HubSpot AEO is a $50 a month beta tracker for ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, and Profound is a sales-led enterprise platform that tracks up to nine engines and runs content agents. HubSpot AEO suits teams that want a cheap start, especially inside Marketing Hub, and Profound suits large programs that can buy through a sales team. DeepSmith is a strong alternative on one axis: it tracks AI answers and also writes and publishes the content on one self-serve plan from $99 a month.
Profound vs HubSpot AEO mostly comes down to scale and to what happens after the tracking data arrives. HubSpot AEO launched in April 2026, is still labelled beta, and tracks three engines for a published $50 a month. Profound tracks up to nine engines on its Enterprise package, adds server-log crawler analytics and content agents, and sells through a sales team. Below we compare the two on price, engines, tracking depth and the step from insight to action, and we place DeepSmith as a third option for teams that want tracking and writing on one plan.
Profound vs HubSpot AEO: the short answer
- Choose DeepSmith if you want AI visibility tracking, article writing and publishing to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful on one self-serve plan, from $99 a month with a 7-day free trial.
- Choose HubSpot AEO if you want the lowest published entry price, $50 a month for three engines and 25 prompts, or you already pay for Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise.
- Choose Profound if you need the broader engine list, server-log crawler analytics, SSO and an API, and you can buy through a sales-led, credit-based package.
| Criterion | DeepSmith | Profound | HubSpot AEO |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price (monthly) | $99/mo (Pro) | Custom quote (Enterprise) | $50/mo |
| Annual price (per month) | $80/mo | Custom | $45/mo |
| Prompts at entry tier | 50 | Custom (50 on the 7-day Trial) | 25 |
| Engines at entry tier | ChatGPT | 3 (Trial only) | 3 |
| Most engines on any plan | 10 (Enterprise) | Up to 9 (Enterprise) | 3 |
| Free trial | 7 days | 7 days | 28 days, no card |
| Citation tracking | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Competitor benchmarking | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Content generation | Yes | Yes | Partial, Marketing Hub only |
| CMS publishing | Yes | Yes | Partial, HubSpot blog only |
| API access | Yes, read-only | Yes, Enterprise only | Partial, beta read API |
| MCP server | Yes | Yes | Partial |
| SOC 2 report | Yes | Yes | Yes, platform level |
| Review rating | 4.8/5 on G2 | 4.5/5 on G2 | 4.4/5 on G2 |
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 answer engines mention and cite a brand. It was founded in 2024 in New York and has announced $334.5 million in funding, including a $180 million Series D in September 2026. It is built for enterprise and mid-market marketing, SEO and content teams, and for agencies, that want deep analytics and agents that act on them.
The standout is the depth of the tracking. Profound reports visibility score and rank, share of voice, URL-level citations, sentiment, query fan-outs and a FactCheck feature, and it runs each tracked prompt daily. Around that it sells Prompt Volumes demand data and Agent Analytics, which reads server or CDN logs to see AI crawler visits. The real limitation is access. Paid pricing is not public, seven of the nine listed engines are Enterprise only, and agent use consumes credits that are hard to forecast. The free Trial lasts seven days, covers three engines and keeps no answer history.
Reviewers give it 4.5/5 on G2 from 1,130 reviews (checked September 29, 2026). They praise the visibility and citation analytics and the competitor benchmarking. Complaints center on price, a learning curve, and wanting clearer next steps from the data.
HubSpot AEO
HubSpot AEO is HubSpot's answer engine optimization tool, launched in April 2026 after HubSpot bought XFunnel in December 2025. It runs tracked prompts daily on ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity and reports a visibility score, sentiment, share of voice and citations against competitors. HubSpot sells it standalone and as a feature inside Marketing Hub Professional and Enterprise.
The standout is the price and the low barrier. Standalone costs $50 a month, or $45 billed annually, for 25 prompts and 2,500 answers a month, and it needs no other HubSpot subscription. There is a 28-day trial with no credit card. Extra capacity costs $20 a month for each 10 prompts. The limits are just as clear. It covers three engines, the product is beta, and one setup covers one owned domain. Blog drafting from a recommendation and CRM-based prompts need Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise.
On G2 it holds 4.4/5 from 145 reviews (checked September 30, 2026). Reviewers call it easy to set up and like the clear visibility and competitor view. They also name the 25-prompt cap and the missing Claude tracking, and some find the recommendations generic.
DeepSmith: the alternative that tracks and writes
For a reader choosing between these two, the gap is usually the same one. HubSpot AEO tracks, but writing a full article from a recommendation needs Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise, which starts at $800 a month billed annually plus a $3,000 onboarding fee. Profound does write, through agents on credits, but the output is framed as a draft for human review on a custom-priced package. In both cases you either pay for a larger suite or go through a sales process to get from tracking to published content.
DeepSmith puts both halves on one self-serve plan. AI Visibility tracks mention rate, citation rate, share of voice and sentiment, shows which of your pages AI cites, and ranks the competitors that win citations on your prompts. Engine coverage rises by plan: Pro tracks ChatGPT, Grow adds Perplexity, Scale adds Gemini, and Enterprise covers all ten engines, including Claude, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Grok, Meta AI, Microsoft Copilot and DeepSeek.
Opportunity Agents then read that data and return content ideas, each carrying the data point that justifies it. Content Studio takes an idea through New Ideas and Planned Content to the Writer, which produces a finished article with research, internal and external links, a cover image and publish-ready metadata, grounded in Deep IQ, the stored company, persona and voice context. Autowrite can run the whole thing on a schedule. From Produced Content you publish straight to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful, or to your own webhooks.
Plans are published. Pro is $99 a month ($80 billed annually) with 50 tracked prompts and 20 articles a month. Grow is $199 with 100 prompts and 40 articles, and Scale is $399 with 200 prompts and 90 articles. Enterprise is custom. There is a 7-day free trial and no long-term contract. DeepSmith is SOC 2, GDPR and ISO certified and is rated 4.8/5 on G2.
Engine coverage
Profound wins on engine coverage. Its pricing page lists up to nine engines on Enterprise: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Claude, Google AI Overviews and Exa Search. Exa is a search API used by AI agents more than a consumer chat assistant, so it is worth counting as a slightly different kind of engine. Grok and Meta AI are named on some Profound pages but not in the plan grid, so whether you can buy them is unclear. The catch is that only ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews are on the Trial, and the other engines sit on Enterprise.
HubSpot AEO tracks ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity on every plan and nothing else. Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Copilot and Claude are not listed, and G2 reviewers have asked for Claude. For a team whose buyers mostly use those three engines that may be fine, but it is a hard ceiling for anyone who wants the full picture.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith covers ten named engines, and the count rises with your plan. Enterprise tracks all ten, and Scale already covers ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, which matches HubSpot AEO's list. Moving up a tier adds engines to the same reports.
Tracking depth and data method
In HubSpot AEO vs Profound on tracking depth, Profound wins too. It records every cited URL per prompt and sorts sources into owned, competitor, earned media and social. It shows the sub-queries an engine ran, tracks where the brand ranks inside an answer, and checks AI claims about the brand against a source of truth with FactCheck. Profound says it collects answers from the consumer interface of each engine, not from model APIs. That is the vendor's own description, and it is worth confirming in a trial.
HubSpot AEO covers the core set. It reports a visibility score, sentiment on a scale from minus 100 to plus 100, share of voice, the exact answer each engine gave, and citations by domain and URL, including a list of your own most-cited pages. It does not document rank inside an answer or query fan-out. HubSpot also does not say how it collects answers, which model versions run or how long it keeps history, and the beta label means those answers may change.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith reports a per-prompt mention rate and citation rate with the full answer history, shows which of your pages are cited and what share of your citations each one holds, and lists the competitor pages that win citations on the same prompts. Opportunity Agents then turn those gaps into ideas.
Pricing and value
In HubSpot AEO vs Profound on price, HubSpot AEO wins on what is published, and by a wide margin. The standalone plan is $50 a month, adding 30 more prompts costs $60 more, and nothing else is required. The price changes once you want the writing. Marketing Hub Professional is $890 a month on monthly billing, $800 billed annually, with 25 AEO prompts included, and Enterprise starts at $3,600 a month with 50 prompts. Each generated blog post also uses 1,000 HubSpot Credits.
Profound publishes no price for paid plans. The pricing page shows a free seven-day Trial and a custom Enterprise package, and agent runs use credits whose cost depends on the work. Reviewers describe it as expensive and some ask for more flexible pricing. For a buyer, that means the real number arrives after a sales call.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith publishes every plan price, $99, $199 and $399 a month, or $80, $160 and $299 billed annually, and each plan states its monthly article allowance and tracked prompts. You can start a free trial yourself and cancel without a long-term contract.
Enterprise security and data access
Profound wins this axis. It lists SOC 2 Type II with HIPAA coverage, SSO through SAML and OIDC, SCIM provisioning, role-based access and activity logs. Enterprise adds a REST API, CSV and JSON exports and an MCP server that is an official Anthropic connector, though API access is on request and limited to Enterprise.
HubSpot's security story is at the platform level. HubSpot lists SOC 2 Type II and SAML SSO at the Enterprise tier of its suite, but its own page does not name AEO in that scope. The AEO read API is a 2026-09-beta document aimed at Marketing Hub products, and whether a standalone account qualifies is unclear. There is also a connector that lets Claude or ChatGPT read AEO data. HubSpot documents no BI connectors, Slack alerts or white-label reporting for AEO.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith is SOC 2, GDPR and ISO certified. Its read-only REST API uses scoped keys and returns visibility, Content Map, content library and Deep IQ data, and its MCP server gives AI assistants 23 read-only tools. Signed webhooks fire on content status changes, so your own systems can react to what happens in the workspace.
From insight to action
For a standalone buyer, Profound wins on turning data into work. Its AI Marketer and Agents draft briefs and full articles from citation data and brand context, refresh existing pages, and publish approved drafts to WordPress, Sanity, Contentful, Webflow and several other CMSs. The output is described as ready for human review, with an approval step before anything goes live. The trade is cost, since runs consume credits.
HubSpot AEO wins only inside Marketing Hub. There, prompts can be suggested from CRM data, and a recommendation can become a blog draft in your brand voice that opens in the HubSpot blog editor. That is a real advantage for a team that already lives in HubSpot. Outside it, recommendations stay recommendations, and a post for an external blog has to be copied and pasted.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith connects the whole loop on one plan. Tracking finds the prompts where you are missing, Opportunity Agents return ideas with their evidence, the Writer produces the article, and you publish to your CMS from the same place. Autowrite can write each article on its scheduled date, and Repurpose and Apps Library turn a finished piece into LinkedIn, X, email and other channel versions. None of it depends on a Marketing Hub tier or a custom contract.
Which should you choose: Profound or HubSpot AEO
- DeepSmith fits marketing leads who want to track AI answers and ship the content that closes the gaps from one tool. It suits teams that want published prices, a self-serve start and publish-ready articles going straight to their CMS, whether that is one brand or several workspaces.
- Profound fits large programs that need the wider engine list, crawler analytics, SSO and an API, and that have the budget and patience for a sales-led package with credit-based agents.
- HubSpot AEO fits teams that want the cheapest published way to start tracking three engines, and Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise customers who want content generation next to their CRM.
On Profound vs HubSpot AEO for enterprise AI search, the plain answer to the title is that HubSpot's beta tracker is usually not enough on its own. Three engines, 25 or 50 prompts, one domain per setup and no documented agency features are tight limits for a large program. It can still work as a starting layer for a company already on Marketing Hub Enterprise.
Ready to see tracking and writing in one place? Start a DeepSmith free trial and run your own prompts for seven days.
