Profound review: enterprise AI visibility tracking with no public mid-tier price

Profound is an AI-visibility and marketing platform that tracks how brands appear across AI answer engines and, more recently, has expanded into an "AI Marketer" agent product for drafting and publishing content. It is among the most heavily funded companies in this category, and its pricing page — as it stands in September 2026 — has been simplified down to two options rather than the tiered structure it previously advertised.

Who makes it

Profound was founded in 2024 by CEO James Cadwallader and CTO Dylan Babbs. On September 15, 2026, the company announced a $180 million Series D at a $1.8 billion valuation, co-led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, and others, according to coverage in SiliconANGLE and the company's own press release. The company states it serves more than 1,000 enterprise brands, including Comcast, Walmart, Zoom, ServiceNow, and Figma, and that its customer base includes more than a third of the Fortune 100.

Engines it covers

Profound's free trial tracks 3 engines — ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. Its Enterprise tier expands that to up to 9 answer engines, which the company's marketing separately lists as including Perplexity, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, and Exa Search alongside the trial-tier three. Exactly which 9 apply to a given contract, and whether all are included by default or added incrementally, is not stated on the public pricing page and would need to be confirmed with sales.

How it collects data

Profound describes a data-collection approach that distinguishes it from vendors that rely on official model APIs: it states that it queries the front-end chat interfaces of AI platforms — the same interface a human user would see — rather than calling APIs directly. The company argues that front-end and API responses from the same underlying model can differ, because the consumer interface reflects additional context (browsing, memory, interface-level system prompts) that a raw API call does not carry. Profound also markets a separate dataset it describes as more than 1.5 billion real user prompts, used to power a "Prompt Volumes" feature showing how often topics are raised across engines, broken out by stated intent and demographic categories.

Core features

The current site organizes Profound's offering around an "AI Marketer" — an agent that identifies marketing tasks, drafts content, and works within a "Context Manager" that stores brand knowledge — alongside the visibility-tracking features this category is built on: Answer Engine Insights (brand and competitor appearance across tracked engines and prompts), Agent Analytics (AI-sourced traffic and attribution across a customer's domains, with integrations for Akamai, Cloudflare, AWS, Fastly, and others), Prompt Volumes, and, at Enterprise, ChatGPT Shopping tracking, full data history, CSV/JSON exports, API access, and SSO/SAML with SOC 2 compliance documentation.

Pricing, checked September 2026

As published on tryprofound.com/pricing on 2026-09-25:

• Trial: free for 7 days — 50 unique prompts, daily frequency, 3 engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews), 1 language, 1 region, unlimited seats, no data history, no exports, no API
• Enterprise: custom, "tailored packages" — unlimited AI Marketer credits for the team, a tailored prompt-tracking plan, up to 9 answer engines, dedicated support, and SSO/SAML plus SOC 2 compliance

Notably, the page does not show a mid-market self-serve tier. Some third-party roundups still describe a "Starter" plan near $99/month and a "Growth" plan near $399/month; those numbers do not appear on Profound's current live pricing page as of our September 2026 check, and prospective buyers should treat any such figures as potentially outdated rather than current list pricing.

Strengths

Profound's front-end collection methodology is a genuinely distinctive, well-documented choice in a category where several competitors are vague about how they gather data, and its stated engine ceiling of 9 is among the widest in this review. Its recent funding round is a matter of public record and suggests continued investment in the product; its named enterprise customer list (Comcast, Walmart, Zoom, ServiceNow, Figma) is unusually concrete for this category.

Limitations

The lack of any published price point between a free 7-day trial and a custom Enterprise quote is a real gap for buyers trying to budget before a sales conversation, and it makes head-to-head price comparison with vendors that do publish self-serve tiers difficult. The trial's 7-day window and 3-engine cap are also thin for a category where AI answers are known to vary run to run — a week is a short sampling window to judge answer stability. Finally, Profound's expansion into an agentic "AI Marketer" that drafts and publishes content is a different product shape than a pure measurement tool, and buyers who only want tracking should confirm whether that functionality is optional.

Who it's best for

Profound is built for enterprise marketing teams with the budget and procurement process for a custom contract, who want the widest published engine ceiling in this category and are comfortable evaluating a front-end-based collection method against API-based alternatives on its merits.

Verdict

Profound remains one of the most heavily resourced and most broadly documented platforms in AI visibility tracking, with a genuinely distinctive answer to the API-versus-real-interface question this category has to grapple with. But its current pricing page offers nothing between a short free trial and a custom quote, which means most of the evaluation — and the real cost — happens off the public page, in a sales conversation this review cannot substitute for.