Profound watches how ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and six other answer engines describe your brand, turning a blind spot most companies check by hand into a dashboard that starts at $99 a month.
When a buyer opens ChatGPT and types "best [category] tool for a mid-sized team," does your product come up? Ask your head of marketing and watch the pause. At most companies the honest answer is that nobody knows, and the way they find out is that someone runs the prompt by hand, screenshots the result, and reruns it next week when the answer has quietly rewritten itself. That person is doing manual quality assurance on a storefront the company does not control. Meanwhile the SEO retainer the company signed, which Clutch pegs at an average of $3,199 a month, keeps reporting diligently on Google rankings for a search box a growing share of buyers no longer open first.
That last part is the uncomfortable one. Forrester's February Consumer Pulse survey found that 26 percent of consumers used ChatGPT in the previous month to research a product they were considering buying, which put it third for product discovery behind only Google and Amazon. Whatever the model says about you in that moment is now a material part of your funnel, and it is being generated by a system you cannot log into and check.
Profound is built for exactly that blind spot. It watches how your brand shows up across the answer engines people actually use, Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Copilot, Meta AI, DeepSeek, and Google's AI Overviews, and turns "what does the AI say about us" into a dashboard instead of a hunch. It tracks whether you get mentioned, how you get described, whether the sentiment is flattering or damning, and which source pages the models cite when they build the answer. That last signal is the useful one. If a model keeps recommending your competitor because it is pulling from a Reddit thread and a G2 category page, you now know the exact content that is deciding the recommendation.
It goes past monitoring, too. Profound analyzes the volume of real prompts in your category, so you optimize for the questions buyers actually ask instead of the keywords you wish they searched, and it ships agents that draft the answer-engine content the models tend to cite. The company's own case studies put the shift plainly. "Before Profound, AI Search was a black box," one customer's VP of growth says. "Now it's a competitive advantage."
The pricing is where the workflow math lands. Profound's self-serve Starter plan runs $99 a month and covers a single engine, which is thin. The Growth plan at $399 a month, billed yearly, is where the multi-engine tracking and the useful features actually live, and Enterprise is a custom quote for the companies with compliance requirements and agency seats. Set the $399 tier against the alternatives. It is roughly an eighth of that average SEO retainer, and it covers the surface the retainer ignores entirely. It is also cheaper than one afternoon a week of a marketer copy-pasting prompts into nine chatbots and dropping the results into a spreadsheet that is wrong by Thursday.
Now the part the category's own marketing skips over. A visibility tool measures the problem, it does not fix it. Profound will tell you in high resolution that ChatGPT thinks a competitor is the safer choice. Closing that gap still means writing better content, earning the citations, and restructuring pages so a model can lift a clean answer, which is weeks of work the dashboard does not do for you. The attribution is soft, too. Proving that an AI mention drove a specific dollar of revenue is genuinely hard right now, so a team that has to defend every line item with a clean number will have a fight on its hands with a skeptical CFO. And if you sell into a local market where buyers still open Google Maps, or you are early enough that AI referrals are a rounding error, the $399 is better spent on building something worth citing in the first place. You cannot monitor your way to a reputation you have not earned.
Here is the reframe that makes it click. For twenty years, "search visibility" meant a ranking on a page of blue links, and an entire agency economy grew up to move you three spots higher on it. The answer engines deleted the page. There is no list to climb now, just a paragraph that names one option and leaves everyone else out, generated fresh for every buyer and forgotten a second later. You either show up in that paragraph or you do not exist for that customer, and until recently there was no instrument that could even tell you which one was happening. The blind spot was the whole problem. Turning the lights on now costs about four hundred dollars a month.