Cheaper alternatives to Profound for AI search visibility tracking.

How much does Profound cost?

AI search visibility tracking means checking whether assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews name your brand when buyers ask what to use. Profound is one of the best-known tools for it, and on 29 September 2026 its pricing page listed two plans:

• Trial: free, with 50 prompts run daily for 7 days, "for companies who want to trial Profound before getting a demo".
• Enterprise: a tailored prompt tracking plan, AI Marketer credits for the whole team, seats, exports, an API and a dedicated Slack channel. No price: you agree one with its sales team.

So no published number exists to be cheaper than. The tools below publish a price you can read before anyone asks about your budget, from $29 a month. outrankfast vs Profound compares the two side by side.

Which alternatives did Gemini name?

We track "Is there a cheaper alternative to Profound for tracking AI search visibility?" on Gemini every day. Its 3 answers between 27 and 29 September 2026 named 16 businesses that sell AI visibility tracking, among them Frase, Writesonic, Otterly.AI, Peec AI, SE Ranking, Semrush, ZipTie, AthenaHQ, Rankfender and Nightwatch. Before answering, it searched for "cheaper alternatives to profound ai search visibility tracking" and "ai search visibility tracking tools comparison".

Look at who wrote the pages it cited. In the first answer, at least three of the nine came from companies that sell AI visibility tools. Two were Frase's, one of them its own list of Profound alternatives, and one was Rankfender's page on the same subject. The others came from HubSpot, Zapier, WP Engine and marketing blogs. Profound's competitors write a fair share of what the assistant reads about Profound.

The prices quoted in that first answer were close, and not always current. It gave ZipTie at about $35.63 a month; ZipTie's own page, two days later, estimated its cheapest preset at $42.75. So we read each price below off the vendor's page.

Alternatives that publish a price.

Read on each vendor's pricing page on 29 September 2026, cheapest first.

Otterly.AI adds Gemini and Google AI Mode for $9 a month each, and Claude for $29. Ahrefs is left out of the table on purpose: its $129 Lite plan tracks 5 prompts, and its Brand Radar AI starts at $199 a month.

Which numbers matter besides the price?

Two plans at the same price can buy very different amounts of tracking. Three things multiply the headline figure:

• Prompts times assistants. Searchable counts 100 prompts per model, so its three assistants give 300 checks a day. Otterly.AI counts 15 prompts across its four included assistants, and charges $9 a month each to add Gemini or Google AI Mode.
• How often each prompt runs. Nightwatch, Peec AI, Semrush and outrankfast check daily. LLM Pulse's Starter checks weekly, and Rankfender's Essential plan checks weekly too. Two weeks of daily checks give you 14 answers per prompt and assistant; weekly checks take three months to collect as many.
• Monthly or yearly billing. Nightwatch's €79 and Writesonic's $79 are yearly prices, and both pages show a saving of 240 a year over paying month to month. Frase is $49 a month, or $39 billed yearly.

Work out the cost per check before you compare two tools: divide the monthly price by the number of prompts, times the assistants, times the checks each prompt gets in a month.

Match the tool to the reason you are leaving.

People leave Profound, or never start, for different reasons, and each points to a different tool.

• The bill. Otterly.AI's Lite plan at $29 is the lowest fixed price here. ZipTie charges only for the prompts and assistants you choose, so a small set costs little.
• Breadth without the enterprise contract. Nightwatch covers six assistants for €79 a month billed yearly, with unlimited seats. AthenaHQ covers eleven for $295 a month.
• Pages written as well as tracked. Frase, Writesonic, Searchable and Sight AI write articles on the same plan, and outrankfast's Grow plan drafts a page for each question where a competitor was named.
• An SEO suite you already pay for. Semrush tracks 50 prompts daily from $199, and SE Ranking 100 from $129, alongside the keyword tools your team already uses.
• The answer behind each number. outrankfast keeps the full answer, the searches Gemini ran and the pages it cited for every figure, and your coding agent can read all of it over MCP. It measures Gemini only.

What does Profound include that entry plans may not?

Profound's Enterprise plan lists more than tracking. Before you move, check which of these your team uses each week:

• AI Marketer agents and workflows, which draft and report on your behalf.
• Prompt volumes, an estimate of what people ask AI assistants.
• AI-sourced traffic and attribution across your domains.
• Projects, seats and a dedicated Slack channel for a large team.

The entry plans above cover tracking well, and several stop there. If your team relies on the agents or the attribution, price the second or third plan of each alternative, not the first.

Switch without losing the comparison.

Two trackers report different rates for the same prompts, because each asks at different times, samples a different number of answers and reads names out of them its own way. A move goes better in this order:

1. Export from Profound first. Its pricing page lists exports and an API. Keep your prompt list and the last few months of results.
2. Load the same prompts into the new tool, word for word, so the questions stay comparable.
3. Run both for two weeks if your contract allows, and compare the competitors each one names. Those should agree even when the rates differ.
4. Report the new tool's rate from its first full month, with the number of answers it rests on, and mark the break in your charts.

For the same comparison without the Profound angle, see the best AI recommendation tracking tools. For seats, brands and reporting, see the best tools for marketing managers.