What is the closest direct replacement for Profound?⌄
Scrunch AI. It sells to the same buyer, models buyer personas (one on Core), reports AI agent traffic to your site, and publishes a price: Core is $250 a month with 125 prompts, four engines, five user licences and a seven-day free trial. The gap is engine coverage. Claude, Gemini, AI Mode, Meta and Grok sit on Scrunch's Enterprise plan, which, like Profound's, is quoted. If your buyers mostly use ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews and Copilot, Core covers them.
What are cheaper alternatives to Profound for AI search monitoring?⌄
Every tool on this list that publishes a price, because Profound no longer sells a self-serve plan to brands. The cheapest credible options are Otterly.AI at $29 a month for 15 prompts on four engines, AIclicks at $59 for 30 prompts on three, and Peec AI at $80 billed annually for 50 prompts on three engines with unlimited seats. Writesonic is $79 billed annually with article generation included. Watch the add-ons: extra engines cost $9 to $29 each on Otterly's Lite plan and from $30 each on Peec, so price the configuration you would actually run.
How much does Profound cost now?⌄
For brands there is no published price. Since September 2026 Profound's pricing page has listed a free seven-day trial and a custom-priced Enterprise plan, and nothing in between. The trial runs 50 recommended prompts daily on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, without prompt editing, history, exports or API. The former $99 Starter and $399 Growth plans are gone, so any comparison still quoting them predates the change. Agencies are the exception: full client workspaces on Agency Growth are $399 a month each. Read on Profound's pricing page on 15 October 2026.
Which alternatives offer API or programmatic access?⌄
Peec AI puts an MCP server on every plan and its API on Pro, at $205 a month billed annually. Otterly.AI includes both from its $189 Standard plan, with 2,000 requests a month of each. AIclicks adds GA4, API and MCP on its $189 Pro plan. Ahrefs lists API and MCP access from its $129 Lite plan. Semrush includes MCP access from Starter, with API data integration on its custom-priced Advanced plan. Profound keeps API access and data exports for Enterprise, so almost anything here improves on it without a quoted contract.
Do any of these track AI traffic to my website like Profound does?⌄
Yes, three of them. Peec AI reads AI bot visits from your server or CDN logs on every plan, with connectors for Cloudflare, Vercel, AWS CloudFront, Google Cloud CDN, Akamai and WordPress. Otterly.AI includes Agent Analytics from its $189 Standard plan. Scrunch AI lists AI agent and bot traffic on its $250 Core plan. All three show which AI bots fetched which pages. That is a different measurement from answer visibility, which every tool here, Profound included, still samples.
I already pay for Semrush or Ahrefs. Do I need any of this?⌄
Check before you buy, because one of these two probably covers you and the other probably does not. Semrush bundles daily prompt tracking into its plans, 50 a day from the $165.17 Starter tier, which is a workable tracker for one brand at no extra cost. Ahrefs includes Brand Radar from $129 but only 5 tracked prompts, rising to 20 on Advanced, so meaningful tracking means adding a prompt package from $50 a month. We compare the two in detail in our Semrush AI Toolkit vs Ahrefs Brand Radar head-to-head.
Can I trial these before committing?⌄
Most of them, on very different terms. Profound's own trial lasts seven days on a fixed set of 50 prompts, which shows you the interface but not a trend. Scrunch AI and Writesonic run seven days, AIclicks three, and Otterly.AI and Peec AI both offer free trials. Conductor offers three weeks free and Omnibound a free trial, both without a card, though neither publishes what a paid plan costs. In a category where single readings are noisy, a trial of a week or less shows you the product, not whether its numbers are stable.
How does Profound compare to Peec AI specifically?⌄
Peec AI wins on access and price: $80 a month billed annually against no published Profound price at all, unlimited seats, an MCP server on every plan, and server-log crawl insights from the entry tier. Profound still wins on breadth and service at the top: up to nine engines, AI Marketer agents for content work, and a dedicated specialist on a 24-hour SLA, all on a quoted contract. We use Peec AI on live accounts, and our Profound vs Peec AI head-to-head has the detail.
What happens to our tracking history if we switch?⌄
You start from zero on every tool here. Prompt sets, historical readings and competitor baselines do not transfer between vendors, and no importer exists in either direction. If you are on Profound Enterprise, which lists CSV and JSON exports, take your history out before the contract ends, because the trial carries no history or exports at all. Then run the old and new tools in parallel for at least a month with an identical prompt set. They will disagree, sometimes considerably, and you want to see the size of that gap while you can still compare them.
