Priced comparison · table read 2026-07-31 · five rows re-read 2026-09-22 · Rankscale and Rankability brought to the 2026-10-01 read on 2026-10-06
The best Profound alternatives for a small business, with real prices
Profound no longer publishes a price. On 2026-09-22 tryprofound.com/pricing lists two options: a free 7-day trial (50 prompts run daily; ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews) and an Enterprise tier at custom pricing behind "Get a Demo". On 2026-07-31 the same page printed a $99/mo Lite tier billed yearly and a $399/mo Growth tier; both are gone. So the question "what is a good Profound alternative for a small business" now has a shorter answer: the cheapest ongoing trackers whose own pages print a price are Rankscale from $17/mo, billed yearly only (re-read 2026-10-01), Otterly.ai at $29/mo (the cheapest with a four-engine list), Geoptie at $41/mo billed annually and LLM Pulse at $60/mo; the only option that is not a subscription is a one-time $79 audit, which is ours and is listed below with its real limits. The 18-row table was read from each vendor's own pricing page on 2026-07-31 with the billing label quoted; Profound, Rankscale, Geoptie, LLM Pulse and Peec AI were re-read on 2026-09-22, and on 2026-10-06 the Rankscale and Rankability rows were brought to our 2026-10-01 re-read of every vendor; the rows that changed say so.
Updated
Who runs this
- Built and operated by Sensara LLC, Atlanta, Georgia — about us and how the audit works.
- See what the report looks like before you run anything — score per engine, the competitors AI names instead of you, and a fix plan.
- We run the same audit on ourselves every week and publish the result: in the latest run AI named AskedAbout in 1 of 144 answers. We report our own numbers the way we report yours.
The short answer, by what you need
- Cheapest ongoing tracking: Rankscale, $17/mo (Essentials, credit-based), sold yearly only; the page strikes through the earlier $20. Re-read 2026-10-01.
- Cheapest four-engine list on the entry tier: Otterly.ai, $29/mo monthly, 15 prompts; Gemini and Google AI Mode cost $9/mo each on top (read 2026-07-31; the page served a robot challenge on 2026-09-22 and could not be re-read).
- Tracking with white-label reports: Geoptie, $41/mo billed annually ($490/yr), 15 prompts, four engines on every plan, re-read 2026-09-22.
- One brand, 50 prompts, five models: LLM Pulse, $60/mo monthly or $50/mo annual, re-read 2026-09-22.
- Find out once, no subscription: AskedAbout, $79 one-time, 25 buyer questions across four engines, three samples each. Ours; the section "Where AskedAbout is the wrong choice" below is the part to read first.
- Profound itself: a free 7-day trial (50 prompts, three engines) and custom Enterprise pricing only, as of 2026-09-22. If you want its breadth, the trial is the way to price it.
Profound is a serious platform. If you are an enterprise brand team that needs always-on answer-engine analytics across thousands of prompts, it is built for you and this page will not talk you out of it. But "a good Profound alternative for a small business" is a different question, and the honest answer is that the category now has two dozen products at every price point between $17/mo and $800/mo — plus a small number of things that are not subscriptions at all.
The problem with every list of these that we could find is that the prices are wrong, stale, or absent. So we did the boring thing: opened each vendor's own pricing page on 2026-07-31 and wrote down what it said, including the billing toggle it was showing. Where a price is annual-billed we say so. Where we could not read a price we say that instead of guessing.
Method — and who wrote this
Who we are: AskedAbout sells a $79 one-time AI-visibility audit. We are in this table, we are not at the top of it, and there are buyers below for whom we explicitly recommend something else. Read accordingly.
How the list was built. Our own audit engine runs a fixed panel of buyer questions against four engines (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, Perplexity) three times each and records every domain those answers cite. On the panel's 2026-07-28 run, the question "What is a good Profound alternative for a small business?" produced 47 distinct cited domains across the four engines. We took every one of those that is an actual AI-visibility product with a public price, added the well-known category tools that the engines did not happen to cite that day (Otterly.ai, Peec AI, AthenaHQ, Scrunch AI, Ahrefs, Semrush, Rankscale), and read every price from the vendor's own pricing page on 2026-07-31. That is 18 rows, of which 10 were cited by the engines on that exact question and 8 were added by us.
Two things we will not pretend about. First, prices move — this page is dated, and a dated price you can check beats an undated one you cannot. Second, we did not run a feature bake-off: nobody who publishes one of these lists has paid seats in 18 products, and we are not going to imply we did. What is below is price, billing basis, and what the entry tier says it includes, which is the part every other list gets wrong.
The table — entry price for AI-answer tracking, read 2026-07-31; five rows re-read 2026-09-22; Rankscale and Rankability re-read 2026-10-01
| Tool | Entry price | Billing label on the page | What the entry tier says it includes | Cited by the engines on this question? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rankscale | $17/mo | Essentials, "Yearly only": "Starting at" a struck-through $20, then $17/mo. Re-read 2026-10-01 (the page printed $20/mo on 2026-07-31 and 2026-09-22) | Credit-based monitoring; Pro tier $99/mo monthly ($84/mo yearly) carries 1,200 credits/mo | No |
| Otterly.ai | $29/mo | Monthly; $25/mo on annual | 15 search prompts; 4 engines (AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot). Gemini and Google AI Mode are paid add-ons — $9/mo each on this tier | No |
| Frase | $39/mo | Billed yearly; $49/mo month-to-month | Content optimization, not answer tracking — see the caveat below | Yes (Gemini) |
| Geoptie | $41/mo | Billed annually, $490/yr; $588/yr at monthly rate. Unchanged on 2026-09-22 | 15 monitoring prompts, 2 brands, tracked daily; four engines on every plan | Yes (Gemini) |
| LLM Pulse | $59/mo | Monthly; $49/mo annual ($585 per year); 14-day trial. Re-read 2026-10-01: the dollar figures are a daily conversion of a €49 base | 1 project, 50 tracked prompts, 5 AI models | Yes (Anthropic) |
| AskedAbout (us) | $79 once | One-time. No subscription, no card on file, no renewal | 25 buyer questions × 4 engines × 3 samples = up to 300 answers requested, one report. Free check first | No — cited zero times |
| Writesonic | $79/mo | Per month, billed annually | Brand tracking across ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews; 1 user, 1 project | Yes (Perplexity) |
| Peec AI | $95/mo | Monthly (Starter), re-read 2026-10-01. No annual per-month figure is printed for the plan; the FAQ states 15% off for annual billing | 50 prompts, choose 3 models, 1 project, daily tracking, unlimited users | No |
| Profound | No published price | Re-read 2026-09-22: "Trial Free" and "Enterprise Custom" only. On 2026-07-31 the page printed $99/mo "Billed yearly · 2 months free" (Lite) and $399/mo (Growth) | Trial: 50 prompts run daily for 7 days; ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews. Enterprise: tailored prompt plan, up to 9 engines, SSO, dedicated support | Yes (Gemini) |
| Rankability | No published price | Re-read 2026-10-01: /pricing/ redirects to a demo booking form. On 2026-07-31 the page printed $99/mo Starter "billed annually" | No public tier; the 2026-07-31 Starter listed 10,000 credits/mo, unlimited clients and users | Yes (Gemini, Perplexity) |
| Trakkr | $100/mo | Monthly, or $1,000/yr billed annually; 14-day trial | 1 brand daily, 50 prompts, 8 models. Scale tier $500/mo, 10 brands | Yes (Gemini, OpenAI) |
| Nightwatch | €79/mo | "€948 billed yearly"; Monthly / Yearly toggle, save 20% | 500 keywords + 50 AI prompts (Starter). Rank tracking first, AI second | Yes (Gemini) |
| Ahrefs (Brand Radar) | $129/mo | Lite tier; page banner "Pay annually, save up to 17%" | 5 tracked prompts at Lite, 10 at Standard ($249/mo), 20 at Advanced ($449/mo) | No (cited on other questions) |
| Semrush | $199/mo | Monthly (Starter SEO + AI Search); $165.17/mo billed annually | 50 prompts tracked daily, 1 domain, 300 AI-visibility reports/day | No (cited on other questions) |
| Alhena | $239/mo | Monthly (Essentials); $199/mo billed annually. Free tier exists | 200 conversations/mo. Free tier: 25 conversations/mo + a first AI-visibility snapshot | Yes — all four engines |
| SE Ranking | $218/mo combined | Core $129/mo + AI Search add-on $89/mo; add-on labelled "Annual billing" ($103.20 + $71.20 annual) | AI Search add-on: 200 prompts across AI Overviews, AI Mode, Perplexity, ChatGPT | Yes — three engines |
| Scrunch AI | $250/mo | Core; 7-day free trial | 125 unique prompts, 5 site audits/mo, 1 brand workspace, 5 seats, 4 LLMs | No |
| AthenaHQ | $295/mo | Monthly (Starter); Monthly / Annual toggle, 17% off. Free tier exists | 3,600 credits/mo. Free tier: $25 credit / 300 credits | No |
Pick by what you actually need
You want ongoing tracking and the smallest possible bill. Start at Rankscale ($17/mo, billed yearly only; re-read 2026-10-01), Otterly.ai ($29/mo) or Geoptie ($41/mo billed annually). Read the engine list before you buy: Otterly's $29 tier covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews and Copilot, and charges $9/mo extra each for Gemini and Google AI Mode — which is fine if your buyers don't use them and a hidden 60% price rise if they do.
You already pay for an SEO suite. Do not buy a second subscription until you have opened the one you have. Ahrefs Lite ($129/mo) includes Brand Radar with 5 tracked prompts; Semrush's Starter SEO + AI Search ($199/mo) carries 50 prompts tracked daily; SE Ranking sells AI Search as a $89/mo add-on on top of a $129/mo Core plan. Five prompts is not a monitoring programme, but it is enough to find out whether you have a problem, and you are already paying for it.
You are an agency running this for clients. The multi-brand tiers are where the real money is: Trakkr Scale $500/mo (10 brands), Peec Advanced $495/mo (re-read 2026-09-22; $420/mo on the 07-31 annual badge), Rankscale Growth $385/mo (monthly; $327/mo yearly), Otterly Premium $489/mo, Nightwatch Agency €399/mo; Rankability no longer prints a price (re-read 2026-10-01; its page printed Agency $799/mo on 2026-07-31). Check white-label separately — Trakkr's own comparison page lists white-label at +$49/client and marks two competitors "not listed".
You need enterprise breadth, governance and a human on the other end. That is what Profound (custom Enterprise pricing as of 2026-09-22; $399/mo Growth on 2026-07-31), Scrunch AI ($250/mo Core), AthenaHQ ($295/mo Starter) and Alhena ($199–239/mo) are actually selling, and it is a reasonable thing to buy. Nothing on the cheap end of this table replaces a vendor with an onboarding call and an SLA.
You want to know where you stand once, and then decide. This is the case for a one-time audit, and it is the case we built AskedAbout for: $79, once, 25 buyer questions across four engines sampled three times each — up to 300 answers requested, with the completed count shown — and a fix list. If the answer turns out to be "you're fine", you have spent $79 and you are done. If it turns out you are invisible, you now know which of the subscriptions above is worth its monthly bill. What you should not do is what most of this category's marketing wants: sign a 12-month contract to find out whether you have a problem.
Where AskedAbout is the wrong choice — stated plainly
- You want a trend line. We sell a snapshot. If you need to see this week against last week, buy a tracker — Otterly at $29/mo is cheaper than us within three months and does something we do not do at all.
- You want alerts. We do not have them. No dashboard, no Slack integration, no "your visibility dropped" email.
- You want to know what the ChatGPT consumer app shows. We query the engines through their official APIs, which is a defensible and repeatable instrument, but it is not byte-identical to what a logged-in person sees in the ChatGPT app with memory and personalization on. No tool on this page can honestly claim otherwise; we are saying it out loud.
- You need dozens of brands under one login. We sell a white-label Agency 5-pack at $249 and nothing bigger. If you are running 30 clients, the agency tiers above are built for you and we are not.
- You want a seat, a QBR and a customer success manager. Buy the enterprise end of this table.
Two things in the cited set that are not really alternatives
The engines cited them; we are including them because we said we would list everything the panel returned, and flagging them because a list that quietly launders bad matches is worse than no list. Frase ($39/mo billed yearly) is a content-optimization and briefing tool — genuinely good at what it does, but it does not track how AI engines answer buyer questions about your brand. Alhena ($199–239/mo) is primarily an AI support-and-shopping concierge; AI Visibility is one module of several, and the free tier's "first AI visibility snapshot" is a lead-in to the concierge product. Neither is a fraud; both are what an engine reaches for when the exact answer is thin.
The finding underneath this page: the engines cite companies you have never heard of
The 47 domains that came back on this one question are not an authority list. Alongside Profound, Semrush and G2 sit growganic.io, cockpyt.ai, webmole.ai, industry-lens.com, fixaeo.com, scoutrival.com and atomicagi.com — companies at or below our size. Across the full 12-question panel the four engines cited 538 distinct domains in 1,465 citation entries. askedabout.com appears in zero of them, including on this question, where we have owned a topically-exact page since 2026-06-22 that Google reports as indexed and our robots.txt explicitly allows every major AI crawler to read.
We are publishing our own zero because it is the most useful number on this page for anyone else trying to get cited. It rules out the comfortable explanation — "we're too new, the engines only cite authorities" — because the cited set is full of companies newer and smaller than us. We think the difference is artifact shape: every cited URL on this question is a multi-vendor ranked list, and every page we had built was a head-to-head "us vs them" comparison. This page was the test of that hypothesis, and we said we would report the result on 2026-08-24 either way.
The result, reported 2026-08-24 and carried to 2026-09-22. On the weekly panel run of 2026-08-10, ten days after this page went live, Perplexity's returned source list for the exact question "What is a good Profound alternative for a small business?" contained this page in 3 of 3 samples, at position 3 of 20. It stayed in 3 of 3 on every run through 2026-09-14 (six consecutive runs, positions 2 to 5). Read more strictly, by whether the answer text carries a numbered marker pointing at our entry, the page was referenced in 7 of those 18 samples. ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude cited it in 0 of 84 samples on the same question over the same runs. On 2026-09-21 our engine switched to storing only the sources an answer references, and under that count the page read 0 of 3; the two counts are not comparable and we are not scoring one against the other. The head-to-head pages, unchanged, stayed at zero throughout. The hypothesis held for one engine on one question and did not generalise: two further list-shaped pages we published on other questions were cited 0 of 12 each.
Related reading: AI visibility tools compared · AskedAbout vs Profound, head to head · AskedAbout vs Otterly.ai · AskedAbout vs Peec AI · AskedAbout vs AthenaHQ · how to check whether AI recommends your business.
How much does Profound cost?
As of 2026-09-22 Profound publishes no price. Its pricing page lists a free 7-day trial (50 prompts run daily; ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews; no history or exports) and an Enterprise tier at custom pricing behind "Get a Demo". On 2026-07-31 the same page printed a Lite tier at $99/month billed yearly (1,500 responses per month) and a Growth tier at $399/month (9,000 responses per month); those tiers are no longer listed.
What is the cheapest Profound alternative?
Of the 18 tools whose public pricing page we read on 2026-07-31, the cheapest ongoing subscription is Rankscale Essentials at $17/mo, sold yearly only (re-read 2026-10-01; the page printed "starting at $20/mo" on 2026-07-31 and 2026-09-22), followed by Otterly.ai at $29/mo (monthly; $25/mo annual), which is the cheapest that tracks four engines without add-ons. The cheapest way to get an answer at all is a one-time $79 audit with no subscription — that is our product, and we would rather you know the tradeoff than not: one-time means no trend line and no alerts.
Is there a one-time AI visibility audit instead of a monthly subscription?
Yes — that is what AskedAbout is: $79 once, 25 buyer questions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude, sampled 3 times each (up to 300 answers requested), with a prioritized fix list. There is a free check first, at askedabout.com, that runs a smaller version across two engines. Of the 18 tools priced on this page, it is the only one that is not a recurring charge. Alhena and AthenaHQ both publish free tiers, which is a different thing — a limited ongoing account rather than a full one-off audit.
Do I need an AI visibility tool if I already pay for Ahrefs or Semrush?
Probably not to start. Ahrefs Lite ($129/mo) includes Brand Radar with 5 tracked prompts; Semrush's Starter SEO + AI Search ($199/mo) tracks 50 prompts daily; SE Ranking sells an AI Search add-on at $89/mo on top of a $129/mo Core plan. Those prompt allowances are small, but they are enough to tell you whether the engines mention you at all. Buy a dedicated tool when you know you have a problem and need to watch it move.
Which AI visibility tools do the AI engines themselves recommend?
On 2026-07-28 we asked ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity "What is a good Profound alternative for a small business?" three times each and recorded every cited domain. The result was 47 distinct domains, and only one — alhena.ai — was cited by all four engines. Three engines cited seranking.com. Most of the rest were single-engine citations of companies with no market profile at all: growganic.io, cockpyt.ai, webmole.ai, fixaeo.com, scoutrival.com. The engines are not converging on a consensus shortlist in this category. Anyone telling you AI "recommends" one particular tool is describing one sample from one engine.
How current are these prices?
Every figure in the table was read from the named vendor's own public pricing page on 2026-07-31, together with the billing label the page displayed at the time (monthly vs annual toggles change the number, and several of these pages default to the annual rate). On 2026-09-22 we re-read five of them: Profound (its $99 and $399 tiers gone, replaced by a free trial and custom Enterprise pricing), Peec AI (Starter $80/mo on the annual badge → $95/mo monthly), Rankscale, Geoptie and LLM Pulse (unchanged). Otterly.ai could not be re-read that day; its page served a robot challenge. On 2026-10-01 we re-read all 17 vendors (the full read is on the cheapest tools page); on 2026-10-06 this page's Rankscale and Rankability statements were brought to that read: Rankscale Essentials is $17/mo sold yearly only, and Rankability's pricing URL redirects to a demo form with no price printed. Prices in this category move fast. Check the vendor's page before you buy, and if you find one of ours out of date, tell us at hello@askedabout.com and we will correct it and date the correction.
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Method — we query the official APIs of each AI engine, with web search where supported. Answers vary between runs; the full audit repeats every question and reports frequencies, never one-off snapshots.