Profound and Adobe Brand Visibility (LLM Optimizer) both track how AI engines answer questions about your brand, but they pay off in different setups. Adobe Brand Visibility fits large teams already on Adobe Experience Manager or Adobe Analytics that want edge fixes and revenue attribution, while Profound works on any stack and writes and publishes content through its own agents. DeepSmith is a strong alternative for teams outside the Adobe stack, because it tracks AI answers and publishes finished articles to your CMS on a published price with a 7-day free trial.
Teams that don't run Adobe Experience Manager or Adobe Analytics usually reach the Profound vs Adobe Brand Visibility question for one reason. Adobe is a name they trust, and they want to know whether the tool still makes sense without the rest of the Adobe stack. This guide compares the two on pricing, features, and fit, and it gives a verdict for each kind of buyer. DeepSmith, which tracks AI answers and publishes content on any stack, gets its own section after the two vendor briefs.
Profound vs Adobe Brand Visibility: the short answer
- Choose DeepSmith if you want tracking and finished articles in one self-serve plan, starting at $99 a month with a 7-day free trial, and you want those articles sent straight to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful.
- Choose Profound if you want the deeper tracking of the two on a stack-independent product, plus agents that draft and publish content, and you can buy through a sales-led Enterprise package.
- Choose Adobe Brand Visibility if you already run Adobe Experience Manager or Adobe Analytics and want edge fixes and revenue attribution inside that stack, on one Adobe contract.
| Criterion | DeepSmith | Profound | Adobe Brand Visibility |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price (monthly) | $99/mo (Pro) | Free 7-day Trial, then custom Enterprise quote | Not public, custom quote |
| Annual price | $80/mo billed yearly (Pro) | Custom | Not public |
| Prompts at entry tier | 50 (Pro) | 50 on the Trial, custom on Enterprise | Not listed |
| Engines at entry tier | 1 (ChatGPT) | 3 on the Trial (ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews) | Not listed |
| Most engines on any plan | 10 (Enterprise) | Up to 9 (Enterprise) | Up to 10 LLM families |
| Free trial | 7-day, self-serve | 7-day, self-serve | Existing Adobe customers only |
| Shows which of your own pages earn citations | Yes | Yes | Partial |
| Content generation | Yes | Yes | Partial |
| CMS publishing | Yes | Yes | Partial |
| AI crawler analytics | - | Yes | Yes |
| AI referral traffic tied to revenue | - | Yes | Yes |
| API access | Yes | Yes, Enterprise only | Not listed |
| SOC 2 | Yes | Yes, Type II | Not listed |
| G2 rating | 4.8/5 | 4.5/5 | 3.7/5 |
Pricing and features as of September 2026, from each vendor's site and public reviews.
Profound
Profound is an AI marketing platform that tracks how ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and other engines mention and cite a brand, and then uses agents to research, draft, optimize and publish content from that data. It is built for enterprise and mid-market marketing, SEO and content teams, and for agencies. The company was founded in 2024 in New York and has raised $334.5 million across five rounds.
The standout is depth. Each tracked prompt runs daily by default, and the reports cover visibility rank, share of voice, URL-level citations, sentiment themes and query fan-outs. Prompt Volumes adds demand data for prompts, and Agent Analytics reads server logs to show which AI crawlers visit your site.
The main limitation is access. Paid pricing is not public, the free Trial runs for seven days with 50 recommended prompts that you can't customize, and seven of the nine listed engines, API access and SSO are Enterprise only. Agent runs also use credits, so cost is harder to forecast. On G2, Profound has 4.5/5 from 1,130 reviews (checked September 2026). Reviewers like the visibility and citation analytics and the competitor benchmarking, and the common complaints are price and a learning curve.
Adobe Brand Visibility (LLM Optimizer)
Adobe LLM Optimizer launched in June 2025 and reached general availability that October. In June 2026 Adobe folded it into Adobe Brand Visibility, which adds Semrush prompt and market data, and since 31 July 2026 only Brand Visibility is sold. Existing LLM Optimizer contracts carry over, so a Profound vs Adobe LLM Optimizer search and a Profound vs Adobe Brand Visibility search are now about the same product. It is built for large enterprises, especially ones on Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Analytics or Customer Journey Analytics.
The standout is that it acts on what it finds. Adobe says it can deploy optimizations to AI agents at the CDN edge or in Adobe Experience Manager, with instant rollback, and its Adobe Analytics and Customer Journey Analytics integrations tie AI referral traffic to conversions and revenue. The edge route is described as compatible with Fastly, Akamai and Cloudflare, so it is not tied to Adobe Experience Manager alone.
The real limitation is access, and it shows up in three places. There is no public price, because licenses are sold per prompts per year through a sales order. Brand Presence refreshes weekly by default, and daily refresh can be requested and may cost extra. The only free trial is for eligible Adobe customers. On G2 it has 3.7/5 from five reviews (checked September 2026), four of them incentivized, which is too small a sample to say much about sentiment. One reviewer called CDN log forwarding an onboarding barrier.
DeepSmith: the alternative that tracks and publishes on any stack
Profound and Adobe Brand Visibility each leave something open for a team outside the Adobe stack. Adobe's revenue attribution runs through Adobe's own analytics products, its trial is limited to existing Adobe customers, and writing full on-site articles is not described. Profound does write and publish, and it works on any stack, but its paid plans are not public and its agent work runs on credits. DeepSmith takes the same idea, tracking connected to publishing, and puts it on a published price.
DeepSmith tracks how AI engines answer questions about your brand, finds the gaps, and produces the articles that close them, all from the same data. On the tracking side, the Pages view shows which of your own pages AI actually cites, each page's share of your citations, and the prompts driving them. The Overview reports mention rate, citation rate and share of voice, with a competitor leaderboard and the sources AI cites most.
On the production side, Opportunity Agents turn those gaps into ideas that each carry the data point behind them. The Writer then produces a finished, brand-grounded article, researched and linked, with a cover image and publish-ready metadata, and Deep IQ keeps your brand context in every draft. Autowrite can take an article all the way to published on a scheduled date. From Produced Content you publish straight to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful, or to your own webhooks, so nothing in the chain depends on Adobe Experience Manager.
Plans are public. Pro is $99 a month ($80 billed yearly) with 20 articles and 50 tracked prompts, Grow is $199 ($160 yearly) with 40 articles and 100 prompts, and Scale is $399 ($299 yearly) with 90 articles and 200 prompts. There are no long-term contracts, and you can start with a 7-day free trial. DeepSmith is rated 4.8/5 on G2. Plans don't include crawler log analytics or Adobe Analytics revenue attribution. For the same goal, DeepSmith reports the pages AI actually cites and the Writer produces the pages that close the gap.
Engine coverage
On what each vendor publishes, Profound wins this one. Its pricing page lists three engines on the Trial (ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews) and up to nine on Enterprise, adding Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Claude and Exa Search. Some of those are enabled by request, and a few pages on its own site give different counts, so it's worth asking for the exact list in a demo.
Adobe's product pages name five engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Claude and Microsoft Copilot) and describe ten LLM families. Release notes add Grok, DeepSeek, Gemini and Google AI Overviews for specific modules, but no table shows which engines a given license samples. Adobe may well cover more than Profound's Trial does, but you can't confirm it from public pages, so I'd ask for it in writing before you sign.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith publishes its engine list by plan. Pro tracks ChatGPT, Grow adds Perplexity, Scale adds Gemini, and Enterprise covers all ten engines: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Grok, Meta AI, Microsoft Copilot and DeepSeek. You can see what a plan covers before you talk to anyone.
Pricing and trial access
Neither vendor publishes a paid price, so Adobe Brand Visibility vs Profound is a tie on price transparency. On access, Profound is ahead for a buyer outside Adobe. Anyone can start its free Trial, which runs 50 recommended prompts daily for seven days on three engines, though it has no answer history, exports, API or support. Profound's Enterprise packages are tailored through a demo, and agent usage consumes credits, with higher credit thresholds requiring an Enterprise package.
Adobe sells through a consultation request. Licenses are set per prompts per year in the sales order, and the paid entitlement includes a Semrush Enterprise AIO allowance. The only trial is a conditional one for eligible Adobe Experience Manager Cloud Service or Adobe Analytics and Customer Journey Analytics customers, covering 100 prompts and one domain for activations after April 2026. If you aren't already an Adobe customer, there isn't a way to try it first.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith lists four plans, billed monthly or yearly, and the fixed allowances (articles, tracked prompts, seats and engines) sit next to each price. The 7-day free trial is self-serve and gives you real data and real drafts before you pay. You can compare the plans on the pricing page without a sales call.
Tracking depth and citation analysis
Profound has the deeper tracking here. It runs every tracked prompt daily by default and stores each full answer, reports where the brand ranks inside an answer, and classifies cited sources as owned, competitor, earned media and more. Its Watched Pages feature tracks citations per URL, which answers the question of which of your own pages earn citations. Adobe tracks mentions, citations, sentiment and share of voice, benchmarks up to five direct competitors, and adds SEO query fan-out analysis and prompt research over nearly 300 million prompts. A per-page citation report is not described, so I'd treat page-level attribution as partial. Adobe refreshes weekly by default, so day-to-day movement is easier to see in Profound.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith keeps the full answer history for every tracked prompt, with per-prompt mention and citation rates. The Competitors view ranks who wins citations for your prompts, on which exact pages, and by platform, so a gap becomes a specific page you can answer.
Stack fit and setup without Adobe Experience Manager
Adobe Brand Visibility vs Profound goes to Adobe here, inside its own stack. If you run Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Analytics, native integrations let you deploy fixes and report AI referral traffic and revenue in tools your team already uses. Profound can also read Adobe Analytics and publish to Adobe Experience Manager, so the choice is not as one-sided as the Adobe name suggests. Profound doesn't need the stack, and Adobe's edge deployment works through Fastly, Akamai or Cloudflare, but its revenue story and its only trial both lean on being an Adobe customer.
Setup is worth a look on both sides. Profound's crawler analytics needs a CDN or log integration, which usually means developer or infrastructure permissions. A G2 reviewer described Adobe's CDN log forwarding as an onboarding barrier that pulled in IT and security work. Both take longer than signing up for a trial.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith's own setup is lighter. It sets up from your website during onboarding, and your workspace has a brand brief, competitors, starter tracking prompts and a first batch of ideas before you pay. Publishing goes to the CMS you already use.
From insight to action
The two take different routes from finding to fixing. Adobe's route is on-site: edge and CMS optimizations, plus content for outside surfaces such as Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit. Writing full on-site articles is not described, and one G2 reviewer wanted a writing assistant. Profound's route is content: its agents draft briefs and full articles from your brand context and citation data, refresh existing pages, and publish approved drafts through CMS connections to WordPress, Sanity, Contentful, Webflow and Adobe Experience Manager. Profound frames the output as drafts that go through approval, which suits teams that want a human in every step.
For the question of which one gets you from a visibility gap to a published page, Profound is ahead of Adobe Brand Visibility, which is stronger at fixing pages you already have.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith runs the whole loop in one platform. Tracking finds the gap, an Opportunity Agent turns it into an idea with its evidence attached, the Writer produces a publish-ready article in your brand voice, and Produced Content sends it to your CMS. Autowrite can run that last part on a schedule without anyone in the app, which is how a content calendar becomes something that runs on its own.
Which should you choose
- DeepSmith fits marketing teams and agencies that want to track AI answers and publish the content that closes the gaps on one self-serve plan, on any CMS, at a price they can read before they talk to sales.
- Profound fits larger teams that want the deepest tracking of the pair, agents with human approval steps, and a stack-independent product, and that are comfortable with a sales-led, credit-based package.
- Adobe Brand Visibility fits enterprises already on Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Analytics or Customer Journey Analytics, where edge fixes and revenue attribution in one Adobe contract are the main goal.
On Profound vs Adobe Brand Visibility without Adobe Experience Manager, and if you came here asking Profound or Adobe Brand Visibility with no Adobe stack, the evidence favors Profound of the two, mostly because of access and tracking depth. If you'd rather not buy through a sales team at all, DeepSmith is the option to try first. DeepSmith vs Profound covers that pairing in more detail. DeepSmith vs Adobe LLM Optimizer does the same for Adobe.
Start a free 7-day DeepSmith trial at app.deepsmith.ai and see your own tracking data and a first draft before you pay.
