Profound alternatives (2026): self-serve AI visibility tools

Profound sells brand tracking by contract: its pricing page offers a free seven-day trial and, after that, an Enterprise plan priced on request. If you want to start tracking this week, on a card, at a price you can read before a call, these are the eight tools to look at — what each costs, which engines it covers, and who it suits.

What Profound offers today

The Profound pricing page lists two brand plans. The trial is free: fifty fixed prompts, which you cannot edit, run daily for seven days on ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews, with unlimited seats and no history, exports or API. Enterprise is custom: daily tracking on a custom number of prompts, up to nine answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Mode, Gemini, Copilot, DeepSeek, Claude, AI Overviews and Exa), CSV and JSON exports, an API, SSO, SOC 2, ChatGPT Shopping, agent analytics integrations with Cloudflare, Vercel, Akamai, AWS, Fastly and Google Analytics, and content agents paid for in credits. The self-serve brand plans the page carried earlier in the year are no longer on it.

For agencies, Profound's own November 2025 announcement prices a client workspace at $399 a month, tracking 100 prompts on ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews, with pitch workspaces on top. Its FAQ today mentions a self-serve Agency Growth plan; the current price of that plan is not published in a form we could read.

The alternatives at a glance

Prices are monthly, in US dollars, from each vendor's own pricing page on 10 October 2026. "Entry" is the cheapest paid plan; "add-on" means the engine costs extra on top of the plan.

1. Recomma

This is our product, so it is listed first and should be read with that in mind. Recomma samples ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews and Google AI Mode, capturing each answer from the interface a reader sees rather than from a model API, and records which brands it names and which pages it cites. Every figure carries its sample size and a 95% confidence interval (why). Each tracked question is priced with keyword data, gaps become actions, and every action is re-measured fourteen days after it closes. The brand's own site is audited against fifteen markup rules, and an MCP server lets Claude, ChatGPT or a coding agent read the data and act on it, with writes previewed first.

• Starter: $30/mo · 50 prompts · weekly · 1 project · up to 3 engines.
• Growth: $299/mo · 300 prompts · daily · 3 projects · up to 3 engines; 3-day trial with a card.
• Scale: $999/mo · 500 prompts · daily · unlimited projects · every engine; full API access and CSV export.

Limits. Four engines: no Copilot, no Perplexity in the standard pass, no Claude. Starter is weekly. There is no free plan and no third-party reviews yet. Best for teams and agencies that need to show which changes moved the number, with the error bar to back it. Pricing.

2. Otterly.AI

Otterly is the least expensive way into daily tracking. Lite is $29 a month for 15 prompts in one workspace; Standard is $189 for 100 prompts with unlimited workspaces and 2,000 API and 2,000 MCP requests a month; Premium is $489 for 400 prompts. Every plan tracks ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot daily, with unlimited team members, a GEO audit and exports. Gemini and AI Mode are add-ons at $59 a month each on Standard, Claude at $109 (Otterly pricing). It collects answers through the public websites of the AI products, except Claude, which it reads through the API (how Otterly collects data). The trial is seven days with 50 prompts and no card.

Best for small teams and agencies that want cheap daily tracking of the four core engines. Recomma vs Otterly.AI compares the two in detail.

3. Peec AI

Peec's Starter is $95 a month for 50 prompts and one project, Pro $245 for 150 prompts and two, Advanced $495 for 350 prompts and five, with multiple countries and Looker Studio. Each plan tracks daily, includes three models chosen from ChatGPT, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Copilot, Gemini and Naver AI, and has unlimited users; extra models cost $35 to $165 a month. Enterprise adds the API, SSO and up to thirteen models (Peec pricing). Its MCP server is read-only (docs).

Best for SEO and content teams that want clean daily multi-model tracking across markets. Recomma vs Peec AI goes further.

4. Rankscale

Rankscale charges by credit rather than by prompt. Essentials starts at $20 a month; Pro is $99 for 1,200 credits, Pro+ $229 for 3,000, Growth $385 for 5,500 and Enterprise $780 for 12,000. A query on ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Mode or Gemini costs a quarter of a credit, DeepSeek one and Claude two, and unused credits roll over. Ten engines are available from the same pool, at a cadence from hourly to monthly, with unlimited seats, a REST API from Pro+, an MCP server, Looker Studio and white-label dashboards. The trial is seven days of Pro (Rankscale pricing). It does not publish how answers are collected.

Best for budget-conscious SEOs and agencies who want many engines and are happy to manage a credit balance.

5. AthenaHQ

AthenaHQ has a free plan with 300 credits on ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Gemini and Copilot. Starter is $295 a month for 3,600 credits — one credit is one answer — across eleven models including Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI and Mistral, with Shopify, Webflow, GA4 and Search Console integrations and a content-optimisation agent. API access is a paid add-on on Starter and included on Enterprise (AthenaHQ pricing). Refresh frequency, MCP and the add-on price are not published.

Best for growth teams that want the widest engine list at one credit price, and content actions tied to their analytics.

6. Scrunch

Scrunch's Starter is $300 a month ($250 billed yearly) for 350 custom prompts, 1,000 industry prompts and three users; Growth is $500 ($417) for 700 custom prompts and five users. It covers ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Mode, AI Overviews and Meta, monitors agent traffic, and offers AXP, which serves an AI-friendly version of your site. The API is on Enterprise; the trial is seven days of Starter with no card (Scrunch pricing).

Best for mid-market teams who care about what AI agents do on their site as much as what the answers say.

7. Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit

The toolkit is $99 a month for one project and 25 prompts, with 50 more prompts for $60 and extra users at $99 each. Prompts are tracked daily; its knowledge base names ChatGPT and Google AI Mode (Semrush knowledge base). The Semrush One bundles, from $199 a month, combine SEO with 50 to 200 daily AI prompts, and the pricing page there names a broader set of engines (Semrush pricing).

Best for teams already paying for Semrush who want AI tracking in the same place.

8. Ahrefs Brand Radar

Brand Radar's AI Visibility Index is $199 a month and draws on more than 470 million prompts from Ahrefs' keyword data, across AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot, refreshed monthly. Your own prompts are tracked through custom-prompt packages from $50 a month, or a few a day included with a paid Ahrefs plan; Claude is available for custom prompts only (Brand Radar, Ahrefs pricing).

Best for SEO teams that want market-wide share of voice from a huge pre-collected question set, rather than deep tracking of their own prompts.

Which one to choose

• The lowest price for daily tracking: Otterly.AI.
• The most engines without a contract: AthenaHQ or Rankscale.
• Several countries with daily tracking: Otterly.AI (50+ countries on every plan) or Peec AI (Advanced).
• Agent traffic and an AI-facing copy of your site: Scrunch.
• AI tracking beside an SEO suite you already pay for: Semrush or Ahrefs.
• Figures with an error bar, gaps priced by demand, and fixes re-measured after they ship: Recomma.
• Nine engines, SOC 2 and a procurement process: stay with Profound.

The other comparison of this kind is Otterly.AI alternatives.

How we compared

Each tool's plans, prices, engines, integrations and trial terms were read from its own pricing page, documentation or announcements on 10 October 2026, in US dollars where the page offered a choice. Where a vendor does not publish something, the table says so rather than filling the gap from a third-party listing; third-party listings often carried older prices that the vendors' own pages had since changed. Review-site scores were left out because they could not be checked at the source. The order after Recomma is not a ranking: the specialist tools come first, and the modules of larger SEO suites last.