Profound alternatives: AI visibility tools for smaller budgets

Profound alternatives with a published price include Hypervisible, SE Visible, Similarweb, AthenaHQ and Scrunch. On October 22, 2026, Profound's pricing page showed a free 7-day trial and an Enterprise plan on custom pricing, while these five tools listed entry plans from €49 a month (Hypervisible Solo) to $300 (Scrunch Starter), prices read again on October 29. Several of them track more AI engines on their entry plan than Profound's trial does.

Every price here was read on the vendor's own website, the same rule we follow in our comparison of AI visibility tools. We publish Hypervisible: it comes first in this comparison, and here are the facts behind that. It answers the two complaints teams raise about Profound, since its price is public and its entry plan covers five AIs, Google AI Mode included, where Profound's trial covers three. For a smaller budget, it is where this comparison starts. Its limits get the same plain treatment as everyone else's.

What Profound does well

Profound's strength is breadth. Its Enterprise plan tracks up to nine AI engines every day (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Claude, Google AI Overviews and Exa Search) in the languages and regions you choose, and both of its plans, the trial included, come with unlimited seats.

Tracking is one module among several. Profound also sells Prompt Volumes, meant to show what people ask AI assistants; Agent Analytics, which shows how AI bots view, cite and refer to your pages; Shopping data at SKU level, with ChatGPT Shopping on Enterprise; and agents that pick the work worth doing, draft it and ask for your approval, paid in credits.

Enterprise adds single sign-on, an API, CSV and JSON exports, and support that goes up to a dedicated specialist. If you need nine engines, shopping data and SSO under one contract, none of the entry plans below covers all three.

Why teams look for a Profound alternative

Profound's own pricing page gives two reasons to look elsewhere: there is no figure for Enterprise, and the free trial is short and fixed.

For 7 days, the trial runs 50 prompts a day through ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, limited to one language and one region. According to Profound's FAQ, trial users get a recommended prompt set for their industry and can't edit it; adding, editing and disabling prompts comes with Enterprise, as do exports and the API. A roofing company in Denver that wants to test “best roofer for hail damage in Denver” will learn how Profound works and little about its own market.

The FAQ also mentions a self-serve Agency Growth plan with 400 credits per month per client workspace. The pricing page gives no price for it, and those credits pay for agent runs.

Searches for alternatives are climbing. Google Ads estimated about 260 monthly US searches for “profound alternatives” in October 2026, up 2,300% in a year, plus about 70 for “profound ai competitors”.

Budget is one reason among several. A local business may only need 20 questions in a single city, while an agency has to bill each client separately. And a team that reports once a month can live with weekly data. Those needs point to different tools below.

Why Hypervisible heads this list of Profound alternatives

Hypervisible is the tracker we publish. We put it first here because it deals with the reasons above that send teams looking: a price you can see, and an entry plan that covers more engines than Profound's trial.

A public price. Solo lists at €49 a month, €29 for the first 15 accounts, for a brand tracked on 25 questions against 8 competitors, with no commitment. For scale, AthenaHQ Starter costs $295 a month and Scrunch Starter $300.
Google AI Mode from the first plan. Profound's trial covers ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews. Every Hypervisible plan adds Perplexity and Google AI Mode to those three.
More than one market. The Profound trial stops at one language and one region. Hypervisible measures four markets (France, the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany) with questions written in English, French or German, and its site and interface exist in English (hypervisible.app) and French (hypervisible.fr).
Made by a GEO agency. NEXUS GEO, which builds it, started in January 2026 in Marly-le-Roi, France. Its founder, Martin Noale, has put out a 47-point checklist for showing up in AI answers, free to read, and close to a hundred guides on nexus-geo.fr.

The questions don't change from week to week. They are asked again every Monday, and you read the movement in citation rate, average position and rank against competitors in points. Next to Profound it gives up a lot: a weekly reading where Profound runs daily, no Claude or Copilot, and none of Profound's shopping data, agents or SSO. Hypervisible's free AI visibility analysis shows where you stand before any sales call.

Profound alternatives, one by one

Hypervisible, covered above, and the four tools below publish their price on their own site, and they follow in order of entry price. On a smaller budget, Hypervisible Solo is the first step, at €49 a month (€29 for the first 15 accounts); the next entry plan in this comparison, SE Visible Basic, costs €80.

SE Visible

SE Ranking's AI visibility product, SE Visible, opens at €80 a month (Basic: 75 prompts, 5 projects, €64 billed yearly); Core is €169, both in euros on October 29, 2026. Every day it queries four engines (Gemini, ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode), without Perplexity, in seven countries and five languages. The countries are the US, Canada, the UK, Spain, France, Germany and the Netherlands, which is more than the single region of Profound's trial. You can try it for 10 days.

Similarweb AEO Intelligence

At Similarweb, AEO Intelligence costs $129 a month, $99 if billed annually. That pays for 150 prompts, a single user and three months of history, with daily tracking on ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini and Perplexity. AI Traffic reporting comes with it, so you see visits from AI platforms beside your mentions. For a team, the one-user limit is what pinches.

AthenaHQ

AthenaHQ Starter costs $295 a month for 3,600 credits (a credit is one AI response) across 11 engines, among them Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI and Mistral, which is two more engines than Profound Enterprise lists. Yearly billing takes 17% off. Starter tracks at country level; multi-region and multi-language tracking is reserved for Enterprise.

Scrunch

Scrunch Starter runs $300 a month ($250 on annual billing). For that you get 350 custom prompts and 1,000 industry prompts, 3 personas and 3 seats; extra seats are $25 a month each. Claude and Meta come on every plan, next to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and Google AI Overviews, and the 7-day trial needs no credit card. A team that wants Claude and Meta without paying extra will look here first. More in Scrunch AI alternatives.

Comparison table: Profound and its alternatives

Hypervisible sits in the first row, as everywhere on this page, then Profound's two plans, then each other alternative's entry plan. “Not stated” means the vendor's page didn't give the figure.

Figures from each vendor's pricing page, October 22, 2026; SE Visible, Similarweb, AthenaHQ and Scrunch read again on October 29, 2026.
Tool	Entry price	Included on entry plan	AI engines on entry plan	Frequency
Hypervisible	Solo, €49/mo (€29/mo for the first 15 accounts)	1 brand, 25 questions, 8 competitors	Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Mode, AI Overviews	Weekly (Mondays)
Profound	Trial free for 7 days; Enterprise priced on request	Trial: 50 prompts in 1 language and 1 region	Trial: Gemini, ChatGPT, AI Overviews. Enterprise: as many as 9, with Claude, Copilot and AI Mode	Daily
SE Visible	Basic, €80/mo (€64 billed yearly)	75 prompts over 5 projects	AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini	Daily
Similarweb AEO Intelligence	$129/mo; $99/mo on annual billing	150 prompts for 1 user	ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Mode	Daily
AthenaHQ	Starter, $295/mo	3,600 credits	11, Claude, Grok and Meta AI among them	Not stated
Scrunch	$300/mo; $250/mo on annual billing	350 prompts and 3 seats	Claude, Meta, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Mode, AI Overviews	Not stated

Prices are monthly, in each vendor's currency. Vendors count usage in questions, prompts or credits, so compare the answers a plan buys as well as its price. On Hypervisible Solo, 25 questions on five engines come to 125 answers per Monday reading.

How to choose a Profound alternative

Pick by engines first, the ones your customers actually use. Then work out how many answers you need a month, and set that against what you can spend.

You want a smaller bill. A dental practice in Austin or a law firm in Charlotte can cover its market with 15 to 25 questions. Hypervisible Solo tracks 25 on five engines for €49 a month, read weekly. SE Visible Basic tracks 75 prompts a day on four engines for €80.
You need Claude. Scrunch includes it on every plan, AthenaHQ from Starter. Hypervisible does not measure Claude.
You want many engines without an Enterprise contract. AthenaHQ Starter, with 11 engines for $295, comes nearest to Profound's list; Scrunch reads seven on every plan.
You want AI traffic next to your mentions. Similarweb's AEO Intelligence plan reports both in one product.
You run an agency. Count clients first. Hypervisible Pro covers 3 brands with 40 questions each for €149 a month, and Business 10 brands for €449. SE Visible's Agency plan showed 1,000 prompts over 30 projects for €355 on October 29, and Profound's Agency Growth plan meters credits by client workspace.

Whatever you pick, do two things. Convert each plan into answers per month (prompts, times engines, times runs), which is the only way prompts and credits line up. And keep questions that don't name you, such as “best roofer for hail damage in Denver”, next to the ones that do. Only those unbranded questions show whether an AI would recommend you to a stranger. Our guide to AI share of voice shows how to turn those answers into one number you can follow.

If your team relies on Profound's ChatGPT Shopping data, its agents or SSO, check those first. The entry plans above don't list them, and staying on Profound Enterprise may be the simpler choice.

Other comparisons on this site deal with plans that sell engines as add-ons, plans where you pick three engines, prompt indexes for a whole category and the AI toolkit of a large SEO suite.

Whichever way you lean, know your starting point before the first sales call. Hypervisible's free AI visibility analysis sends 10 questions to its five AIs, five that name you and five about your industry that don't, and has the 50 answers read within 5 to 10 minutes. There's no card to enter.

Measuring is only half the job: what Hypervisible gives you to act on

Profound pairs its tracking with agents that draft content. Hypervisible stays on the measuring side, and each reading is built to point to a next step.

Every Monday report lists the sites the AIs cited on your questions: review sites, comparison pages, videos, forum threads. Those are the places where your name has to appear. It quotes what the AIs say about your brand and in which tone, so a discontinued service or a wrong price turns into a correction on your site and your listings. It names the brands cited in your place, question by question, and the change in points from one Monday to the next shows whether the correction moved anything. Our team can also look over your tracking and fit the questions and competitors to your market.

Hypervisible measures and shows where to act. It doesn't write your content, and it doesn't get other sites to cite you. For the deeper work, from content and site structure to structured data, reviews and a presence on the sources the AIs read, a GEO agency works with the brand. NEXUS GEO, the agency that publishes Hypervisible, takes on that kind of engagement; we're naming our own team.

GEO and SEO complement each other, and they remain two separate jobs. SEO moves a page up Google's links, while GEO gets a brand named and cited in an AI's answer, and since the AIs also read forums, videos and reviews and reply with brand names, GEO calls for its own methods and its own metrics.

Your brand

The free analysis asks 10 questions to five AI engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode), reads the 50 answers in 5 to 10 minutes and keeps your dashboard in your account.

Frequently asked questions

Who are Profound's competitors?

Hypervisible, which we publish, is the first we list: a public price from €49 a month and five AIs, Google AI Mode included, on every plan. This comparison also covers SE Visible from SE Ranking, Similarweb, AthenaHQ and Scrunch. They all track how AI assistants mention brands and differ on engines covered, tracking frequency and price. On October 22, 2026, each of them published the price of a paid entry plan, which Profound did not.

How much does Profound cost?

On October 22, 2026, Profound's pricing page showed two plans. The free trial runs 50 prompts daily for 7 days on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. Enterprise is on custom pricing, with a “Get a Demo” button where the price would be. The FAQ also mentions a self-serve Agency Growth plan with 400 credits per month per client workspace, without a price. Expect a sales conversation before you see a figure.

Is there a cheaper alternative to Profound?

Hypervisible, which we publish, is the one we list first: Solo costs €49 a month (€29 for the first 15 accounts) for 25 questions on five AIs, measured weekly, while Profound gives its Enterprise price only after a demo. Among the other tools here, SE Visible Basic costs €80 a month for 75 daily prompts and Similarweb AEO Intelligence $129 ($99 billed annually) for 150, read October 29, 2026. Each gives up some of Profound's engines or features.

Does Profound have a free trial?

Yes. Profound's free trial lasts 7 days and runs 50 prompts daily on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, in one language and one region, with unlimited seats. According to Profound's FAQ, trial users get a recommended prompt set for their industry and can't customize it; editing prompts, exports and the API come with Enterprise. The pricing page doesn't say whether a credit card is required.

Which Profound alternatives track Claude?

Among the tools in this comparison, Scrunch tracks Claude on every plan, from $300 a month ($250 billed annually), and AthenaHQ from its $295 Starter plan, which lists 11 engines. SE Visible and Similarweb don't list Claude on their entry plans. Hypervisible does not measure Claude; it covers ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Overviews and AI Mode. Ask for the engine list of the exact plan you would buy.

Is a tracking tool enough to get cited by AI?

No. Hypervisible, which we publish, measures and shows where to act: the sites the AIs cite on your questions, what they say about your brand and in what tone, who gets named instead of you, and the change in points each Monday. It doesn't write your content or get other sites to cite you. That deeper work falls to your team or to a GEO agency such as NEXUS GEO, which publishes Hypervisible. GEO and SEO complement each other.