Three funded platforms now dominate shortlists for measuring how a brand appears inside AI answers, and the choice between them is less interchangeable than the category's marketing suggests. Profound vs AthenaHQ vs Scrunch is not a contest between three versions of the same dashboard. It is a decision between three different theories of what visibility measurement is for: engine breadth with content production attached, analytics depth with a free entry point, or crawler-side telemetry with an edge-serving layer attached to it. An AI visibility tool comparison that reduces the three to a single ranked score tends to obscure exactly the difference that determines whether a team gets value from the subscription.
The more useful framing is a mapping exercise rather than a ranking exercise. Each of the three is defensibly the correct answer for a specific operating situation, and each is a weak fit outside it. The sections below set out what each platform tracks, what each entry tier actually buys, where each is genuinely strongest, and where a limitation is structural rather than cosmetic. All figures cited are the vendors' published positions as of mid-2026, and pricing in this category has moved quickly enough that verification at the point of purchase remains sensible.
The short answer for each buyer type
- Profound suits enterprise brands that need the broadest engine coverage and want content production inside the same vendor. It is the best-funded of the three, having closed a $96M Series C on February 24, 2026 at a $1B valuation, with roughly 272 employees behind it.
- AthenaHQ suits mid-market teams and agencies that want analytics depth and a zero-cost starting point. It is the only one of the three with a genuinely free plan, and its $295 per month Starter tier unlocks all eight tracked engines.
- Scrunch suits technical SEO and content-engineering teams for whom crawler behavior, not prompt-level citation counts, is the primary signal. It is the only platform of the three that both observes AI agents and serves them a modified version of the page.
Profound vs AthenaHQ vs Scrunch at a glance
The table below sets the three side by side on the dimensions that tend to decide a shortlist: engine coverage, entry price, whether production is included, and vendor scale.
| Dimension | Profound | AthenaHQ | Scrunch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Founded | 2024 | 2025 | 2023 |
| Headquarters | New York, NY | San Francisco, CA | Salt Lake City, UT |
| Total disclosed funding | ~$154.5M | ~$2.7M | ~$19M |
| Approximate team size | ~272 | ~19 | ~77 |
| Engines tracked | 8 at Enterprise | 8 in paid tiers, 5 on the free plan | 4 |
| Cheapest paid tier | $99/mo Starter (annual billing) | $295/mo Starter | $250/mo Core (annual billing) |
| Free plan | None disclosed | Yes, Essential | None, 7-day trial only |
| Content production built in | Yes, the Agents module | Recommendations only | No |
| Enterprise compliance | SOC2, SSO/SAML, custom SLA | SAML and OIDC SSO at Enterprise | SSO tier-gated |
| Core differentiator | Engine breadth plus production | Citation intelligence and discrepancy detection | Bidirectional monitoring and edge serving |
| Ownership status | Independent | Independent | Acquired by Sitecore, June 3, 2026 |
Profound: engine breadth with production attached
Profound is the broadest and best-capitalized platform in this GEO tracker comparison. Its product surface spans four areas: Monitor for per-prompt tracking, Create for content generation, Operate for benchmarking and recommended actions, and a set of integrations covering CMS publishing and CDN-level crawler detection. The Monitor module reports mention rate, citation rate, share of voice, per-platform breakdowns, a competitor leaderboard, and the sources most frequently cited for each tracked prompt.
Engine coverage is the headline claim. At the Enterprise tier Profound tracks eight engines, namely ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, and Grok, with DeepSeek added at that same tier. The Create module produces publish-ready articles grounded in tracking data, with internal links, external links, schema markup, and metadata injected during generation, and it publishes to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Ghost, and Shopify.
The funding position is not a trivial detail for procurement. Profound raised $20.5M from Kleiner Perkins in June 2025, $35M from Sequoia in August 2025, and $96M led by Lightspeed in February 2026, reaching roughly $154.5M disclosed in total. For a buyer whose security review asks about vendor viability, SOC2 attestation, SAML, and a contractual SLA, that combination is a meaningful reduction in perceived risk.
The limitations are concentrated at the entry tier, and they are structural rather than incidental. Starter at $99 per month billed annually covers 50 prompts but tracks ChatGPT only, and it includes a single seat. A team that needs multi-engine data or more than one login moves to Growth at $399 per month, which is a $300 step-up and still covers only three engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. The full eight-engine promise arrives only at custom-priced Enterprise. The Agents module runs on a monthly credit allowance, 100 credits at Starter and 400 at Growth, which means production capacity is metered against the same pool as analytics workflows and sustained volume tends to push a team toward an Enterprise conversation. Profound also has no publicly disclosed free plan, which removes the low-commitment evaluation path that AthenaHQ offers. Its public customer list is short as well, anchored on Eight Sleep and MongoDB; broader logos appear in vendor-authored comparison content but are not independently verified.
AthenaHQ: analytics depth and the only free tier
AthenaHQ is the newest of the three, founded in 2025 by Andrew Yan and Alan Yao, and it came through Y Combinator's W25 batch with roughly $2.7M raised and around 19 employees. It positions itself as a GEO platform rather than a pure tracker, organized around an AEO/GEO command center, an executive visibility dashboard with ROI and sentiment reporting, an agentic copilot called Ask Athena, a content module, the Athena Citation Engine, a recommendation engine, and Oracle, a discrepancy-detection layer that flags where AI answers contradict each other or contradict the site itself.
The free Essential plan is the most immediately differentiating feature in this category. It provides 300 credits, unlimited members, prompt and response analysis, source and competitor insights, content recommendations, and the Athena agent, across five engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Claude. No competitor in this comparison offers an equivalent. For a marketing lead who has been asked what the AI search strategy is and needs evidence before requesting budget, that is a genuinely useful on-ramp.
Coverage per dollar at the paid entry tier is also strong. Starter at $295 per month unlocks all eight engines, adding Google AI Mode, Microsoft Copilot, and Grok to the free five, along with 3,600 credits, API access, integrations with Shopify, Webflow, GA4, and Google Search Console, CSV export, citation intelligence, and robots.txt and llms.txt management. Annual billing reduces that by roughly 17 percent. Enterprise adds Oracle, the Citation Engine, persona targeting, multi-region and multi-language support, BI integrations for Tableau, Power BI, and Looker, SAML and OIDC SSO, an audit log, and a two-hour SLA.
The constraints are equally clear, and they cluster around vendor maturity rather than product design. AthenaHQ is the smallest and youngest vendor of the three by every available measure, and enterprise procurement teams tend to raise viability questions that a 19-person, post-seed company cannot fully answer yet. Its differentiated features carry vendor language without published benchmarks: self-learning content improvement and Oracle accuracy have no third-party validation, so they belong on a trial checklist rather than in a business case. Content authoring is not bundled the way Profound's Agents module is, so a team adopting AthenaHQ still needs a separate production capability. The eight-engine figure also applies to paid tiers only; the free plan covers five.
Scrunch: agent telemetry and the edge-serving layer
Scrunch is the most architecturally distinct entry in this AI visibility tool comparison, and the distinction is worth understanding before dismissing it on engine count. Founded in 2023 in Salt Lake City by Chris Andrew and Robert MacCloy, it raised a $15M Series A on July 22, 2025, reaching roughly $19M total across about 77 employees, and was acquired by Sitecore on June 3, 2026, continuing as a product within Sitecore's AI search portfolio.
The platform has two halves. The monitoring half performs bot detection and traffic classification at the server and edge level, identifying GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, and similar agents per page and per intent, alongside citation tracking, prompt library management, trend discovery, and a site-map visualization showing which URLs bots crawl and which they skip. The serving half, marketed as the Agent Experience Platform, is an edge-level reverse proxy that detects an AI bot request and returns a token-light, structured version of the page with titles, summaries, FAQs, and schema.
That bidirectional design is unique among the three. Where Profound and AthenaHQ observe what engines say, Scrunch also intervenes in what engines receive. For a technical SEO team that has already diagnosed a retrieval problem rather than a content problem, that intervention point is the one the other two do not offer at any tier. The bound on it is that serving a cleaner page to a crawler improves how existing content is read, not whether the content exists, so the capability pays off for teams whose library is already substantial.
The engine limitation is the real constraint. Scrunch tracks four engines only: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Microsoft Copilot. There is no native Claude, Gemini, Google AI Mode, or Grok tracking, which is half the coverage of the other two platforms. Core at $250 per month billed annually provides 125 prompts, five site audits per month, one brand workspace, and five user licenses, with a seven-day trial. Pro, Scale, and Enterprise pricing is not published and requires sales contact, which slows evaluation for self-serve buyers. The Sitecore acquisition cuts both ways: it adds enterprise distribution and support depth, and it introduces roadmap uncertainty, since no unified Scrunch and Sitecore roadmap has been published as of mid-2026.
Engine coverage: the axis that decides most shortlists
Engine coverage is where the three separate most cleanly, and where the comparison is frequently stated imprecisely. Profound reaches eight engines at Enterprise, AthenaHQ reaches eight in paid tiers, and Scrunch tracks four. On raw breadth, AthenaHQ vs Scrunch is not close: the $295 Starter tier covers twice the engines of Scrunch Core at $250.
The nuance is that breadth and tier are entangled. Profound's eight engines are an Enterprise-tier capability, so the practical comparison at self-serve pricing is one engine at $99, three engines at $399, and eight engines only after a custom contract. AthenaHQ is the only platform of the three where eight-engine coverage is reachable on a published price, though its free plan stops at five and the eighth engine arrives only with the paid tier. For Scrunch, the four tracked engines are less a gap than a deliberate consequence of its focus, since bot-level telemetry and edge serving apply to any crawler that reaches the site regardless of whether that engine appears in the citation-tracking list.
The practical question is which engines carry the buying conversation in a given category. A team whose buyers research primarily in ChatGPT and Perplexity gains little from Grok coverage, and paying for eight engines to monitor two actively is a common source of unused subscription value.
Pricing: what each entry tier actually buys
Comparing headline prices across these three platforms produces misleading conclusions, because the entry tiers are not equivalent products.
- Profound Starter, $99 per month annually: 50 prompts, ChatGPT only, one seat, 100 Agent credits.
- AthenaHQ Essential, free: 300 credits, five engines, unlimited members, no production.
- AthenaHQ Starter, $295 per month: 3,600 credits, eight engines, unlimited members, API access.
- Scrunch Core, $250 per month annually: 125 prompts, four engines, five licenses, five site audits.
Read carefully, AthenaHQ vs Scrunch at the paid entry point favors AthenaHQ on coverage and seats, while Scrunch remains the only option that includes edge serving at any price. Scrunch AI vs Profound at the entry tier is the most commonly misread pair: Profound Starter is cheaper in absolute terms at $99, but it tracks one engine with one seat, whereas Scrunch Core covers four engines with five licenses for $250. The cheaper subscription is not the cheaper program once seat count and engine coverage are held constant.
Where DeepSmith fits in this comparison
DeepSmith belongs in this GEO tracker comparison on two counts, and engine coverage is now one of them. DeepSmith tracks ten engines: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Grok, Meta AI, Microsoft Copilot, and DeepSeek. That is the widest tracked list on this page, ahead of the eight Profound reaches at Enterprise and the eight AthenaHQ unlocks at Starter, and it is the only list here that includes Meta AI. Coverage rises with tier in the same shape Profound's does: Pro tracks ChatGPT, Grow adds Perplexity, Scale adds Gemini, and Enterprise or Custom covers all ten. Held at the same price, the two ladders land close together, three engines at $399 on either side, with the difference that DeepSmith has a $199 step in between where Profound has none.
What DeepSmith does differently is close the loop between measurement and production. All three trackers above are strongest at telling a team where it is invisible. Two of them stop there, and the third bills production against a credit pool. DeepSmith tracks mention rate, citation rate, share of voice, sentiment, and visibility trend across its covered engines, identifies which prompts and pages are losing, and then produces the publish-ready articles that address those gaps, with internal linking, schema, metadata, and AEO structure built in during generation rather than added in a later review pass. Opportunity Agents sit between the two halves, reading the visibility data or the Content Map and returning ideas that each arrive with the specific data point that justifies them, so the backlog is defensible rather than brainstormed.
The pricing comparison at the entry tier is instructive. DeepSmith Pro is $99 per month, or $80 billed annually, and includes 50 tracked prompts, five seats, and 20 articles per month on ChatGPT. Profound Starter is also $99 per month billed annually with 50 prompts on ChatGPT, but with one seat and a 100-credit allowance rather than a monthly article count. Grow at $199 adds Perplexity, 100 prompts, seven seats, and 40 articles; Scale at $399, or $299 annually, adds Gemini with 200 prompts, ten seats, and 90 articles. A seven-day free trial provides real data and real drafts before payment, and there are no long-term contracts or cancellation fees.
The honest boundary is narrower than the engine axis suggests. DeepSmith does not serve modified pages to bots at the edge the way Scrunch's Agent Experience Platform does, so a team that has already diagnosed a retrieval problem rather than a coverage problem should weigh Scrunch on that axis specifically. Everywhere else, what DeepSmith removes is the second vendor, the second workflow, and the gap between knowing which prompts are lost and having the articles that contest them.
Which tracker to choose, by situation
- Large enterprise brand needing maximum breadth and compliance: Profound. Eight engines, SOC2, SAML, dedicated support, and the deepest funding position of the three, provided the budget accommodates the Growth or Enterprise tier rather than Starter.
- Mid-market team or agency wanting analytics depth and a free start: AthenaHQ. Five engines at no cost, eight at $295, plus citation intelligence and discrepancy detection, accepting that content production is not included and vendor scale is modest.
- Technical SEO or content-engineering team focused on crawler behavior: Scrunch. Bot telemetry and edge serving are unavailable elsewhere in this set, and the Sitecore relationship helps teams already invested in that ecosystem, at the cost of half the engine coverage.
- Team whose constraint is producing the content, not measuring the gap: DeepSmith. Ten engines at Enterprise and three on the published $399 tier, feeding directly into publish-ready production, at $99 to $399 per month.
Teams uncertain which category they fall into should measure first and buy second. Running a small tracked prompt set for a month usually reveals whether the deficit is coverage, retrieval, or published content, and that answer determines which of these four platforms is worth the subscription. Start a free DeepSmith trial to see the tracking data and the drafts it produces before committing budget.
