Profound Review 2026: The $1B Leader, and Its $99 Entry Plan

Profound is among the best-funded and most visible company in AI visibility, a New York platform that tracks how answer engines describe a brand and how AI agents crawl its site. It raised $96 million in a Series C at a $1 billion valuation in February 2026, bringing total funding past $155 million.

It is also, by our own measurement, absent from Google’s AI Overview when you ask which tool to use.

Disclosure and a correction: EchoWi competes with Profound. We previously described Profound’s valuation as $225 million in three of our own articles. That was wrong, we had confused it with two other companies’ figures, and it is corrected here and there.

The short version

1. $155M+ raised at a $1B valuation, led by Lightspeed with Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins participating. Nobody else in this category is close.
2. The entry plan is $99 a month and tracks ChatGPT only. Multi-engine coverage starts at $399.
3. Nine engines at the top tier, including DeepSeek, which most Western tools skip.
4. Its content strategy is the best in the category and worth studying separately from its product.
5. It did not appear in any of our six Google AI Overview runs asking which tool to use. Neither did we.

What it costs, verified

Prices read from Profound’s own pricing page on 6 August 2026. Yearly billing includes two months free. Enterprise adds SSO, SAML and SOC 2, multiple companies tracked and dedicated Slack support.

The specification worth reading twice is the engine count on Starter. At $99 a month, Profound tracks one engine. Promptmonitor covers six for $29. If your requirement is breadth of coverage at low cost, the category leader is the most expensive way to get the least of it.

That is not a criticism of the product. It is a statement about who Starter is for: someone evaluating the platform before an enterprise conversation, not someone whose needs end there.

What the plan actually meters, and the arithmetic that follows

The engine count is the headline, and it is not what you run out of. Re-read on 7 August 2026, the pricing page publishes four more numbers per tier that the table above leaves out:

Divide the responses by the money and the picture inverts:

$99 ÷ 1,500 responses = $0.066 an answer $399 ÷ 9,000 responses = $0.044 an answer

Growth is a third cheaper per answer than Starter, while costing four times as much. That is a normal volume curve and it is worth naming for the same reason the engine count is: the cheap plan is the expensive one per unit, and the page does not do that division for you.

The daily claim that actually checks out

Now the division that matters more, because we have used it to take another vendor apart this week.

Starter: 50 prompts, 1 engine, 30 days = 1,500 responses. Sold: 1,500. Growth: 100 prompts, 3 engines, 30 days = 9,000 responses. Sold: 9,000.

Both land exactly. The response budget on each tier is precisely what daily collection of that prompt set on that engine list consumes, with nothing spare and nothing missing.

We checked this because Goodie advertises daily on all three of its tiers and sells a third of what daily needs on the cheapest one. The same arithmetic applied to Profound comes out clean on both priced plans. When a vendor’s numbers reconcile we say so as plainly as when they do not, and this is the only tool in our catalogue where we have run this check and found the budget matching the promise to the answer.

The engine count still limits what Starter is worth. It is one engine sampled thoroughly, rather than six sampled thinly, and which of those is the right buy depends on whether your buyers are in ChatGPT only.

What it does beyond tracking

Three modules make Profound genuinely different from a prompt tracker, and they are where the funding shows.

Answer Engine Insights is the tracking layer everyone has.

Agent Analytics watches how AI crawlers reach and interpret your site. That is a different question from what an answer says, and it addresses the first link in the chain: if OAI-SearchBot cannot render your page, nothing downstream matters. Very few tools instrument this.

Conversation Explorer surfaces what people are actually asking assistants. This attacks the weakest assumption in most GEO work: that the prompt set you invented resembles what buyers type. Evertune attacks the same problem with a behavioural panel.

Where we would push back: breadth like this is only worth paying for if you will use all three. A team that will look at a mention-rate chart once a month is buying two modules it will never open.

The content strategy is the real lesson

We analysed Profound’s ranked keywords while planning our own work, and it is the most instructive thing about the company.

Their definitional article on answer engine optimization pulls roughly 4,777 monthly visits and appears in 9 of the 10 AI Overviews it competes in, on 61 referring domains. They also run single-vendor reviews of their competitors, ranking third for a rival’s own brand name.

They win with editorial, not with capital. That is worth saying plainly in a review of among the best-funded company in the category, because it is the opposite of what their funding would predict, and it is available to anyone.

The thing our own measurement found

We asked Google’s AI Overview, six times, in the United States and in English, which tool is best for tracking brand visibility in ChatGPT. Fifteen domains were cited.

Profound appeared zero times. So did AirOps, Scrunch, Peec AI, Evertune and Semrush, which is every funded vendor in the category without exception. The stable citations went to Reddit, YouTube, and two tools almost nobody in the industry discusses.

We are reporting that in a review of Profound because it is the most interesting fact we have about them, and because it is not a fact about them: it holds for every funded name in the category, and we sell here too, which is why the question, surface, market and run count behind it are published. A $1 billion valuation did not put them in the answer, which is either evidence that the answer is a poor guide to product quality, or evidence that the category’s marketing budgets are pointed at the wrong layer. We think it is mostly the first.

Where Profound is the right call

• You are an enterprise with procurement requirements. SSO, SAML, SOC 2 and a billion-dollar backer clear a security review that a seed-stage vendor will not.
• You need agent-level crawl visibility. Agent Analytics addresses the retrieval prerequisite most tools ignore entirely.
• You do not know what your buyers ask. Conversation Explorer is a real answer to a real weakness.
• You track multiple brands. The Enterprise structure is built for it.

Where it is the wrong call

• You want engine breadth cheaply. One engine at $99 against six at $29 elsewhere. That comparison does not favour them and we would rather say so.
• You are a founder or a small team. The product is built for a marketing department, and the pricing reflects that.
• Your market is China. DeepSeek is covered at Enterprise; Doubao and Qwen are not, which is the gap we built for.
• You need attribution above all. Measuring whether one change moved a number, against a control, is a narrower job than this platform is designed for.

What we could not verify

• Enterprise pricing. Custom, as expected at that tier.
• How many runs sit behind a reported number. Not documented publicly. Evertune states its sampling and almost nobody else does. Ask in the demo.
• Accuracy against other tools. No controlled side-by-side comparison exists from anyone, including us.

Profound versus the alternatives

If you arrived here comparing rather than deciding, the same eleven tools sit in one table with every entry price verified and the engine count each one buys, in our Profound alternatives comparison, and we are in that table too.

Prices read from each vendor’s own page. The full comparison covers every tool we could verify, plus one that shut down.

Common Questions About Profound

How much does Profound cost?

$99 a month for Starter billed yearly, tracking ChatGPT only with 50 prompts. $399 a month for Growth, adding Perplexity and Google AI Overviews with 100 prompts. Enterprise is custom and reaches up to nine engines.

How much funding has Profound raised?

More than $155 million. The most recent round was a $96 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation led by Lightspeed in February 2026, following a $35 million Series B led by Sequoia.

Which AI engines does Profound track?

Up to nine at the Enterprise tier: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Claude and ChatGPT Shopping. Starter covers ChatGPT only, and Growth covers three. It does not cover Doubao or Qwen.

Is Profound worth $99 a month?

It depends on whether you are evaluating the platform or buying coverage. At that price you get one engine, where cheaper tools give you six. As the first step of an enterprise evaluation it is reasonable. As a destination it is expensive for what it tracks.

What is Agent Analytics?

A module that shows how AI crawlers reach and interpret your site, rather than what answers say about you. It addresses the first link in the retrieval chain, and few competitors instrument it at all.

Why does Profound not appear in AI answers about GEO tools?

We do not know, and the honest answer is that nobody does. In our six-run measurement no funded vendor appeared, including us. The likeliest explanation is that retrieval favours pages answering the question directly over vendor pages written to sell, and funding is invisible to a retrieval layer.

What is the best Profound alternative?

For engine breadth at low cost, Promptmonitor at $29 a month. For stated sampling rigour, Evertune. For a free tier, AirOps. For Chinese engines and change-versus-control measurement, that is what we build EchoWi for.

Where this leaves you

Profound is the category leader by capital, by product surface and by content, and the three are not equally responsible for that position. The funding bought the product surface. The content is what made them visible, and content is the part any competitor can copy.

The buying question is narrower than the company’s profile suggests. If you need agent-level crawl data, prompt discovery grounded in real behaviour, and a vendor your security team will approve, this is the strongest option in the category. If you need to know whether you appear in six engines next week, you are looking at the most expensive way to find out.

Next: our six-run measurement of what the AI actually recommends, the Evertune review, and the full comparison with verified prices.