Profound alternatives: the price moved behind a demo

If you are shopping for a Profound alternative, start with what changed. Read on 25 September 2026, Profound’s pricing page publishes two tiers: a Trial that is free and runs 50 unique prompts daily for seven days, and an Enterprise tier whose price is Custom and whose button is Get a Demo. Nothing is published in between. For a business that cannot put a procurement call on the calendar, that one fact settles the evaluation before any feature comparison begins.

What the pricing page publishes today

The Trial tier is described on the page as being for companies who want to trial Profound before getting a demo. Its plan table lists 50 unique prompts tracked, a prompt frequency of “Daily for 7 days”, three answer engines (ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews), one language, one region, five Prompt Volumes searches, no data history, no exports, no API, no support and no SSO. Seats and tracked domains are both unlimited.

The Enterprise tier lists a tailored prompt tracking plan, daily prompt frequency, capability for up to nine answer engines, custom languages and regions, all time data history, CSV and JSON exports, API access, SSO with SAML, SOC 2 compliance, and support options running up to a dedicated specialist with a 24 hour SLA. Its price is Custom. Every line below was read from the plan table on that page on 25 September 2026.

A custom price is a filter, and the filter may not be aimed at you

Earlier this month the same page carried self-serve tiers. This site recorded them on 12 September 2026 in a comparison of seven AI SEO platforms: a Starter plan at $99 a month billed yearly, described on Profound’s own page as ChatGPT tracking only, and a Growth plan at $399 a month. On 25 September 2026 neither plan is on the page. Profound has published no note explaining the change, so the honest statement is what the page said on each date, and not why it changed.

For companies operationalizing AI Search insights and running marketing agents at scale

That is the Enterprise tier’s own description of its buyer, and it is a useful filter to hold up against yourself. A team running marketing agents at scale has a budget line for this and a procurement process to spend it through. A ten-person company that wants to know whether ChatGPT names it when a customer asks for a supplier has neither, and a demo call is a slow way to answer a question that size.

Nine answer engines, and the five your buyers use

Profound’s Enterprise column lists capability for nine engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Anthropic Claude, Google AI Overviews and Exa Search. More coverage is genuinely more coverage, and for a brand watching several markets that list is an argument. It is also more surface than most sites need, and two of the nine are worth separating out before you pay for them.

Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode are not a separate index with separate rules. Google’s AI features and your website documentation, last updated 10 December 2025, is direct about it.

There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary.

The same page says a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet, and that there are no additional technical requirements beyond that. So the Google portion of any nine-engine dashboard moves on ordinary indexing work. It is worth measuring; it is not worth buying a second time as a separate engine line.

What a Profound alternative has to replace: three jobs, not one product

Measuring is asking the assistants your buyers’ questions on a schedule and recording whether you were named and who was named instead. Diagnosing is working out which page should have been quoted and what is missing from it. Changing is editing that page, and being able to put it back. Products in this category are priced as though they all do the same thing, and they do not.

• Measure. Nearly every product here does this. It is the part that demonstrates well, and also the part you can replicate by hand for a handful of questions at no cost.
• Diagnose. Fewer do this at page level. OpenAI’s ChatGPT search help page says a site has to allow OAI-SearchBot to crawl it and that the host or CDN has to permit traffic from OpenAI’s published searchbot IP addresses, so a site can be invisible for a reason no prompt dashboard will ever show you.
• Change. Fewest do this. If nobody on the team is going to act on a report, a tracker converts a question you could not answer into a list you will not work through.

It is also worth being clear about what no product in this category can sell you. The same OpenAI page says ChatGPT ranks search results using multiple factors intended to help users find relevant, reliable information, and that placement is not guaranteed. Any tool that promises placement is promising something the platform does not offer. For the opposite case, a vendor that does publish its prices and meters them in tracked prompts, see what $29 a month actually meters at Otterly.

What to do this week, whichever product you pick

1. 01Write down the five questions a customer would actually type when they are looking for what you sell, in their words, not your brand name.
2. 02Ask each one in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Grok, logged out and with web search on, and record whether you were named, who was named instead, and which sources the answer cited.
3. 03Check that the searchbots can reach you. Allow OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt and confirm your host or CDN is not blocking OpenAI’s published searchbot IP addresses.
4. 04Take the one page that should have answered your best question and make it answer, in plain sentences, high on the page rather than below a product tour.
5. 05Repeat in two weeks. One check is a snapshot and tells you very little; two is the beginning of a series.

Where SearchLift sits in that split: every price and every limit is published as a number, and the product covers all three jobs rather than the first. AI visibility tracking records who was named instead of you and which sources each answer used. The AI SEO audit finds the page that should have been quoted and applies the fix on approval, with the previous value saved so undo is one click. The Free plan takes no card and does not expire: up to 10 pages per audit, 1 tracked question, AI visibility checks on Gemini, 2 AI fixes a month, weekly audits and 30-day analytics history. Plus is $8.99 a month and adds Perplexity, 50 pages per audit, 2 tracked questions and 25 AI fixes a month. Premium is $17.99 and its AI visibility checks cover all five assistants. Every figure is on the pricing page.

searchlift · console