On 15 September 2026, Profound announced $180M in new funding at a $1.8B valuation. Days later, the Starter and Growth plans, $99 and $399 a month, disappeared from its pricing page. If your team was on Growth, you now need a replacement.
Profound tracks how often AI apps name your brand. It does four jobs: it runs your prompts daily and records answers, it scores your visibility, it turns gaps into content with an AI Marketer, and it watches AI bot traffic with Agent Analytics. No tool in this post does all four. But for daily prompt tracking, several tools are cheaper and more transparent.
This post covers 10 alternatives that publish prices, bill monthly, and can start the same day. The focus is on how each meters usage and where each fits Profound's workflow.
What Profound's four parts map to
Profound's four parts are:
- Answer Engine Insights: runs prompts daily and records answers.
- Visibility Score: share of answers that name you.
- AI Marketer and Agents: turns visibility gaps into content.
- Agent Analytics: tracks crawler and bot behavior.
The table below shows the closest match in this post for each part.
| Profound part | Closest match in this post |
|---|---|
| Answer Engine Insights | All 10. Widest coverage: Rankscale (17+ AI apps), AthenaHQ and Promptwatch (11 each) |
| Visibility Score | Lumirank, Otterly.AI, Peec AI |
| AI Marketer and Agents | Promptwatch Content Agent, basic content generation on Scrunch Core |
| Agent Analytics | Peec AI, Ahrefs bot crawler logs |
That last row is where alternatives are cheapest and most alike. The choice comes down to how each tool meters usage.
Visibility Score and the API gap
Profound's case for tracking the public app rather than the API is that 'API responses and front-end responses from the same model can diverge', because the public app carries context an API call does not see.
Profound's Visibility Score is the share of answers that name you, out of the answers that name at least one brand. If ChatGPT often replies with general advice and no vendor names, Profound's score runs higher. A 15-point drop after a switch may be nothing more than a new denominator. The same answers can produce two very different numbers depending on the definition.
Profound publishes no Enterprise price. The $2,000 to $5,000 or more a month that third-party reviews quote comes from user reports, not from Profound, so treat it as a rough guide. Profound licenses conversations from multiple, double-opt-in consumer panels, covering hundreds of millions of prompts a month in 10 countries, updated weekly.
The AI Marketer runs Agents that turn visibility gaps into content, and each Agent run spends credits. That is a separate cost from prompt tracking.
How the alternatives meter usage
You pay for questions. Each question runs on every AI app the plan covers.
Lumirank works this way from Pro up, as do LLMrefs and Semrush's toolkit. Adding an AI app costs nothing within the plan, so the bill is predictable.
Otterly.AI includes four apps and charges $59 a month each for Gemini and AI Mode on Standard. Peec AI includes three models and charges $85 for a fourth on Pro. If the payroll team needs Gemini, Otterly.AI's Standard plan costs $248, not $189.
Credits are the most flexible unit and the hardest to forecast. Ahrefs and Semrush use credits where each AI app costs a different rate. Claude can cost eight times ChatGPT.
Plan limits differ:
- Lumirank, Otterly.AI, Peec AI, Rankscale and LLMrefs have unlimited users.
- Promptwatch has 1, 2 or 5 seats.
- Scrunch has 5 seats.
- Semrush charges per extra user.
Lumirank and AthenaHQ have free plans.
Plans with 100 to 150 prompts cost $99 to $250 a month across Lumirank, Otterly.AI, Semrush, Peec AI, Promptwatch and Scrunch. Every one lists a lower monthly price than Profound's old Growth plan at $399 a month paid yearly.
The 10 alternatives
Lumirank
Lumirank runs each prompt once a day on every AI model in your plan, in the countries you pick. A prompt is 'one question in one country'. The same question tracked in the US and Canada uses two prompts.
Pro is $99 for 100 prompts on all six apps: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews. Scale is $399 for 450 prompts. Extra countries use extra prompts, but nothing is charged per AI app or per seat. Every plan has unlimited team members. The free plan covers 10 prompts on two apps, and Pro has a 14-day trial with no card.
Compared with Profound's old Growth plan, Pro has the same prompt count on twice the AI apps, Gemini included, for a quarter of the price, billed monthly.
Lumirank's home page shows daily tracking across six AI apps. Screenshot: lumirank.ai, September 2026.
What it lacks: no prompt volume data, no crawler logs, no content agent. It does not track Claude, Grok or DeepSeek. Its pricing page lists the API, MCP server and exports as 'coming soon'. That matters if Profound's data fed a BI tool. It also does not say whether answers come from web interfaces or APIs.
Pros: all six AI apps on Pro, unlimited team members, daily runs in multiple countries, monthly billing.
Cons: no Claude, Grok or DeepSeek, no prompt volumes, no crawler logs, no content agent, and API and exports are still 'coming soon'.
Otterly.AI
Otterly.AI queries each AI app daily, per country, as a neutral, non-personalized user. On Standard, AI Mode and Gemini cost $59 a month each and Claude costs $109. Standard with all three added comes to $416.
Crawler data sits on the same $189 plan as prompt tracking. A public API arrived in June and Claude tracking arrived later that month. Standard and Premium include MCP access. The GEO Audit checks single pages for on-page issues.
Otterly.AI includes four apps and charges extra for Gemini and AI Mode on Standard. The list price holds only if the included apps are the ones your buyers use.
Peec AI
Peec AI meters prompts and models. Each plan includes three models chosen from ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini and Copilot. A fourth model costs $85 a month on Pro. Peec also covers part of Agent Analytics with crawl insights for 40+ AI bots.
Essential is $95 for 50 prompts, Professional is $245 for 150, and Business is $579 for 350. Seats are metered as well: 1, 2 and 5. Headcount can push you up a plan before your prompt count does.
Peec AI pitches itself as AI search analytics for marketing teams. Screenshot: peec.ai, September 2026.
Cons: three models per plan, a fourth costs $85 a month on Pro, and no content agent or prompt volume data.
LLMrefs
LLMrefs has one plan at $79 a month: 500 prompts on 11 AI apps, with unlimited projects and users. That is about 16 cents a prompt, the lowest on this list by a distance. The FAQ says every keyword updates at least once per week, and the price is framed as limited-time.
You give it a keyword and it writes the conversational prompts. That is a gentle way in if Profound's suggested prompts were your starting point.
LLMrefs starts from a keyword, not a prompt. Screenshot: llmrefs.com, September 2026.
Also worth a look
The remaining six tools compete more directly with Profound and cost more.
- Ahrefs runs prompts through the public web interfaces of AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot, logged out. Its index covers 400M+ prompts. A 317M+ prompt database is a strong asset. But Ahrefs does not filter hallucinated links out of its data. Access to big AI indexes is an add-on, and its own pages disagree on the price: $199 or $699 a month.
- Semrush One bundles the toolkit with SEO tools. Its Pro+ plan is $299 a month for 100 prompts. It includes bot traffic tracking and basic content generation.
- AthenaHQ supports 11 AI apps including Claude and DeepSeek. It has a free plan with $25 of credit.
- Rankscale covers 17+ AI apps. Credits are the catch because every app and run spends them.
- Scrunch Core costs $250 a month for 125 prompts and 5 seats. It includes Copilot, bot traffic tracking and basic content generation. It runs every 72 hours after day 14, and there is no Gemini on Core.
- Promptwatch is the only one of the 10 with a full article writer. It tracks 11 AI apps and has 1, 2 or 5 seats. Its pricing page lists no add-on.
How to compare a candidate against Profound
If you are a current customer with a renewal due, put Profound next to one candidate. If not, put two candidates next to each other.
Use this test:
- Write 25 prompts: 15 category questions such as 'best payroll software for a 50-person US startup', and 10 that compare you with your two closest rivals.
- Load all 25 into both tools, on the same AI apps, with the US as the country.
- Each week, ask 5 of the prompts yourself in a logged-out browser from the US.
- Compare the lists. If they mostly agree, both tools are reading the same answers.
Then price your full prompt list, AI apps and seats on the tool you keep. If the lists diverge, check which tool explains its collection method. If panel data on AI prompts matters to you, or your procurement team needs SSO and SOC 2, Profound's Enterprise plan is still worth the call.
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