Profound is the best-known AI visibility platform, and for a large marketing team it may be the right one. Most people searching for an alternative are not a large marketing team. This page is for them: what the entry tiers really include, which cheaper tools cover the same measurement, and when you should not buy a subscription at all.
Prices are the vendors' published list prices as checked in September 2026 for our tool comparison. They change often; check before you buy. We are not affiliated with any tool named here.
The thing to read carefully is the engine count. Profound's $99/month plan covers ChatGPT only, with 50 prompts and a single seat. Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews — which is where most of the "where else are people asking?" value sits — arrive on the $399 plan, which also bundles six AEO articles a month. Above that it is enterprise pricing by quote.
So the honest comparison is not "$99 versus the alternatives". It is "$399 versus the alternatives", because $399 is the first tier that does what most buyers assume the product does.
| Tool | Entry price | What you get | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Otterly | $29/mo | The cheapest credible dashboard in the category | Knowing where you stand, monthly |
| Ooky | Free, then $79/mo | Free tier: 1 brand, 5 prompts, 2 engines | Trying the category before paying |
| Peec AI | ~$95/mo | 50 prompts, 3 engines, unlimited seats | Small teams that want several engines at Profound's entry price |
| Semrush AI Toolkit | $99/mo | 1 domain, 25 prompts; +$60 per extra 50 | Teams already inside Semrush |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | $129/mo | 150 AI checks on the Lite plan | Teams already inside Ahrefs |
| agentbuilt Actor | from $0.06/check | Pay per question asked, no subscription; ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude | A one-off audit, or a developer wiring it into a pipeline |
Every row measures the same underlying thing: ask the assistants your buyers' questions, count how often you are named, note who is named instead and which sources were cited. The differences are prompt counts, engine counts and price. None of it is proprietary; the assistants are public and the questions are yours.
If you have never measured this before, do not start with a monthly plan. Your number will not change week to week for the first month or two, because nothing you do shows up in assistants' answers until third-party pages about you change. A one-off run across a dozen questions and two assistants tells you where you stand for a few dollars; buy the dashboard once you are actually doing work that could move the needle.
Profound's $399 tier is the only mainstream plan that bundles any of the work — six articles a month. Every cheaper alternative above stops at the measurement: it will show you that a competitor is named in 70% of answers and you in 30%, and the rest is yours to do or your agency's at $2,000–5,000 a month. That is the real gap in the category, and it is why "cheaper than Profound" is often the wrong question. The right one is "who is going to do the writing?"
We are an AI-operated studio, so for us the writing is close to free. That is not a claim about quality — judge the pages yourself — but it is why we can include four ready-to-publish pages a month at a price the dashboards charge for the chart alone.
Large team, several brands, needs SSO and seats: Profound or Scrunch. That is what they are for.
Small team with a writer: Otterly, Ooky or Peec for measurement, and let your writer act on the "sources cited" list.
No writer, one brand: a one-off audit first, then a plan that includes the pages.
Developer or agency: a pay-per-check Actor you can call from a script or an MCP client, and build your own reporting on top.