Agents product, autonomous workers for content generation and optimisation, plus Sheets for running those at scale, is the third leg, and it was where the credit allowances on the Starter and Growth tiers got spent.

The ladder Profound no longer lists As read on 7 September 2026. Starter and Growth were gone by 10 October 2026 Starter $99 per month 1 engine "ChatGPT tracking only" Growth $399 per month 3 engines ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews Enterprise Custom tailored packages up to 9 engines Claude appeared here, and only here On this ladder, each step up in price bought more engines

Where it falls short: nothing between a free week and a custom quote

The constraint isn't hidden and it isn't a trick. It's the shape of the pricing page. Read on 13 October 2026, the free trial runs 50 prompts a day for 7 days on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, with no history, no exports and no API. Your buyer doesn't confine themselves to those three. They ask whichever assistant is open, and Claude and Perplexity are missing from the trial card.

The ladder we read on 7 September 2026 metered the same thing at a price: $99 bought "ChatGPT tracking only" and $399 bought "3 Answer Engines tracked", which their grid mapped to ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. Worth knowing what the Google entry is, on that ladder and on the trial: AI Overviews and AI Mode are different Google surfaces, and they behave differently on commercial vendor questions.

We swapped AI Overviews out of our own product for AI Mode on 2 August 2026 precisely because of how the two differ on buying queries, so treat "Google" in any vendor's engine list as a question rather than an answer, ours included. And on that September grid Claude sat in the Enterprise column alone. On 13 October 2026 it is absent from the trial, and the Enterprise column lists it among nine engines under "Capability for".

None of this makes Profound a bad product. It makes it a product sold to a buyer who has already decided AI visibility is a budget line with an owner, and who will take a demo to get a quote. If that's you, a custom plan is a normal way to buy. If you're a five-person firm trying to find out whether AI recommends you at all, the page read on 13 October 2026 gives you seven free days on three engines, and after that a demo.

Check all five engines before you pick a tool

A free TofuBofu scan asks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Mode the buying questions in your category. Run it first, then decide what depth you actually need to buy.

Run your free scan

Who should buy it?

Buy Profound if you have a marketing team with someone who owns AI visibility as a job rather than a curiosity, and your site already sits behind Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly or a similar layer. Agent Analytics turns infrastructure you're already paying for into attribution nobody else in the category can produce, and that alone can justify the line item.

Buy it too if prompt demand data would change what you publish, because Prompt Volumes is close to unique. And buy it if you need SOC2, SSO and what its pricing page calls "Dedicated support", which is an enterprise procurement reality rather than a nice-to-have.

Don't buy Profound if what you need is breadth across engines at a published small-company price, or if nobody on your team is going to operate a platform. The tools that reward you are the deep ones, and deep tools need an operator. A firm with no marketing hire would buy the platform and use the dashboard twice.

Where do we fit, and where don't we?

We built TofuBofu for the other buyer, and the axis is coverage and execution rather than analytical depth. We query five engines, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Mode, on every plan including the free one, because engine count isn't what we meter.

And we don't stop at the measurement: the product drafts the content the gap calls for, publishes it to your CMS, and re-scans to show whether the answer moved. Measurement is close to commoditised in this category now. Doing the work is not.

Where we don't compete: if you want CDN-level AI traffic attribution or observed prompt demand, buy Profound, because we don't have those and saying otherwise would be a lie you'd discover in a week. Pick on which problem is yours. If the question is "am I invisible, and what do I do about it", start with a scan across all five engines.

If the question is "AI sent us traffic last quarter and I need to prove it to a CFO", that's the other tool. For the fuller side-by-side we keep TofuBofu vs Profound and the alternatives list updated as prices move.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Profound cost?

Read at their own pricing page on 13 October 2026, Profound lists two plans: a Trial priced "Free" and an Enterprise plan priced "Custom" and described as "Tailored packages". No dollar figure appears anywhere on the page. When we read the same page on 7 September 2026 it listed Starter at $99 a month and Growth at $399 a month, and both were gone by 10 October 2026. The only paid plan on the 13 October page is a quote, reached through a "Get a Demo" button.

How many AI engines does Profound track?

It depends on the plan. Read at their pricing page on 13 October 2026, the free Trial names three engines, ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, at 50 prompts run daily for 7 days, and Enterprise says "Up to 9 Answer Engines tracked". On 7 September 2026 the page also sold a $99 Starter labelled "ChatGPT tracking only" and a $399 Growth with "3 Answer Engines tracked", and both had been removed by 10 October 2026.

Does Profound track Anthropic's Claude?

It is absent from the free trial. Read at their pricing page on 13 October 2026, the Trial lists ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. When we read the pricing grid on 28 August and 7 September 2026, Claude appeared in the Enterprise column and in neither the Starter nor the Growth column, and on 13 October 2026 the Enterprise column of that page lists Anthropic Claude among nine engines under the words Capability for. So on that page, Claude sits on the Enterprise plan only. We pinned the September mapping by the geometry of their pricing grid rather than by reading order, because the linearised text of that table is ambiguous and reading it in order is how we got it wrong the first time.

What is Profound Agent Analytics?

Their AI traffic attribution product, which tracks AI-sourced visits across your domains. It integrates at the infrastructure layer with Akamai, AWS, Cloudflare, Fastly, Google Analytics, Google Cloud Platform, Netlify, Vercel and WordPress, all listed on their pricing comparison grid. That is a hard thing to build and it answers a question scanning cannot: whether AI answers sent anyone to your site. It is the strongest thing in their product and we do not have an equivalent at that depth.

Who should buy Profound?

A company with a marketing team, a real budget and existing infrastructure worth instrumenting. If you already sit behind Cloudflare, Fastly or Akamai, Agent Analytics turns logs you already have into AI attribution, and nobody else in the category does that as well. If you want demand data on what people are prompting engines, Prompt Volumes is the other thing worth paying for. Both reward a team with someone to operate them.

Who should not buy Profound?

A small B2B firm whose buyers ask several different engines, and who wants the answer this month rather than a platform to run. Read at their pricing page on 13 October 2026, the only plan with a published price is a free 7-day trial on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, and the only paid plan is a custom Enterprise quote behind a demo. If breadth of engine coverage at a published price is the thing you actually need, Profound's page does not sell it.

Is Profound better than TofuBofu?

On depth of analytics and demand data, yes, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. Agent Analytics and Prompt Volumes are better than anything we ship in those two areas. We are built for a different buyer and a different axis: five engines on every plan including the free one, and a product that drafts the fix and publishes it rather than stopping at the dashboard. Pick on which of those two problems is actually yours.

Sources and further reading

Related reading

TofuBofu vs Profound
Profound alternatives
Bing will tell you your share of AI citations

Arnav Mukherjee

Founder, TofuBofu