Profound is a dedicated AI visibility platform with AI referral attribution, query fan-out and content agents, sold through a custom Enterprise package. SE Ranking AI Visibility is the AI tracking inside an SEO suite, with a public price from $129 a month, and it does not attribute AI referral traffic or show fan-out. DeepSmith is a strong alternative for teams that want tracking and publish-ready writing on one self-serve plan from $99 a month.
When you compare Profound vs SE Ranking AI Visibility, the real question is what you want to measure. If you want to know how often AI engines name your brand, both tools can tell you. If you want to know how much traffic those engines actually send you, only one of them does that today. Below we cover pricing, engines, features and a buying verdict, and we place DeepSmith next to both, because it tracks citations and also writes the pages that earn them.
Profound vs SE Ranking AI Visibility: the short answer
- Choose DeepSmith if you want AI visibility tracking and publish-ready articles in one platform, on self-serve plans from $99 a month with a 7-day free trial and no long-term contracts.
- Choose Profound if you need AI referral traffic attribution and query fan-out, you are an enterprise or mid-market team, and a sales-led, credit-based package is fine.
- Choose SE Ranking AI Visibility if you already run SEO in a full suite and want AI prompt tracking at a public price, starting at $129 a month on the Core plan, with API and MCP access on every plan.
Comparison table
| Criterion | DeepSmith | Profound | SE Ranking AI Visibility |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price (monthly) | $99 (Pro) | Free 7-day Trial; paid plans custom | $129 (Core, full suite) |
| Annual price (per month) | $80 (Pro) | Custom | $103.20 (Core) |
| Prompts at entry tier | 50 | 50 (Trial, 7 days) | 100 daily |
| Engines at entry tier | 1 (ChatGPT) | 3 (Trial) | 5 |
| Most engines on any plan | 10 (Enterprise) | Up to 9 (Enterprise) | 5 |
| Free trial | 7 days | 7 days | 14 days, no credit card |
| Citation tracking | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| AI referral traffic attribution | - | Yes | No |
| Query fan-out | - | Yes | No |
| Writes full articles | Yes | Yes | Partial |
| Publishes to a CMS | Yes | Yes | Partial |
| API and MCP | Yes | Yes, API Enterprise only | Yes, every plan |
| SOC 2 | Yes | Yes | Not listed |
| Review rating | 4.8/5 on G2 | 4.5/5 on G2 | 4.7/5 on G2 (whole suite) |
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 answer engines mention and cite a brand. It was founded in 2024 in New York and has raised $334.5 million. It is built for enterprise and mid-market marketing, SEO, content and brand teams, and for agencies, that want deep analytics plus agents that act on them.
The standout is breadth. It reports visibility, rank, share of voice, URL-level citations, sentiment and query fan-outs, and it reads server or CDN logs to show AI crawler visits and to attribute human visitors from AI platforms to conversions. Its agents draft briefs and full articles and publish approved drafts to CMSs such as WordPress, Sanity, Contentful and Webflow.
The limits are mostly about buying. Paid pricing is not public, the free Trial runs seven days with 50 fixed prompts on three engines, and agent use consumes credits that are hard to forecast. Seven of the nine Enterprise engines, the API and SSO sit on the Enterprise package only. Crawler analytics also needs a CDN or log integration, which usually means a developer.
Reviewers on G2 gave it 4.5/5 from 1,130 reviews when we checked in September 2026. They praise the visibility and citation analytics, and they complain about price and a learning curve.
SE Ranking AI Visibility
SE Ranking is an SEO platform founded in 2013, and its AI Search Toolkit tracks how a brand is mentioned, linked and positioned in answers from Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. It is built for SEO teams and agencies that already run, or want, a full suite with rank tracking and audits next to the AI data.
The standout is that AI tracking comes inside the entry suite price. Core is $129 a month ($103.20 billed annually) and includes 100 prompts tracked daily, and the 14-day trial needs no credit card. API and MCP access come with every plan, and the Sources tab shows cited domains and pages with recommendations. It also tracks paid ads in ChatGPT and AI Mode answers.
The limits sit in what is missing or split across products. Claude and Microsoft Copilot are not tracked. Query fan-out analysis and GA4-based AI Traffic Analytics are both marked coming soon, and sentiment lives in the separate SE Visible product. The packaging is also hard to read, with suite plans counted in daily prompts and the AI Search add-on counted in monthly checks. No SOC 2 or SSO is stated on its pages.
Its G2 rating is 4.7/5 from 1,606 reviews, but that covers the whole SE Ranking suite and not the AI product alone.
DeepSmith: the alternative that tracks and writes
Both tools above stop at a different point on the way from a measurement to a published page. SE Ranking AI Visibility tells you where you are named and cited, and its writing and CMS features belong to the wider suite and are not tied to the AI data. Profound does connect the two with its agents, and it does that through a sales-led package where agent work runs on credits and sits behind an approval step. Neither gives a small team a single self-serve plan where tracking and writing share one set of data.
DeepSmith is an AI search analytics and content production platform in one. Its AEO module reports mention rate, citation rate and share of voice, and its Pages view shows which of your pages AI cites and the prompts behind each one. Competitor citations show who wins those prompts and on which exact pages. From there, Opportunity Agents turn the gaps into ideas that each carry the data point that justifies them, and the Writer turns a planned idea into a finished, brand-grounded article, researched, linked and published with a cover image and metadata. Deep IQ holds your brand context so each article is written with it. Output is publish-ready, and Autowrite can take it all the way to published without anyone in the app, or you can review it in Produced Content and publish to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful.
The plans are public. Pro is $99 a month ($80 billed annually) with 50 tracked prompts, ChatGPT tracking and 20 articles a month. Grow is $199 with 100 prompts, ChatGPT and Perplexity, and 40 articles. Scale is $399 with 200 prompts, adds Gemini, and includes 90 articles. Enterprise is custom and covers all ten engines. DeepSmith is SOC 2, GDPR and ISO certified and rated 4.8/5 on G2, and the API and MCP server give read access to your workspace data.
Engine coverage
Profound has the wider engine list, though most of it costs more. Its Enterprise package covers up to nine engines, including Perplexity, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek and Google AI Mode, while the Trial tracks three. SE Ranking AI Visibility covers five engines on every plan that includes the tracker, including both Google surfaces, and it can set country and language per engine. It does not track Claude or Copilot, and its own pages say Claude is coming.
Both capture answers the way a person sees them, through the consumer interface, and both check tracked prompts daily. SE Ranking keeps full answer text for 30 days and presence metrics for a year, while Profound lists answer history as all time on Enterprise and none on the Trial.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith tracks ten engines, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Grok, Meta AI, Microsoft Copilot and DeepSeek, and coverage rises by plan. Pro tracks ChatGPT, Grow adds Perplexity, Scale adds Gemini, and Enterprise covers all ten.
AI referral traffic and query fan-out
On Profound vs SE Ranking AI Visibility referral traffic is the clearest split, and Profound wins it. Profound's Agent Analytics reads server or CDN logs, without a JavaScript tag, to show AI bot visits, and its Attribution and Traffic Insights measure human visitors from AI platforms and connect them to conversions through Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics. Its Query Fanouts tab shows the sub-queries an engine ran for a prompt, with the share of each and how they shift by persona.
SE Ranking AI Visibility has neither today. Its AI Traffic Analytics page is labelled coming soon, and what it offers now is an estimate of traffic potential from AI Overviews and AI Mode, which is not a count of real visits. Query fan-out analysis is also listed as coming soon. On the question that matters most in SE Ranking AI Visibility vs Profound, which one shows the traffic AI engines really send, Profound is the only one that does it now. Profound's customer stories include one about growing AI referral traffic, and that is a vendor-reported case, so treat it as an example of what the feature is for and not as a benchmark.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith's tracking reports the pages AI cites and the prompts that win those citations, so you can see which of your pages earn the mentions. It also gives you the means to act on them. For why referral numbers are hard to turn into revenue on their own, our guide on calculating content ROI from AI referrals covers the measurement side.
Citation and competitor analysis
On this axis the two are close, and Profound goes deeper. Both record which URLs answers cite, show which of your own pages earn citations, track position inside an answer, and benchmark named competitors on the same prompts. Profound adds sentiment themes, a FactCheck feature that compares AI claims about your brand with your own source of truth, and Citation Decay, which flags pages that are losing citations. SE Ranking AI Visibility adds a Sources tab with mention opportunities, competitor-only sources and one-click actions, and AI Competitor Research for up to five domains on Core and fifteen on Growth. Sentiment is only partly covered, because it sits in SE Visible.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith's Competitor citations view ranks tracked rivals by citation rate and lists their most-cited pages, so you can see the exact page that is winning a prompt you want. Those gaps feed straight into Opportunity Agents.
Pricing and value
SE Ranking AI Visibility wins on price clarity. Core is $129 a month, Growth is $279, and the AI Search add-on runs from $89 to $345 a month for 200 to 1,000 monthly checks. The standalone SE Visible product starts at $99 a month. You are buying a suite, so the AI tracking comes with keyword research, audits and backlink tools you may or may not want. Profound shows a free seven-day Trial and a custom Enterprise package, with no public dollar price for paid plans. The agency pricing is behind a toggle we could not verify, so we are not quoting a number for it. Profound's agents run on credits, and the overage rate is not published. Reviewers describe it as expensive and want more flexible pricing.
If you want the lowest verified entry cost for AI tracking alone, SE Ranking AI Visibility is the one with a number you can budget against. If you need what Profound adds, the number comes from a sales call.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith publishes four plans, from $99 a month, and each states its prompts, engines and monthly article allowance, so tracking and writing are budgeted in one line. There are no long-term contracts and no cancellation fees.
From insight to action
The A vs B answer here is that Profound closes more of the loop. Its agents draft briefs and full articles from citation data, refresh decaying pages and publish approved drafts to ten named CMSs. The output is framed as drafts for human review, with an approval step before anything goes live. SE Ranking AI Visibility has recommendations inside the tracker, and the writing tools sit in the suite, with an AI Writer, a Content Editor and a WordPress export. These are not part of the AI tracking product and are not driven by its data.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith runs the whole loop on one plan. Tracking shows the gap, Opportunity Agents return ideas with the evidence attached, the Writer produces a publish-ready article grounded in Deep IQ, and the finished piece can publish to your CMS. Our write-up on turning AI visibility gaps into a content backlog walks through that loop in more detail.
Which should you choose
- DeepSmith fits marketing teams that want to see where AI engines cite them and publish the pages that close the gaps, without stitching a tracker to a separate writing tool. It suits teams that want a public price and a 7-day trial, and it grows from ChatGPT-only tracking on Pro to all ten engines on Enterprise.
- Profound fits enterprise and mid-market teams that must measure AI referral traffic and conversions, want query fan-out, and have the budget and the infrastructure access for a sales-led, credit-based package.
- SE Ranking AI Visibility fits SEO teams and agencies that already live in a full SEO suite and want AI prompt tracking at a public price next to rank tracking, with API and MCP on every plan.
If you are still deciding, our best AI visibility tools list covers more options.
Ready to see tracking and writing on one plan? Start a free DeepSmith trial.
