Profound is a sales-led platform that tracks up to nine answer engines and uses agents to write and publish. Clearscope is a content grader with published prices that scores drafts your writers produce and tracks brand mentions in ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. DeepSmith sits between them for teams that want both jobs on one self-serve plan. It tracks ten AI engines and then produces the finished, on-brand article from what the tracking finds.
If your content team already uses an optimization tool, the question behind a Profound vs Clearscope search is whether grading drafts covers AI search, or whether you need to see what the engines say and then act on it. The two tools start from opposite ends. Clearscope scores the writing you hand it, and Profound watches the answer engines. DeepSmith, covered below, tracks the answers and produces the article too.
Profound vs Clearscope: the short answer
- Choose DeepSmith if you want AI visibility tracking and publish-ready article production on one plan that starts at $99 a month, with a 7-day free trial and no long-term contract.
- Choose Profound if you are an enterprise or agency team that wants the deepest answer analytics, up to nine engines, and is fine buying through a sales conversation.
- Choose Clearscope if your writers draft in Google Docs or WordPress, you want term-based grading at a published price of $129 or $399 a month, and light AI tracking is enough.
Profound vs Clearscope: comparison table
| DeepSmith | Profound | Clearscope | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price (monthly) | $99/mo (Pro) | Custom quote | $129/mo (Essentials) |
| Annual price | $80/mo (Pro) | Custom | Not listed |
| Free trial | 7 days | 7 days | 14 days |
| Tracked prompts at entry | 50 | Custom (Trial: 50) | 50 |
| Engines at entry | ChatGPT | Custom, up to 9 (Trial: 3) | ChatGPT, Gemini |
| Most engines on any plan | 10 | 9 | 3 |
| Tracks brand mentions in AI answers | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Writes long-form articles | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Brand voice and knowledge grounding | Yes | Yes | Partial, tone set per draft |
| Scores drafts against top-ranking content | - | Yes | Yes |
| Publishes directly to a CMS | Yes | Yes | Not listed |
| Public API | Yes, read-only | Yes, Enterprise only | Not listed |
| Security certifications | SOC 2, GDPR, ISO | SOC 2 Type II | Not listed |
| G2 rating | 4.8/5 | 4.5/5 | 4.9/5 |
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, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and other engines mention and cite a brand. It was founded in 2024 in New York and has raised $334.5 million, including a $180 million Series D announced in September 2026. It runs each tracked prompt daily in the consumer interface and reports visibility, rank, share of voice, URL-level citations, sentiment and query fan-outs.
It is built for enterprise and mid-market marketing teams and agencies. The standout is depth. Profound adds Prompt Volumes demand data, server-log crawler analytics and an AI Marketer with agents that draft articles and publish approved ones to WordPress, Sanity, Contentful, Webflow and other systems.
The real limits are cost and access. The public pricing page shows a free seven-day Trial and a custom Enterprise package, with no dollar price for paid plans, and agent runs use credits. Seven of the nine listed engines, the API and SSO are Enterprise only. On G2 it holds 4.5/5 from 1,130 reviews as of September 2026, with praise for the analytics and complaints about price and a learning curve.
Clearscope
Clearscope is a long-running SEO content optimization tool, run by Mushi Labs in Austin, Texas. Its core is the Content Grade, which scores a draft on how well it uses terms taken from the top-ranking pages for a query. Around that it offers Topic Exploration for research, guided AI drafting, Content Inventory for spotting decay through Search Console, and Query Tracking for brand mentions in ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude.
It is built for content and SEO teams, from small publishers to large brands and agencies, who write and refresh articles themselves. The standout is the editor. Term importance is scored from 1 to 10, the grade updates as you type, and it works inside Google Docs and WordPress. Plans include unlimited users and projects.
The real limits show up once you ask it to do more than grade. Its pages describe no public API, MCP server, bulk generation or CMS publishing, and AI drafting runs one piece at a time. The pricing page names ChatGPT and Gemini for tracking while product pages add Claude. Reviewers give it 4.9/5 on G2 from 92 reviews, checked in September 2026. It also holds 4.9/5 on Capterra from 60 reviews, and the main reservation is price for the usage included.
DeepSmith: the alternative that tracks and produces the article
Profound and Clearscope each cover half of the job well. Profound shows you where you are missing from AI answers, and its agents can draft a response. Clearscope shows how a draft compares with what ranks. A content team still has to decide what to write from AI answers, produce it in the brand's voice, and get it live, and the two tools split that work differently. Profound sells it as credits on a custom contract, with drafts that its own pages describe as ready for human review. Clearscope leaves production to your writers.
DeepSmith puts tracking and production on one self-serve plan. The AEO module checks the questions you define on a schedule and reports mention rate, citation rate and share of voice, with a per-platform breakdown, a competitor leaderboard and the sources AI cites most.
Opportunity Agents read that data and return content ideas, each carrying the data point that justifies it. The Writer then turns a planned idea into a finished article that is researched, linked internally and externally, and comes with a cover image and publish-ready metadata. Deep IQ stores your company, products, personas, brand voice and content types once, so every draft starts from your real context instead of a blank page and a style note.
Autowrite takes it further by writing each article on its scheduled date with no one in the app, and Produced Content publishes to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful, or to your own webhooks. Plans are published: Pro is $99 a month for 20 articles and 50 tracked prompts, Grow is $199 for 40 articles and 100 prompts, and Scale is $399 for 90 articles and 200 prompts, with Enterprise custom. It is rated 4.8/5 on G2 and is SOC 2, GDPR and ISO certified.
Engine coverage and tracking depth
Profound wins this axis. Enterprise covers up to nine engines, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Claude and Google AI Overviews, and a Trial covers three. It reports where the brand ranks inside an answer, URL-level citations, sentiment themes and the sub-queries an engine ran. Most of the wider coverage is on the Enterprise tier only.
Clearscope tracks ChatGPT and Gemini on every plan according to its pricing page, with Claude named on product pages. For each query it reports a mention percentage against up to five competitor domains, using a rolling average of the 21 most recent responses and a 90-day trend. It does not publish how it collects the answers or how often. That is enough to see whether your brand comes up, and not enough to see which of your pages gets cited.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith tracks ten engines, with ChatGPT on Pro, Perplexity added on Grow, Gemini added on Scale and all ten on Enterprise. It reports mention rate, citation rate, share of voice and sentiment, shows which of your pages the engines cite, and lists which competitor pages win the citations for your prompts.
Drafting and grading
In a Clearscope vs Profound match-up on grading, Clearscope wins, and on this axis Profound is not really competing. The Content Grade is what Clearscope was built for, and reviewers repeatedly praise the editor and the term suggestions. Its AI Term Presence view adds which terms show up in Gemini and ChatGPT responses for the query you are targeting. Whether using those terms improves AI citations is a claim from the vendor, and it is hard to check from outside.
Profound writes where Clearscope grades. Its agents draft full articles from live citation data and a Brand Kit, refresh existing pages, and score content with a Content Optimizer. Its pages call the output drafts ready for human review, with an approval step before publishing, although it also describes the content as publish-ready in minutes.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith produces the whole article instead of scoring one that someone else wrote. Keyword coverage, heading structure, schema markup, internal linking and metadata are part of the writing pipeline, and AEO formatting such as crisp answers near the top and clear headings is built in. The draft arrives in your stored brand voice with live web research behind it.
Pricing and value
Clearscope is the easier one to price. Essentials is $129 a month with 50 tracked queries, 20 Topic Explorations, 20 Drafts and 50 Content Inventory pages. Business is $399 with 300 tracked queries and 300 pages, but the same 20 Drafts. Extra Drafts and pages are add-ons. Monthly plans have no minimum contract, and there is a 14-day trial.
Profound publishes no dollar price for paid plans. You get a seven-day Trial with 50 prompts that cannot be customized, then a quote. Agent work runs on credits that depend on how complex the run is, so cost is hard to forecast. Reviewers on G2 describe it as expensive. A third-party review reports agency pricing, but the first-party pages we hold do not confirm it, so we leave it out.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith publishes four plans at $99, $199 and $399 a month plus custom Enterprise, or $80, $160 and $299 billed annually. Each plan includes a fixed monthly article allowance and a set number of tracked prompts, so tracking and writing come from one price. There is a 7-day free trial with real data and real drafts, and no long-term contracts or cancellation fees.
Data access and security
Profound has the broader enterprise package. It lists SOC 2 Type II, SAML and OIDC single sign-on, SCIM, a REST API, CSV and JSON exports and an MCP server, though the API and SSO are Enterprise only. Clearscope lists SSO on Enterprise. Its pages describe no public API, MCP server or security page, and SOC 2, ISO 27001 and a data processing agreement could not be verified publicly. A security review at a larger company would stop there.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith is SOC 2, GDPR and ISO certified. Its REST API and MCP server give read-only access to visibility data, the Content Map, the content library and Deep IQ assets, and signed webhooks notify your own systems when content changes status.
From insight to action
This is where Profound vs Clearscope for AI search gets decided. Profound closes the loop with agents. Citation Decay queues pages that are losing citations and hands them to an agent to draft an update, and approved drafts publish to a CMS. Clearscope stops at the draft. It flags where your terms fall short, tells you which queries mention competitors and not you, and leaves the decision about what to write and the writing itself to your team. For that reason Profound is the stronger answer to the question in the title, and a grader alone covers the measurement side only lightly.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith turns each gap into a finished article through one loop. Content Map shows the topics where a competitor publishes more than you do, Opportunity Agents return ideas with their evidence, New Ideas become Planned Content, and Autowrite writes them on schedule. Repurpose then produces the social posts and channel versions in the same voice, so distribution is part of the same step.
Which should you choose
- DeepSmith fits content and marketing teams, and agencies, that want to see where they are missing in AI answers and then produce the articles that close those gaps, with brand voice and product context applied every time and a published price.
- Profound fits enterprise and agency teams that need the widest engine coverage, crawler analytics and security paperwork, and can run a sales process and manage agent credits.
- Clearscope fits teams whose writers already produce the drafts and mainly want term-based grading and refresh monitoring inside Google Docs or WordPress, with basic mention tracking included.
If you are weighing the two, start a trial of the one that matches your bottleneck and compare it against a real article you plan to publish. Start your DeepSmith free trial and see tracking and production work from the same data.
