Profound AI review: the dashboard, the new pricing, and whether you need it

If you read a Profound review from earlier this year, two things are now different.

The self-serve plans are gone

Most reviews in Google's top 20 still quote $99 and $399. Those plans aren't on Profound's brand pricing page any more.

From dashboard to "AI marketer"

In July 2026 Profound launched Aim, an always-on agent that reviews your visibility data, ranks opportunities and turns them into projects for its content agents, with a human approving each step. In September it raised a $180 million Series D at a $1.8 billion valuation, co-led by Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins, and repositioned itself as an AI platform for marketing teams. Tracking is still the core, but Profound is now selling the work as well as the measurement.

Profound is a New York company founded in 2024 and led by CEO James Cadwallader. It raised a $96 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation in February 2026, led by Lightspeed, followed by the Series D in September. Profound says more than 1,000 enterprise brands use it, including Plaid, MongoDB, Ramp and Zoom.

It works like other AI visibility trackers, with a few differences in scale:

• You (or Profound's team) define a set of prompts, the questions your buyers ask.
• Every prompt runs daily on each engine you're tracking, in up to 30+ languages and 150+ regions.
• Profound says it captures answers from the consumer interface, what a real user sees in ChatGPT or Perplexity, rather than the developer API.
• Results roll up into scores, competitor benchmarks and citation reports.

On top of that, it sells data most trackers don't have, such as estimates of what people ask AI assistants, and tools that act on the findings.

This walkthrough is based on Profound's own product pages, tutorial and changelog. For each view: what you see, what it tells you, and the catch.

Answer Engine Insights: the home view

Four headline tiles, Visibility Score, Share of Voice, Average Position and Citation Rank, with a trend line and a leaderboard of every brand in your answers. You can filter by platform, topic, region, persona, tag and language.

Visibility Score

The share of tracked AI answers that mention your brand. Profound averages it across multiple responses because answers vary between runs. The catch: it only reflects the prompts you chose. A 40% score on 50 hand-picked prompts isn't 40% of your market.

Share of Voice

Your mentions divided by all mentions of you and your tracked competitors. The catch: it changes when you add or remove competitors, even if nothing changed in the answers.

Average Position

Where you usually appear in the answer, where lower is better. The catch: Profound doesn't document how answers that don't mention you are treated, so compare it only with your own past numbers.

Citations and Citation Rank

Which domains and pages AI engines cite for your topics, and how often they link to you compared with competitors. Newer views add Citation Decay (week-over-week citations for each URL), separate YouTube and Reddit breakdowns, and Watched Pages for tracking specific URLs. This is usually the most actionable part, because it tells you which sites to get mentioned on.

Sentiment and FactCheck

Sentiment rates mentions as good, neutral or bad and pulls out recurring themes. FactCheck flags inaccurate claims AI makes about you, such as old pricing or a discontinued feature, and shows the source each claim came from.

Platform comparisons

The same prompts compared by engine, so you can see that you're strong in Perplexity but missing from Google's AI Overviews.

Prompt Volumes

Formerly called Conversation Explorer. Estimates what people actually ask AI assistants: prompt volumes, topic trends, intent and demographics, refreshed weekly. The catch: it's modeled from opt-in consumer panels, and Profound's pages quote different dataset sizes. Treat it as directional demand data, like keyword volumes in SEO tools.

Agent Analytics

Uses your server or CDN logs (Cloudflare, Vercel, AWS, Akamai, WordPress and others) to show which AI crawlers visit your site, which pages they read, real versus spoofed bots, and AI referral traffic. It's included even in the trial.

Shopping

For e-commerce brands: visibility in ChatGPT Shopping, product-level analysis, attribute accuracy and merchant share. Enterprise only.

Custom dashboards and reporting

Build your own views from the four core metrics and six filters, export to PDF, share public links, and combine several brands in one dashboard.

Opportunities, Aim and Agents

Opportunities are suggested actions. Aim groups them into projects, and Agents carry out the work, such as briefs, content and page optimization, using credits. You see an estimated credit cost before each run.

New to these metrics? Our guide to AI search visibility explains each one with a worked example.

How to sanity-check any AI visibility number

Before trusting a score from any tool, run 3 to 5 real buyer prompts yourself in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, on two different days, using a temporary chat. Note whether you're mentioned, your position and the sources cited. If the tool's picture doesn't match what you see, ask why. Our free scan does this across 6 AI surfaces in about two minutes.

Profound also sells agency plans. Its official page doesn't list a price for those either.

What the free trial can tell you

The trial is useful for seeing the dashboard on your own industry, but the prompts are a preset set you can't change and the data disappears afterwards. It shows what Profound looks like more than how you perform on the questions your buyers ask.

What Enterprise costs

Profound doesn't publish it. Several competing vendors estimate $2,000–$5,000+ a month. Treat that as a rough third-party estimate and get a quote. Agents and Aim also use credits, and heavy use can require a bigger package, so ask how credits are priced and capped.

Old prices you'll still see

$99 (Starter), $399 (Growth), and occasionally $299 or $499, all come from older pricing pages or reviews. None of them is on Profound's brand pricing page today.

Enterprise covers up to 9 engines on Profound's pricing page: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Claude, Google AI Overviews and Exa Search. Some of Profound's other pages also show Grok, so check the current list during your demo. The trial covers only ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews.

If you want to know how you look on the engines that matter to most startups before talking to sales, our free checkers cover ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, all in one scan.

We read 12 third-party reviews, most of them written by competing vendors, and counted how often each point came up.

Pros

• The broadest engine coverage in the category, up to 9 engines (6 of 12 sources).
• Insight leads to action: Opportunities, Aim and Agents turn findings into tasks (4 of 12).
• Prompt Volumes, demand data most trackers don't offer (4 of 12).
• Detailed citation intelligence, down to page level, with decay over time.
• Polished, shareable reporting for stakeholders.
• Enterprise-ready: SOC 2 Type II, SSO, role-based access and an API.

Cons

• Expensive, and built for enterprise (8 of 12), and since September 2026 there's no self-serve plan at all.
• You still need people to act on it (5 of 12): an analyst, a content team, or approvals for agents.
• Learning curve and data overload for small teams.
• Credit-based agents make total cost harder to predict.
• The trial's preset prompts mean you can't test your own buyer questions before buying.

Usually not yet. Here's a quick way to tell.

Profound is probably overkill if…

• You'd track fewer than about 50 prompts for one brand.
• Nobody on the team has time to act on the findings each week.
• Your budget for this is under about $1,000 a month.
• You don't know yet whether AI mentions you at all.
• You don't sell physical products, so Shopping doesn't matter.

Profound earns its price if…

• You're an established brand with several products, markets or languages.
• You have a content or SEO team ready to work through recommendations.
• You need enterprise security, such as SSO, SOC 2 and an API for your data warehouse.
• You sell on ChatGPT Shopping, or need prompt-demand data for planning.

A rough budget guide by stage

Not sure where you fit? Book a free 30-minute strategy call. We'll look at your free scan together and give you a straight answer on whether paid tracking is worth it yet. If you want the work done, our done-for-you audit builds a prompt set and fix plan without an enterprise contract.

Our Peec AI review covers Peec's dashboard and pricing in the same detail.

Prices are from each vendor's site or recent reviews and change often. See our full comparison of the best AI visibility tools.