Visiby and Profound both track how AI engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews cite your brand, but they are built for different buyers. Profound is the well-funded enterprise leader in the category, with the widest engine footprint and a customer list full of Fortune 500 names. Visiby is the self-serve, action-first alternative: it measures your AI citations across three core engines (five on Pro), then generates the content briefs and finished deliverables that close the gaps it finds, all at flat per-plan pricing you can start today. This page compares the two fairly, using real data from our own 172-prompt benchmark, so you can decide which fits your team rather than which has the bigger marketing budget. Run your own baseline first with a free report inside the live product.
Both tools are credible, and both now publish flat pricing. The honest summary is that Profound fits a large organization with a dedicated AEO program and a budget for the widest engine list, while Visiby is the stronger default for everyone else: self-serve access you can start hands-on today, three core engines reported separately and traced to the exact passage, Brand Entity and Competitor Intelligence on Pro, and a fix at the end of every run instead of a dashboard you have to interpret. We name Profound's real strengths throughout, because a comparison that pretends the category leader has none is not worth reading.
How we compared Visiby and Profound
The footprint numbers in this comparison come from running the loop, not from either vendor's marketing. The author, Raunaq Arora, is the senior software and AI engineer who built the Visiby AI-visibility pipeline at FNA Technology. In June 2026 we ran a 172-prompt benchmark across the AI-visibility category itself, sampling every prompt through ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. ChatGPT and Perplexity answered all 172; Google AI Overviews answered 170. From the raw answers we indexed 3,340 citation events spanning 2,355 unique URLs from 1,174 unique domains, and a structural validator passed all 9,615 underlying citation claims with zero rejected. Profound's footprint numbers below are read directly off that record.
Profound's company facts are sourced to dated public reporting, never to our own pipeline. Where we cite Profound's pricing, it reflects its published tiers as of June 2026, and we tell you to confirm at tryprofound.com/pricing because the category moves quickly.
What is Profound, and what is it good at?
Profound is the category leader in answer engine optimization and AI visibility monitoring, built explicitly for large enterprises. It started as a monitoring dashboard tracking how brands appear across AI surfaces, and has since added a Create layer called Agents, pitched as autonomous workers that generate AI-optimized content and run marketing workflows.
Its strengths are real, and a fair comparison names them:
- It is well-capitalized and credible. Profound raised a 96 million dollar Series C at a 1 billion dollar valuation in February 2026, led by Lightspeed with continued participation from Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, and others, bringing total funding to 155 million dollars (Fortune, 24 Feb 2026).
- It has broad engine coverage, advertising tracking across up to ten AI surfaces including ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Grok, Meta AI, and DeepSeek, among the widest coverage claims in the category.
- It owns data others do not. Profound's Prompt Volumes feature reports panel-based demand for the questions buyers actually ask AI engines, a genuinely unique dataset in the category that Visiby does not attempt to replicate.
- It has real enterprise traction. Named customers include Ramp, U.S. Bank, Indeed, MongoDB, DocuSign, Chime, Target, and Figma, with roughly 10 percent of the Fortune 500 reported as customers (SiliconANGLE, 24 Feb 2026) and more than 2,000 marketers across 500-plus organizations using it daily (PR Newswire, 12 Aug 2025).
- It carries enterprise-grade trust signals, with SOC 2 Type II compliance referenced across independent buyer-review sources, which matters for large, regulated buyers running a vendor security review.
If you are a large enterprise standing up a dedicated AEO program, those strengths are exactly what you want. The question this page answers is what happens when you are not that buyer.
Where Visiby is different: it measures, then fixes
The core difference is what happens after the score. Profound is, at its foundation, a measurement and monitoring platform that has begun adding a content layer. Visiby is built from the start to end each weekly run with a fix: an Action Plan tab that hands you a ranked, trackable queue of changes, plus the written briefs and finished, gold-standard deliverables aimed at the specific citation gaps the data found.
That is not a slogan. In a single June 2026 Visiby run, the pipeline produced 14 content briefs and 35 finished deliverables targeting the exact gaps the citation data revealed. Profound has moved toward content generation with its Agents and Agent Analytics layer, which is a genuine product expansion, but at least one hands-on reviewer running a 90-day, three-brand test reported hitting a practical ceiling when relying on those Agents to produce finished content at volume (Analyze AI, 2026), and the layer is data-dense and oriented toward a dedicated AEO owner, so its actionability carries a steeper learning curve.
The second difference is per-engine honesty and depth. Our benchmark found that the same brand behaves very differently per engine, so a single blended score hides the truth. Profound is the clearest example in our own data: across all 172 prompts its citation rate is a roughly flat 11 percent per engine, yet inside the AI Visibility Tracking topic specifically, Perplexity cited Profound in 24 of 45 prompts (53 percent) against ChatGPT's 5 of 45 (11 percent) on the same questions, a 4.7x gap. Visiby reports each engine separately for that reason, and traces every citation to the exact page and passage so a gap becomes a paragraph to rewrite rather than a number to stare at. On Pro, a Brand Entity tab adds how each engine characterizes your brand, not just whether it cites you, and a Competitor Intelligence tab maps your citation share against named competitors per topic and engine.
The third difference is access. Both vendors now publish flat pricing, but Visiby's first report runs inside the live product, so you are hands-on with the real tool from the first run. Profound's free touch is a one-off AEO report, and onboarding to the platform itself is sales-led with no hands-on trial.
Visiby vs Profound: the scored comparison
This is the section a comparison page lives or dies on, so it compares the two tools on the dimensions that actually decide a purchase: what you get at each price, how the data is reported, and what you walk away with at the end of a run. Each row reflects published terms and the capabilities each vendor documents, not a reassembled feature list.
| Dimension |  | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry-tier pricing (as of Jun 2026) | 99 dollars / mo, ChatGPT tracking only, 50 prompts | 100 dollars / mo, three engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews), 50 prompts |
| Three-engine coverage | 399 dollars / mo Growth, 100 prompts | 250 dollars / mo Pro, 100 prompts, plus Gemini and Copilot for five engines |
| Getting started | Free one-off AEO report; platform onboarding sales-led, no hands-on trial | Free first report run inside the live, self-serve product |
| Per-engine reporting | Reported across surfaces | Each engine scored on its own and traced to the exact passage |
| Brand Entity and Competitor Intelligence | Part of its enterprise analytics and Agent Analytics | Brand-perception view plus citation-share matrix, included on Pro at 250 dollars |
| Action and finished deliverables | Agents, Create, and Agent Analytics (data-dense, AEO-owner oriented) | Ranked action plan plus briefs and finished deliverables every run |
| Top-tier breadth and trust | Up to 10-plus engines, SOC 2 Type II, Prompt Volumes panel data, API | Enterprise: 1,000-plus prompts, custom engines, daily refresh, white-label, API and SSO |
Read across the rows that decide a purchase and Visiby is equal or stronger on the ones most teams weigh: three real engines at the entry price where Profound's entry is ChatGPT-only, five engines at 250 dollars where Profound's three-engine plan is 399, self-serve hands-on access, per-engine reporting traced to the passage, Brand Entity and Competitor Intelligence on Pro, and a fix at the end of every run. Profound's genuine edge is breadth of engine coverage at the top tier, its unique Prompt Volumes demand data, and enterprise trust signals, which the category leader has earned and which a large AEO program will value as neutral context rather than a scoreline.
The same 172-prompt benchmark that maps Profound's footprint is the exact methodology Visiby runs on your brand: buyer-intent prompts sampled across three engines, every citation traced to the page and passage that earned it. What that methodology shows about the category leader is the opportunity. Profound, the most-cited dedicated tool in the entire set, still appears in only 27 percent of prompts, which means it is absent from roughly 73 percent of the answers buyers actually read. Presence in AI answers is a race almost no one is running yet, and that is the gap a tracker exists to surface and a fix step exists to close.
One counterintuitive note worth flagging. On our 40-point domain-authority rubric, Profound scores 10 out of 40, one of the lowest of the 25 domains we rated, well behind YouTube and Wikipedia at 34. Yet it is cited in 27 percent of our prompts. AI engines cite for topical relevance and content structure, not domain authority alone, which is good news for any smaller brand willing to build the right pages. That is the whole premise of the fix step: you do not need a unicorn balance sheet to earn citations, you need the right pages structured the right way.
Run your own brand against the same three core engines, free and inside the live product.
What Profound costs, and where the friction shows up
Profound is worth it for the buyer it is built for: a large organization with a dedicated AEO function and a need for the widest possible engine coverage and enterprise trust signals. For that buyer, the depth of data, the Prompt Volumes demand panel, and the breadth of surfaces are a genuine advantage.
As of June 2026, Profound publishes three tiers (confirm at tryprofound.com/pricing): a 99 dollar per month Starter billed yearly that tracks ChatGPT only with 50 prompts, a 399 dollar per month Growth plan that adds Perplexity and Google AI Overviews for 100 prompts, and a custom Enterprise tier for ten-plus engines with SOC 2, API access, and ChatGPT Shopping. The friction for a smaller team is in the shape of that ladder: the engines most buyers research only arrive at the 399 dollar Growth tier, and while Profound offers a free one-off AEO report, onboarding to the product itself is sales-led with no hands-on trial.
Reviewers also note real usability friction: the platform is data-dense and oriented toward teams with a dedicated AEO analyst, so the depth that helps a large team can be a steeper learning curve for a small one (Analyze AI; Indexly). None of this makes Profound a weak product. It makes it an enterprise-depth product, which is exactly what it set out to be.
Visiby vs Profound on cost and access
Visiby publishes its pricing, and it is flat per plan rather than per seat. Starter is 100 dollars per month for 50 prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, with 10 action items, weekly refresh, and bot analytics that monitor GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended access plus a robots.txt audit. Pro is 250 dollars per month for 100 prompts and 25 action items across five engines, adding Gemini and Copilot plus Brand Entity, Competitor Intelligence, Sentiment Analysis, and fan-out queries. Enterprise is a custom rate for 1,000-plus prompts with multi-brand support, white-label reports, custom engines and regions, daily refresh, and API and SSO. Annual billing is charged as ten months for twelve, and the first report is free.
The right way to compare the two is value per run, not price per prompt. Every Visiby run does the same job end to end: it samples your prompts across the engines on your plan, traces each citation to the page and passage that earned it, and ends in a ranked action plan with briefs and finished deliverables you can ship. So the entry comparison is not 99 against 100, it is ChatGPT-only against three engines for a dollar more; and the three-engine comparison is Profound's 399 dollar Growth against Visiby's 250 dollar Pro, which covers five engines to its three and still ends in a fix. For a startup, a small SaaS team, or an agency watching margin per client, that is the comparison that matters.
To be fair to Profound: its custom Enterprise tier exists because enterprise needs (security review, multi-seat governance, custom coverage) genuinely vary, and a flat table cannot capture them. If you are that buyer, the custom quote is a feature, not a barrier — and Visiby's Enterprise tier is built the same way, with white-label, API, SSO, and custom engines.
Profound vs Visiby for agencies and single-product SaaS teams
For agencies, the deciding features are multi-client management, white-label reports, and whether pricing is per plan or per seat, because per-seat pricing quietly erodes margin every time you add a client. Profound publishes flat tiers, but multi-engine coverage, API, and the controls an agency needs concentrate in its custom Enterprise tier. Visiby's Enterprise tier is built for the agency case with multi-brand support, white-label reports, API and SSO, and up to 1,000-plus prompts, and its lower tiers are flat per plan, so adding a client is a known cost rather than another seat.
For a single-product SaaS team, the question is depth on a focused prompt set versus enterprise breadth. Profound's wide engine coverage and its unique Prompt Volumes demand data are built for large organizations and can be more than a lean team needs, with onboarding gated behind sales. Visiby fits a single-product team with flat pricing, a managed prompt library scoped to your category, per-engine and per-competitor share of voice through its Competitor Intelligence tab, and an action plan with written briefs so a small team can act without a dedicated analyst. Either way, the right move is to run your own prompts through both and let your data decide rather than the feature grid.
How each tool surfaces the competitor citations stealing your answers
Both Profound and Visiby report which competitors appear in AI answers. The difference that changes what you do is depth of provenance. The shallow version tells you a competitor was mentioned somewhere. The version that earns its place names the exact competitor page and the on-page passage the engine quoted, broken out per engine, so you know which paragraph to answer and on which surface.
Visiby is built around that passage-level trace, paired with a Competitor Intelligence citation-share matrix (your brand against named competitors, across topics and engines, with the change since the last run) and a recommended play to win the slot back. This matters because, as our data shows, engines pull from largely different sources for the same query. In our full 172-prompt corpus, Reddit was cited by ChatGPT in 45 percent of answers and by Google AI Overviews in 29 percent, but by Perplexity zero times. YouTube was cited in 66 percent of Perplexity answers but only 0.6 percent of ChatGPT answers. A competitor stealing your answer on Perplexity is often a completely different page than the one beating you on ChatGPT, which is why per-engine, passage-level provenance is the feature that turns a competitor report into a fix.
A useful test when you demo either tool: pick one prompt where a competitor outranks you, and ask the vendor to name the exact page and passage the engine cited, plus the change that would close the gap. If it can, it belongs on your shortlist. If it can only show a percentage, it is a reporting tool, not a fix.
Switching from Profound to Visiby
Switching is mostly a matter of moving your inputs, not migrating data. You give Visiby your domain and your buyer questions, or start from its managed prompt library, add your competitor list, and your first weekly run sets a fresh baseline. There is no painful import step, because the work is in the prompt set and the competitors, both of which you can stand up in an afternoon.
Historical citation data does not carry over, and this is true between any two vendors in the category, not a Visiby limitation. Each tool stores its own raw record of which engine cited which URL on which date, and there is no shared export standard, so a trend built in one tool cannot be reconstructed in another. The clean approach is to run Visiby in parallel for a few weeks, build a consistent trend under one methodology, and then cut over once you trust the baseline. Because the first report is free and runs inside the live product, you can start that parallel run today at zero cost.
Which buyer each tool fits
A fair comparison says which buyer each tool fits. Profound fits a team whose top priority is the widest possible engine footprint at the top tier, that wants its unique Prompt Volumes demand panel, and that has a dedicated AEO function to run data-dense analytics daily. It brings a large internal citation dataset and strong analyst and press momentum, which is a real asset for a large brand standing up an AEO program.
If your reason for looking enterprise is governance, a vendor security review, white-label, API and SSO, or custom engine coverage, that is not a reason to leave Visiby — it is a reason to look at Visiby Enterprise, which is built for exactly that: SSO, API, white-label reports, custom engines and regions, daily refresh, and 1,000-plus prompts, with the same action-first run underneath. The one place to set expectations honestly is refresh cadence: Visiby refreshes weekly on Starter and Pro and daily on Enterprise, so a team that needs daily monitoring should price the Enterprise tier.
For everyone else, Visiby is the stronger default. You start hands-on today with a free first report inside the live product, you get three core engines reported separately and traced to the passage (five on Pro), Brand Entity and Competitor Intelligence that tell you how engines characterize you and where competitors take your slot, and above all a run that ends in a fix (a ranked action plan with briefs and finished deliverables) rather than a dashboard you interpret yourself. Most teams evaluating this category are not standing up an enterprise AEO program, and for them the self-serve, measurement-plus-action model is the one that moves the work forward.
Start with your free baseline report inside the live product, or book a strategy call if you want to talk through which fits your team.