Last Updated on February 27, 2026 by Alex Birkett
Profound has emerged as the category leader in AEO (Answer Engine Optimization).
They just raised $96 million at a $1 billion valuation, work with 10% of the Fortune 500, and they’ve built what is probably the most comprehensive AI visibility platform on the market.
But Profound isn’t the right fit for everyone.
The Growth plan starts at $399/month and gives you meaningful functionality, while the Starter plan at $99/month is limited to ChatGPT only – which, in a world where your brand needs to show up across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, is like monitoring one lane of a five-lane highway.
And the Enterprise plan? Contact sales. Which, in my experience, means “expensive enough that they don’t want to put it on the website.”
So I wanted to list the best Profound alternatives, given there are many GEO (generative engine optimization) tools on the market.
Some are cheaper. Some are more focused. A few do things Profound doesn’t. Here’s what’s worth your time.
The 9 Best Profound Alternatives in 2026
- Scrunch
- Peec AI
- AthenaHQ
- Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit
- Ahrefs Brand Radar
- Adobe LLM Optimizer
- Meltwater GenAI Lens
- AirOps
- Goodie AI
1. Scrunch
Best for: Teams that want monitoring AND a technical delivery layer for AI crawlers
Scrunch is a solid Profound competitor with feature parity and some cool features that go beyond monitoring into actual optimization infrastructure.
Most GEO tools are “read-only,” as in they tell you where you show up in AI search and where you don’t. Scrunch does that, but it also has something called the Agent Experience Platform (AXP), which is a separate, optimized layer of your website built specifically for AI crawlers.
Think of it like having two versions of your site: one for humans, one for bots. The AXP serves a clean, structured version of your pages to AI crawlers without requiring you to rewrite anything on your actual site.
On the monitoring side, Scrunch tracks performance across ChatGPT, Claude, Meta AI, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Mode, and AI Overviews.
You get prompt-level analytics such as share-of-answer, citation data, competitor benchmarking sliced by persona, topic, geography, and funnel stage.
The persona and funnel segmentation is particularly useful. You can see if you’re visible to a “CTO” persona but invisible to a “Developer” persona, or winning top-of-funnel awareness queries but losing bottom-of-funnel purchase-intent queries.
They also have an AI bot crawl monitor that shows you in real time how AI bots are crawling your site, plus a page audit tool that flags issues preventing your pages from being cited, complementing other technical SEO tools you may use.
What I like:
- AXP delivery layer is unique, goes beyond monitoring into technical optimization
- Prompt-level tracking across all major AI engines
- Persona and funnel-stage segmentation for visibility data and actionable insights
- Real-time AI bot crawl monitoring
- Page audit tool for citation-blocking issues
What could be better:
- No content generation or AI-written optimization briefs, you need to execute elsewhere
- Core plan starts at $250/month, which isn’t cheap for small teams
- Still a monitoring-first tool at its core, despite the AXP
Pricing: Core starts at $250/month. Agency plans from $500/month. Enterprise is custom.
2. Peec AI
Best for: Mid-market teams and agencies that want clean AI visibility tracking without the complexity
Peec AI is one of the top Profound alternatives and one that I use quite extensively at my AEO agency, Omniscient.
It’s the tool I’d recommend if Profound feels like overkill and you want something simpler, cleaner, and more affordable.
Where Profound and Scrunch go deep on enterprise features, Peec keeps things focused: set up your prompts, see your AI visibility, act on top citations. That’s it. And for most marketing teams, that’s actually what you need.
The platform tracks brand rankings across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and other major AI search platforms. You get prompt organization like tagging and categories, competitor tracking, source identification (which specific citations are influencing your results), and actionable recommendations. Daily tracking updates mean you can spot visibility shifts quickly.
Peec recently raised $21M and is adding roughly 300 customers per month, with brands like Chanel, ElevenLabs, and Axel Springer on the roster. For a platform that launched relatively recently, that’s powerful traction.
The pricing is also refreshingly transparent. Starter is $95/mo. Pro is $245/month. Both with a 7-day free trial. Unlimited team seats on all plans, which is notable, since most competitors charge per seat (and as a side note, the unlimited seats is an amazing key feature for agencies like mine)
What I like:
- Clean, simple interface. Low learning curve and genuinely fun to use
- Transparent pricing starting at €89/month
- Unlimited team seats (no per-seat charges)
- 7-day free trial
- Strong competitor tracking and citation source identification
- 115+ language support
What could be better:
- Vague prompt volume tracking from LLMs
- Lacks deep technical insights into why specific sources are selected
- SSO and API access not available on all plans
Pricing: Starter at $95/mo. Pro at $245/month. 15% discount on annual billing. Enterprise is custom.
3. AthenaHQ
Best for: Enterprise teams that need to prove GEO ROI with revenue attribution
AthenaHQ was founded by former Google Search and DeepMind employees and is one of the top enterprise tools for AI search performance.
The standout feature is revenue attribution. AthenaHQ integrates natively with Shopify and Google Analytics to correlate AI visibility with actual sales and traffic. If you’re trying to justify a GEO budget to your CFO, this is the tool that gives you the numbers to do it.
Their Olympus Dashboard tracks share-of-voice across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Copilot, and Google, and generates a unified GEO score that combines citation count, sentiment, traffic impact, and query types. The AI-generated Action Center suggests specific fixes like content restructuring, FAQ additions, schema changes, and outreach targets rather than just showing you dashboards and leaving you to figure out what to do.
They also have a proprietary Athena Citation Engine (ACE) that predicts citation probability, which is very useful for prioritizing which pages to optimize first.
What I like:
- Revenue attribution via Shopify and Google Analytics integrations
- GEO score that unifies multiple signals into one metric
- AI-generated action center with specific, prescriptive recommendations
- Citation probability prediction (ACE)
- Strong agency tools with white-labeled reporting
- All AI platforms available on the Starter plan (no feature gating by engine)
What could be better:
- Starts at $295/month, premium territory
- Credit-based consumption model means you can burn through your allocation quickly
- Best features (Recommendation Engine) locked to enterprise tier
- No free trial
- Overkill for small teams or solopreneurs
Pricing: Starts at $295/month. Custom Enterprise pricing for high-volume monitoring. Annual plans include one month free.
4. Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit
Best for: Teams already using Semrush who want to add GEO without switching platforms
Semrush AI Visibility is the path of least resistance if you’re already in the Semrush ecosystem.
Rather than buying a standalone GEO tool, you add AI visibility tracking to your existing SEO workflow for $99/month per domain.
The toolkit monitors brand mentions and visibility across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and AI Mode, with Gemini coming soon. You get prompt monitoring (Semrush claims to track 100M+ relevant LLM prompts globally), brand performance reports, sentiment analysis, and competitive perception metrics.
The integration with Semrush’s broader SEO toolkit – keyword research, technical SEO tools, search optimization in general – is the real value. You can see your traditional SEO performance alongside your AI visibility in one dashboard, which makes it easier to spot correlations and prioritize work.
However, it’s my personal opinion that their feature set is not to parity with Profound or the other alternatives on this list. It works in a pinch, but I’d recommend one of the other AI visibility tools for your brand visibility needs.
What I like:
- $99/month per domain — affordable relative to standalone GEO tools
- Seamless integration with Semrush’s 55+ existing SEO tools
- 100M+ prompt database (largest U.S. database)
- Brand perception and sentiment analysis
What could be better:
- Requires a Semrush subscription, so total cost is higher than it looks
- U.S. only for prompt tracking (as of early 2026)
- Less mature than dedicated GEO platforms
- Some reports of the toolkit being deprecated or limited for certain users
Pricing: $99/month per domain as an add-on. Or bundled in Semrush One starting at $199/month.
5. Ahrefs Brand Radar
Best for: SEO teams already using Ahrefs who want integrated GEO monitoring
Ahrefs Brand Radar takes a similar approach to Semrush. It’s a GEO module built into an existing SEO suite. If you’re already paying for Ahrefs (and many content and SEO teams are), Brand Radar adds AI visibility tracking without requiring another vendor.
What makes Ahrefs’ approach unique is their massive proprietary web index.
Brand Radar can correlate AI search visibility with the backlink and content data Ahrefs already has, giving you a perspective that standalone GEO tools can’t match. You can see, for instance, whether pages with more referring domains get cited more frequently by AI engines and use that to inform your link building strategy.
What I like:
- Integrated with Ahrefs’ backlink and content data
- Correlates AI visibility with traditional SEO signals
- Familiar interface for Ahrefs users
What could be better:
- Newer product, still maturing
- Less sophisticated GEO-specific features than dedicated platforms
- Engine coverage may be limited compared to specialized tools
- Additional charges for tracking your own prompts
Pricing: starting $199/mo (additional to your regular subscriptions) with payment plans for custom prompts
6. Adobe LLM Optimizer
Best for: Enterprise teams in the Adobe ecosystem who need end-to-end GEO with one-click deployment
Adobe LLM Optimizer is the enterprise heavyweight in the AI tracking space. Isn’t that always the case with Adobe products, though?
If your org already runs on Adobe Experience Cloud, this is the GEO tool that plugs directly into your existing content management and deployment workflows.
Key value is one-click optimization deployment through Adobe Experience Manager. Most GEO tools tell you what to fix. Adobe lets you fix it and push it live without leaving the platform. They also have edge deployment that requires no code changes and can be rolled back instantly, which matters a lot when you’re working with risk-averse enterprise teams.
Monitoring covers ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. The agentic traffic detection feature identifies AI crawler visits via CDN logs, and the platform uses models trained on LLM content optimization to propose and implement changes.
What I like:
- One-click deployment via Adobe Experience Manager
- Edge deployment with instant rollback, zero production risk
- Prescriptive content recommendations with auto-optimization
- Agentic traffic detection
- Enterprise-grade security and MCP/A2A integrations
- Free trial (200 prompts) for existing AEM customers
What could be better:
- Pricing is opaque. Enterprise sales process required
- Prompt-based pricing (minimum 1,000 prompts annually) can get expensive at scale
- Only useful if you’re already in the Adobe ecosystem
- Newer product, launched October 2025
Pricing: Custom pricing. Minimum purchase of 1,000 prompts/year. Volume discounts available.
7. Meltwater GenAI Lens
Best for: PR and comms teams that need AI visibility integrated with media intelligence
Meltwater GenAI Lens comes at the GEO problem from a completely different angle than every other tool here. Rather than being a standalone AI visibility platform, it’s a module inside Meltwater’s Media Intelligence Suite, which means it connects AI search monitoring with social listening, PR coverage tracking, and influencer data in one unified view. Great for digital PR teams.
If your team already uses Meltwater for media monitoring (and a lot of enterprise comms teams do), GenAI Lens is the path of least resistance.
It tracks how the majority of major LLMs (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, Deepseek, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews) talk about your brand, products, and competitors. Every response surfaces metadata including sentiment, emotion, keywords, and source links, so you can see not just whether you’re mentioned but how you’re being characterized.
The source and journalist insights are where Meltwater’s PR DNA shows through. The platform reveals which publishers and journalists are influencing LLM responses, essentially answering “who is shaping what AI says about us?” For comms teams, that’s directly actionable: you know which media relationships to invest in and which narratives to get ahead of.
The cross-channel context is also a huge differentiator.
You can build reports showing AI-driven visibility alongside traditional media KPIs, social listening data, and influencer metrics. For a CMO or VP of Comms trying to understand brand perception holistically, that unified view is hard to get anywhere else.
What I like:
- Tracks majority of major LLMs, broadest model coverage on this list
- Rich metadata per response (sentiment, emotion, keywords, source attribution)
- Source and journalist influence tracking (unique to Meltwater)
- Integrates with existing Meltwater media intelligence, social listening, and influencer data
- Automated logging with month-over-month comparison
- Quick setup with customizable prompt templates
What could be better:
- Mostly valuable if you’re already a Meltwater customer (or willing to become one)
- Meltwater’s suite pricing is enterprise-level (this isn’t a $99/month add-on)
- Less focused on content optimization and technical GEO than dedicated tools
- More of a brand perception tool than a search visibility tool
Pricing: Custom pricing through Meltwater. Requires a demo and sales conversation.
8. AirOps
Best for: Content teams that want to act on AI visibility insights, not just monitor them
AirOps occupies a different position than every other tool on this list.
Where Profound, Scrunch, and Peec are primarily monitoring platforms (they tell you where you show up in AI search) AirOps is built for what happens next.
It’s a content operations platform with GEO baked in, designed for teams that need to turn visibility data into actual content changes at scale.
Think of the difference like analytics vs. a CMS.
Most GEO tools are dashboards. AirOps is closer to a workflow engine.
You get AI visibility insights, but you also get the infrastructure to update content, run GEO audits, manage large content libraries, and ship improvements with humans in the loop. Their GEO audit workflow reportedly cut audit time from 4-5 hours to just over one hour.
AirOps integrates 30+ AI models and connects to your CMS, analytics tools, and marketing platforms. The AEO Research feature lets you investigate how AI engines handle your category’s queries and turn findings into assigned, trackable tasks. For teams managing hundreds or thousands of pages, this operational layer is the real value.
They recently closed a $40M Series B, and clients like Webflow report 5x faster content refresh cycles and meaningful traffic increases after implementation.
What I like:
- Execution-focused. Connects monitoring to content workflows, not just dashboards
- Integrates 30+ AI models for content production and optimization
- Connects to your existing CMS and analytics stack
- Strong for teams managing large content libraries
What could be better:
- Pricing isn’t published. Requires a sales conversation for Solo and Pro plans. And speaking from personal experience, it’s quite expensive.
- Free plan (1,000 tasks/month, 1 user) is too limited for real programs
- More of a content ops platform than a dedicated GEO tool. Could be overkill if you just want monitoring
- Their AI visibility monitoring, citation sources, and share of voice analytics are significantly less developed than other Profound alternatives on this list
- Steeper learning curve than pure-play tracking tools
Pricing: Free plan available (limited). Paid plans require contacting sales.
9. Goodie AI
Best for: Teams that want monitoring, optimization, attribution, AND content intelligence in one platform
Goodie AI positions itself as the most complete GEO platform: combining monitoring, optimization, attribution, and content intelligence. Built specifically for GEO from day one (rather than bolted onto an existing SEO tool), it aims to cover the full workflow from tracking to execution.
The content intelligence layer is what differentiates it from pure brand visibility monitoring tools. Rather than just showing you where you’re visible, Goodie analyzes why certain content gets cited and helps you create more of it.
What I like:
- Full-stack GEO: monitoring + optimization + attribution + content intelligence
- Built for GEO from scratch, not retrofitted
- Covers the execution gap that most monitoring tools leave open
What could be better:
- Newer entrant, so less market validation
- Feature breadth means potential tradeoffs in depth
- Pricing and specific feature details still evolving
Pricing: Custom pricing.
How to Choose a Profound Alternative
The GEO market is still young, which means tools are differentiating fast and no single platform does everything well. Here’s my framework:
If you want Profound’s depth at a lower price: Scrunch is the closest in capability, especially with the AXP delivery layer. AthenaHQ is another strong enterprise option with the added bonus of revenue attribution.
If you want simplicity and affordability: Peec AI at $95/month. Clean, focused, and transparent pricing. Hard to beat for getting started. This is one of my favorite all around tools for optimizing your AI presence.
If you’re already invested in an SEO suite and don’t want to add on another tool: Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit or Ahrefs Brand Radar.
If you’re enterprise and in Adobe’s ecosystem: Adobe LLM Optimizer. The one-click deployment alone justifies evaluation.
AirOps (and more recently Goodie and Profound) are not visibility only tools, but also offer content creation, on page optimization automation, and AI agents that can act on your behalf to (hopefully…jury is out) improve performance.
Conclusion
AI search software in 2026 feels exciting, overwhelming, fragmented, and interesting. So roughly where SEO software was fifteen years ago.
The market is fragmented, data accuracy varies (most tools rely on APIs or scraping that don’t perfectly match what users actually see), and best practices are still being established. My oh my, don’t even start thinking about user level personalization, memory, and those extremely long tail prompts. It’s a whole new world!
However, from my personal experience, AI visibility data is incredibly useful and actionable when critically analyzed, AI search optimization is clearly the next frontier channel, and AI search trends continue to grow. Thus, I’d be seriously looking into your AI presence.
Pick a tool that fits your budget and use case, start monitoring, and build your intuition. The teams that are learning now will have a massive advantage when AI search becomes the primary discovery channel, which, based on the trajectory I’m seeing with our clients at Omniscient Digital, is happening faster than most marketers expect.