Profound and Conductor both track how AI engines answer questions about your brand and both write content, but Profound publishes approved articles straight to a CMS while Conductor's content work ends at the draft and its weight sits in always-on technical site monitoring. Neither publishes a dollar price. DeepSmith tracks and publishes on public prices, with Autowrite writing each planned article on its scheduled date and self-serve plans from $99 a month.
If you're comparing Profound vs Conductor, the first thing to sort out is what your AI search problem actually is. Some teams have a content problem. They can see the prompts they lose, but the articles that would fix it take weeks to write, review and move into the CMS. Other teams have a site problem, where the pages exist but rendering errors or blocked AI bots keep them from being picked up. Profound leans toward the first and Conductor toward the second, and each covers some of the other. DeepSmith sits on the content side and adds public pricing. The facts below come from each vendor's own pages and public reviews as of September 2026.
Profound vs Conductor: the short answer
- Choose DeepSmith if you want AI visibility tracking and publish-ready articles on one self-serve plan, from $99 a month, with Autowrite writing planned pieces on their dates and publishing to your CMS.
- Choose Profound if your gap is turning AI visibility data into content that reaches the CMS, and you can buy a sales-led, credit-based Enterprise package.
- Choose Conductor if your gap is technical site health, with 24/7 monitoring, AEO checks and AI crawler analysis, and you're fine moving finished content into the CMS yourself.
| DeepSmith | Profound | Conductor | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price (monthly) | $99/mo (Pro) | Not published | Not published |
| Annual price | $80/mo billed yearly | Not published | Not published |
| Free trial | 7 days | 7 days | 3 weeks |
| Engines at entry tier | 1 (ChatGPT) | 3 on the Trial | Not listed |
| Most engines on any plan | 10 (Enterprise) | Up to 9 (Enterprise) | 8, plan access not listed |
| Citation tracking | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Competitor benchmarking | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Writes full articles | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Publishes directly to a CMS | Yes | Yes | No |
| Repurposes articles into channel formats | Yes | Yes | Partial |
| AI crawler analytics | - | Yes, from server logs | Yes, Enterprise included |
| Technical site audit | - | Yes | Yes |
| MCP server | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| G2 rating | 4.8/5 | 4.5/5 | 4.5/5 |
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. It was founded in 2024 in New York and has raised $334.5 million, and it says a third of the Fortune 100 trust it. It's built for enterprise and mid-market marketing, SEO and content teams, and for agencies, that want deep analytics plus agents that act on the data.
The standout is how much of the path from data to published page sits inside one product. Profound's Agents draft briefs and full articles from brand context and citation data, and approved drafts publish to WordPress, Sanity, Contentful, Webflow and other CMSs. Its Agent Analytics reads server and CDN logs to show which AI crawlers visit your site.
The real limitation is access. Paid pricing isn't public, agent use consumes credits, and seven of the nine listed engines, the API and SSO are Enterprise only. The free Trial lasts seven days, covers three engines and 50 prompts, and keeps no answer history. Profound's pages describe agent output as drafts ready for human review, with an approval step before anything publishes.
G2 shows 4.5/5 from 1,130 reviews (checked September 29, 2026). Reviewers praise the visibility and citation analytics and the competitor benchmarking, and some call the product expensive or report a learning curve.
Conductor
Conductor is an enterprise SEO and AEO platform founded in 2006 in New York. It sells four connected products: Intelligence for AI search and keyword reporting, Creator for drafting and scoring, Monitoring for 24/7 technical and AEO site checks, and AgentStack for the MCP server, APIs and agents. It's built for large and mid-to-large SEO, content and web teams that want AI visibility reporting in the same system as their keyword, analytics and technical data.
The standout is Monitoring. It crawls continuously, flags issues such as JavaScript rendering mismatches, weak semantic HTML and AI robot directives, and ranks problems by business impact. Log file analysis separates OpenAI, Perplexity, Anthropic and Meta bots. Conductor tracks eight engines, including Grok, and its security page lists SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and ISO 42001.
The real limitation is on the publishing side. Conductor's Writing Assistant FAQ says final publishing remains in your CMS, so the content work ends at a scored draft. Drafts are capped at 60 a year on Essentials and 180 on Growth, and Enterprise is listed at 600 or Custom. Prices aren't published, and neither is which engines come with which plan.
G2 shows 4.5/5 from 788 reviews and Capterra shows 4.7/5 from 118. TrustRadius shows 9.3/10 from 393 (all checked September 30, 2026). Reviewers praise the support and training, and some say the price is hard to justify for smaller teams and that the breadth brings a learning curve.
DeepSmith: the alternative that tracks and publishes on public prices
Profound and Conductor leave different gaps for the same reader. Profound covers tracking, writing and CMS publishing, but the work arrives as drafts behind an approval step and runs on credits under a sales-led contract. Conductor covers tracking, drafting and monitoring, and someone on your team still has to move the finished piece into the CMS. If you want the loop from AI answer to published article to run on a plan with a price you can read, that's the part DeepSmith is built for.
DeepSmith tracks and produces in one platform. The AI Visibility module checks the questions you define on a schedule and reports mention rate, citation rate and share of voice, with a per-platform breakdown and a competitor leaderboard. The Pages view shows which of your pages AI actually cites. Opportunity Agents turn that data into content ideas, each carrying the data point that justifies it. The Writer then turns a planned idea into a finished article with internal and external links, a cover image and publish-ready metadata, grounded in Deep IQ, which stores your brand voice, personas and products.
The output is publish-ready, not a first draft to rescue. With Autowrite, a planned article writes itself on its scheduled date and lands in Produced Content, and you can publish it straight to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful, or send it to your own webhooks.
Pricing is public. Pro is $99 a month for 50 tracked prompts, 20 articles a month and five seats, Grow is $199 with 40 articles, and Scale is $399 with 90 articles. Annual billing brings those to $80, $160 and $299 a month. Pro tracks ChatGPT, Grow adds Perplexity, Scale adds Gemini, and Enterprise covers all ten engines. There's a 7-day free trial and no long-term contract, and DeepSmith is rated 4.8/5 on G2.
Engine coverage and data method
Engine coverage is close to a tie, and Profound gives the clearer picture of what each plan includes.
Profound's pricing grid lists nine engines on Enterprise: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Claude, Google AI Overviews and Exa Search. The free Trial covers three, which are ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. Exa Search is a search API used by AI tools rather than a consumer chat assistant, so I'd treat it as a bonus and not a ninth chat engine. Grok and Meta AI appear on other Profound pages but not in the plan grid, so whether you can buy them is unclear.
Conductor tracks eight engines, with ChatGPT tracked in two modes, Auto and Search, which makes nine tracked surfaces. The list includes Grok, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, Perplexity and both Google AI Overviews and AI Mode. Conductor doesn't publish which engines come with which plan, so you'd confirm that in a quote.
The data method differs too. Profound says it queries the consumer interfaces through the browser instead of using API outputs. Conductor says it uses official engine APIs wherever possible. Neither claim has been independently audited, and an API answer may not match what a person sees in the app, so it's worth asking each vendor how they sample. Both let you set location and language, and Conductor also lets you choose daily, weekly or monthly runs.
Citation and competitor analysis
Profound is ahead on the depth of its citation and competitor analysis, while Conductor ties its version to more of your search data.
Profound shows every cited URL per prompt and sorts sources into Owned, Competitor, Earned Media, PR Wire, Social and Institution. It also reports Visibility Rank, which is where your brand sits among the brands mentioned, along with sentiment themes, a FactCheck feature and query fan-outs. Prompt Volumes adds modeled demand data from licensed consumer panels, though Profound's own pages quote different corpus sizes, so I wouldn't lean on one number.
Conductor tracks mentions and citations, a Top Cited Page for each topic, and a Pages report that lists the prompts citing each page. Share of voice can be mention-based or citation-based, and sentiment gets a 1 to 10 score grouped by business driver. Tracked competitors run from 5 on Essentials to 25 on Growth and 75 or more on Enterprise. Conductor's pages don't describe tracking where your brand ranks inside an answer. The upside is that AI referral sessions, conversions and revenue from Google Analytics 4 or Adobe Analytics sit in the same Pages view as keyword rankings.
What DeepSmith does: The Competitors view ranks tracked competitors by citation rate and lists their most-cited pages, and each one opens to mention rate, prompt coverage and citation rate per engine. The Content Map adds unlimited competitor sites, so you can see the topics where a competitor publishes and you have nothing, and Opportunity Agents turn those gaps into ideas that carry their evidence.
Site monitoring and crawler analytics
Conductor wins on continuous site health, and Profound covers crawler analytics but not continuous site monitoring.
Conductor Monitoring crawls up to 100,000 pages on Essentials, 500,000 on Growth, and sites of any size on Enterprise. Alerts carry High, Mid or Low priority and can go to Slack or Microsoft Teams. It advertises up to 60 months of website-change history, which is a record of page changes and not of AI answers. Log File Analysis is included on Enterprise and marked "Available" on Essentials and Growth, and the pricing page doesn't say whether that means a paid add-on.
Profound's Agent Analytics reads server or CDN logs from providers such as Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly and Vercel, verifies real AI bots, and ties AI referrals to conversions. It also audits robots.txt, shows what bots see on each page, and offers Dynamic Bot Rendering for customers on CloudFront, Cloudflare or Vercel. Setup usually needs developer or infrastructure permissions, which is worth planning for.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith's plans don't include crawler log analytics or site monitoring. Its tracking reports which of your pages AI actually cites and which prompts drive those citations, and the Content Map re-checks sitemaps every 24 hours so you can see where your coverage is thin. The pages you write next come from that evidence.
Pricing and value
Neither vendor publishes a price, so this is a tie on transparency, with Conductor ahead on trial length.
Profound's public pricing page offers a free Trial and a custom Enterprise package. The Trial runs seven days with 50 prompts you can't customize, three engines, one region and one language, limited AI Marketer credits, and no answer history, exports or API. Agent runs consume credits, higher credit thresholds require an Enterprise package, and overage billing is optional but unpriced. Reviewers describe Profound as expensive.
Conductor names three plans, Essentials, Growth and Enterprise, with usage allowances but no dollar amounts. Essentials and Growth list 2,500 AI Search credits a year, and the cost per response runs from 0.1 credits for Google AI Overviews and AI Mode to 2 for ChatGPT Search and Gemini, so your engine mix changes how many answers you can track. The free trial lasts three weeks with no credit card, though the credits it includes aren't stated. Conductor's published US terms from May 2024 make fees noncancellable and nonrefundable by default, with automatic renewal unless you give 90 days' notice, and an order form can change that. Profound's subscription agreement also points to the order form for fees and limits.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith publishes every plan. Pro is $99, Grow is $199 and Scale is $399 a month, with article allowances of 20, 40 and 90, and you can see them before talking to anyone. Plans are self-serve, so you can start on the 7-day trial and move to a plan with no long-term contract.
From insight to action
Profound wins on getting content from AI visibility data into the CMS.
Profound's content agents cover research-to-article, brief creation and content refreshes, grounded in Brand Kits and Context Manager. CMS nodes publish approved drafts to WordPress, Sanity, Contentful, Webflow, Framer, Payload, Drupal, Directus, Basehub and Adobe Experience Manager, and Agents can also turn articles into channel formats such as LinkedIn and newsletter cutdowns. Profound frames the output as ready for human review, and its pages say every run includes an approval step before publishing.
Conductor's AEO Recommendations rank actions by the signals behind them and link into the Writing Assistant, which produces outlines and drafts with a Content Score, Content Profiles for voice and tone, up to five Knowledge Sources per draft, and internal link suggestions. The Drupal integration gives guidance inside the editor before you publish. The Writing Assistant FAQ is plain that final publishing stays in your CMS, and channel repurposing is limited to image briefs and video scripts. On the data side, Conductor's MCP server is included on all three plans, and its Data API is included on Enterprise.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith closes the loop in one platform. Opportunity Agents name the gap and the data behind it, the Writer produces the article, Autowrite does it on the scheduled date, and Produced Content publishes to your CMS. Every finished article arrives with social posts already written, and the Apps Library turns it into LinkedIn, X, Medium, Substack, email and other native versions in the same brand voice. Because the output is publish-ready, your review goes to editorial judgment and not to rework.
Which should you choose
- DeepSmith: Marketing teams that want to see where they're missing in AI answers and have the articles that close the gap written, linked and published, on a self-serve plan with a price they can read and no sales call.
- Profound: Enterprise and mid-market teams, and agencies, that want deep AI answer analytics with agents that publish approved drafts to a CMS, and can work through a sales-led package with credit-based usage.
- Conductor: Large SEO and web teams with big sites who care most about continuous technical monitoring, AI crawler analysis and keeping AI visibility next to keyword and analytics data, and who are fine publishing from their own CMS.
If your problem is mostly about content that reaches the CMS, the choice between Profound or Conductor usually goes to Profound. If it's mostly about site health, Conductor is the closer match. For the Profound vs Conductor content publishing and site monitoring decision overall, DeepSmith covers the content side with prices you can check today.
You can try DeepSmith free for 7 days and see real tracking data and real drafts before you pay.
