Profound vs AI Visibility Check: An Honest Comparison

By Sameer Bhat · Published 1 September 2026

Profound is an enterprise AI-visibility platform sold on a monthly subscription. AI Visibility Check is a free scan with an optional £9.99 one-off Deep Scan. They’re built for different buyers, and this says plainly which one fits which situation.

What does Profound do?

Profound tracks how a brand shows up across AI engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and others — over time. It runs many prompts on a schedule, watches for brand mentions and citations, and reports trends back to a marketing team. That’s a monitoring product: it’s built to answer “how are we doing this month compared to last month” across a portfolio of tracked terms, which is the shape of question an in-house marketing or SEO team asks continuously, not once.

Profound doesn’t publish specific prices on its own site — pricing is handled through a sales conversation. Third-party SaaS pricing trackers, checked September 2026, converge on the same shape: Trakkr’s Profound pricing breakdown reports a Starter tier at $99/month, billed annually ($1,188/year), covering ChatGPT only with 50 tracked prompts and one seat; a Growth tier at $399/month, also billed annually ($4,788/year), covering ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews with 100 tracked prompts and three seats; and custom Enterprise deals above that for wider engine coverage, API access and dedicated support. Those are third-party figures, not Profound’s own published numbers, so treat them as an estimate of shape rather than an exact quote — and note the monthly rate only applies if you commit to the year.

What does AI Visibility Check do?

AI Visibility Check audits one site at a time, not a portfolio of tracked prompts. The free scan runs first and checks the technical basics: can AI crawlers reach the site, does structured data validate, do pages have the content shape a model can quote. That’s what the free tier is scoped to — it does not run AI model probes. In the audit engine’s own code, the free path passes analystOnly: !deep into the LLM collector, which skips the parts of the pipeline that ask a model “have you heard of this business” or “who would you recommend” whenever a run isn’t a Deep Scan.

The £9.99 Deep Scan turns that flag off. It runs subject-recognition probes across a roster of models, runs recommendation prompts for the business’s category, and extracts named competitors from those recommendation answers — the same extraction step is careful not to invent a name that wasn’t actually said: it only pulls competitor names out of text the models already produced, never generates a list independently. That’s the one-off report a business owner buys when they want a specific answer, once, rather than a dashboard they check every week.

What each costs

The comparison only holds if you’re honest about what each number buys. Profound’s monthly fee buys continuous monitoring across many prompts and engines — that’s worth it if AI visibility is a metric someone on your team owns every month. AI Visibility Check’s one-off fee buys a single, detailed answer about one site, once. Paying £9.99 seven times a year is not the same product as a $399/month subscription, and neither is pretending a one-off scan replaces ongoing tracking for a team that genuinely needs it.

Which should you use?

Use Profound if AI visibility is already a KPI your marketing team reports on monthly, you’re tracking a defined set of prompts across a multi-brand portfolio, and the budget for a dedicated subscription tool already exists.

Use AI Visibility Check if you’re a single business — an agency, a local company, an SMB — that has never had a clear answer to “can ChatGPT and Google actually find and recommend us,” and you want that answer with evidence, without committing to a subscription first. Run the free scan to see the technical baseline; if it looks solid and you want the AI-model-probe evidence too, the Deep Scan is the £9.99 next step.

What neither of them can tell you

Neither tool can tell you what a model will say about your business next month. Model behaviour drifts, providers update systems without announcing it, and both a subscription and a one-off scan are a measurement at a point in time, not a guarantee. Profound’s advantage is that it re-measures on a schedule so drift shows up in a trend line. AI Visibility Check’s Deep Scan doesn’t do that by design — it’s a snapshot, dated, with its evidence attached, so you know exactly when it was true and can decide for yourself whether to run it again.

Not sure which tier you need? Run the free scan to see the technical baseline first, or read the audit methodology for exactly what each tier checks.