Alternatives to Profound for AI search visibility tracking

Peec AI, Otterly, AthenaHQ, Scrunch AI, and the AI visibility features inside Semrush and Ahrefs. Which one you want turns on a single question: do you need a cheaper dashboard, or do you need someone to do the work?

Profound is the most established name in this category and usually the first one an assistant names. People look for alternatives for three reasons — price, a tool broader than their actual need, or wanting the fixing done rather than reported. Those three reasons lead to three different products, and picking from the wrong group is the expensive mistake.

The alternatives, by the problem they solve

Tool	Reported entry price	Replaces Profound when
Otterly.AI otterly.ai	~$29/month	You are a small team or agency and want mentions, citations and sentiment across several countries at the lowest price
Peec AI peec.ai	~$95/month	You want prompt-level visibility, share of voice and citation analysis, and someone in-house will act on it
AthenaHQ athenahq.ai	~$295/month	You need the closest thing to a Profound-shaped platform — broad coverage, dashboards, recommendations — at a self-serve price
Scrunch AI scrunch.com	Quoted	Your question is less “am I named” and more “how do AI systems describe us, and what do they see when they visit”
Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit semrush.com	~$99/month per domain	You already pay for Semrush and want AI visibility beside your existing keyword and competitor data
Ahrefs Brand Radar ahrefs.com/brand-radar	Bundled with Ahrefs plans	You want AI mentions connected to backlinks and broader brand research, with prompts derived from real search demand
Bungad AEO bungad.com	$99/month	You do not want a dashboard at all — you want the tracking and the content and schema work done for you

On these prices: the four numeric figures — Otterly ~$29, Peec AI ~$95, Semrush ~$99 per domain, AthenaHQ ~$295 — are what Perplexity reported on 19 September 2026, with the sources it cited, in a run we stored and published. Two cells are not from that run: “Quoted” for Scrunch AI and “Bundled with Ahrefs plans” are our own characterisations, because the run returned no price for either. We have not independently verified any other vendor’s pricing and it changes often — check their own page. Our $99 is ours and it is exact.

What the engines themselves currently recommend

We asked Perplexity “Alternatives to Profound for AI search visibility tracking” through its API on 19 September 2026, as one of the eight questions in our own published audit. It named, in order: Otterly.AI, Peec AI, AthenaHQ, Scrunch AI, the Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit, Ahrefs Brand Radar and SE Ranking. It did not name Bungad.

That is worth stating plainly on a page where we are one of the options. This was the only one of our eight questions in which five competitors were named at once, and we were in none of them. If your criterion is “the tool the assistants already recommend”, this page is a list of them and we are not on it.

The three groups, and how to tell which you are in

You want the same thing, cheaper

Then you are choosing between Otterly, Peec AI and AthenaHQ, and the question is how much coverage you lose on the way down. Count the questions you need tracked and the markets you need them in before you look at a single price — that, rather than seats, is what every meter in this category actually charges for. A tracker that covers half your markets at a third of the cost is not a saving, it is a smaller purchase.

You want AI visibility inside a tool you already pay for

Then look at Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit or Ahrefs Brand Radar before buying anything new. The dedicated tools go deeper, but a feature you already own and will actually open beats a better tool in a tab nobody visits. The honest version of this advice costs us a sale and it is still the right advice.

You want the work done, not reported

This is the group that gets sold the wrong thing most often. If nobody on your side is going to write the pages a dashboard tells you to write, a cheaper dashboard does not help — it just costs less to ignore. That is the case for a managed subscription, ours or an agency’s. We compare all three shapes, with prices, on AEO tools compared and what AEO costs per month.

Where we fit, and where we do not

Bungad is a managed monthly subscription: we track the questions, find why you are skipped, fix the content and structured data, and send a report. $99, $299 or $799 a month, month to month. We are the newest and least proven name on this page, and three things follow from that which you should weigh before switching to us:

We cover one engine automatically. Perplexity is the only engine we hold an API key for. ChatGPT and Claude adapters are built and awaiting keys; Gemini is not built; Google AI Overviews and Copilot have no API and are reviewed by hand for Scale clients. If you are leaving Profound for price but still need broad automated coverage, we are not your replacement — AthenaHQ is the closer fit.
We have no enterprise procurement story yet. If your purchase needs a security review, a DPA negotiation and a multi-year contract, stay where you are.
Our own audited visibility score is 0 out of 100. Published in full at our score, updated monthly whether it improves or not. Nobody else on this page publishes theirs. That is either the most or the least reassuring thing here, depending on what you value.

When to stay with Profound

Many markets and languages at once. Breadth is what enterprise pricing buys and the cheaper tools do not match it.
Procurement requires an established vendor. Security review, contracts, references. That is a real requirement and not one to route around.
Several brands or product lines in one place. Consolidation has a value that per-domain pricing elsewhere will erase.
You have a team whose job is to act on the analytics. Then depth is worth paying for, and you should not be reading a page about doing the work for you.

Five questions to ask any replacement

Which engines do you query through an API, and which do you check by hand?
How many tracked questions, brands and markets does the price cover?
Can I export my question history and results if I leave?
How do you handle a failed engine call — is it recorded as “not mentioned”?
Can I see one real report before I buy?

The fourth is the one nobody asks and the one that quietly ruins a trend line. If a timeout is scored as an absence, you are measuring the vendor’s reliability and calling it your visibility. Ours are recorded separately and never counted as a miss — the rule is written out on how we measure.

Common questions

What are the main alternatives to Profound?

Otterly.AI and Peec AI for self-serve tracking at a fraction of the price, AthenaHQ for the closest enterprise-style replacement, Scrunch AI for how AI systems describe and experience your brand, and the AI visibility features inside Semrush and Ahrefs if you already pay for one of them. Bungad AEO is a different shape again: a managed subscription that does the fixing rather than a dashboard.

Is there a cheaper alternative to Profound?

Yes. Profound is quoted per contract and generally enterprise-priced, while the self-serve trackers reported entry prices of roughly $29 a month for Otterly, $95 for Peec AI, $99 per domain for the Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit and $295 for AthenaHQ as of September 2026. Those are reported figures rather than prices we have verified, so check each vendor’s own page.

When should you stay with Profound?

When you need many markets and languages at once, when procurement requires an established vendor with security review and contracts, when several brands or product lines share one dashboard, or when you have a team whose job is to act on the analytics. Switching to a cheaper tracker to save a few hundred dollars while losing coverage you actually use is a false economy.

Is Bungad an alternative to Profound?

Only for a specific reader. Bungad is a managed subscription at $99 to $799 a month that tracks questions and then does the content and structured data work, rather than a platform you operate. It is narrower than Profound: Perplexity is the only engine we hold an API key for today. If your reason for leaving Profound is price but you still need broad automated engine coverage, we are not the replacement.