Profound and the Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit both track how AI engines mention and cite a brand. Profound adds agents that draft and publish content on credits under a custom contract, while the Semrush toolkit measures and recommends for $99 a month and does not write. Profound fits larger teams that buy through sales, and the toolkit fits teams already working in Semrush. DeepSmith is a strong alternative on one axis, tracking and publish-ready writing on one self-serve plan with public prices from $99 a month.
Teams that already run SEO in Semrush tend to reach this decision when leadership asks what the plan is for AI search. Profound vs Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit for Semrush users comes down to whether the reports inside the suite you already pay for are enough, or whether you want agents that research, write and publish from the same data. Both measure mentions and citations across AI engines. They differ on engine coverage, on how they charge, and on what happens after the report. DeepSmith is a third route that pairs tracking with a Writer on public plans.
Profound vs Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit: the short answer
- Choose DeepSmith if you want AI visibility tracking and publish-ready articles on one self-serve plan, with a published price from $99 a month and a fixed monthly article allowance.
- Choose Profound if you are an enterprise or mid-market team that can buy through sales, wants up to nine engines, and is ready to run content agents on credits.
- Choose the Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit if your team already works in Semrush, wants a $99 standalone price, and plans to write the content somewhere else.
Side-by-side comparison
| Criterion | DeepSmith | Profound | Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price (monthly) | $99/mo (Pro) | Not public; Enterprise is custom | $99/mo (standalone) |
| Annual price | $80/mo (Pro) | Custom | Not listed |
| Free trial | Yes, 7 days | Yes, 7 days | Partial, only through Semrush One |
| Prompts at entry tier | 50 | 50 on the Trial; custom on Enterprise | 25 |
| Engines at entry tier | 1 (ChatGPT) | 3 on the Trial | 5, varies by report |
| Most engines on any plan | 10 (Enterprise) | Up to 9 (Enterprise) | 5 on the toolkit |
| Citation tracking | Yes | Yes, URL level | Yes |
| Competitor benchmarking | Yes | Yes | Yes, up to four competitors |
| Content generation | Yes | Yes | No |
| CMS publishing | Yes | Yes | Not listed |
| White-label reporting | - | Partial | Yes |
| Public API | Yes, read-only | Yes, Enterprise only | Partial |
| Security certifications | SOC 2, GDPR, ISO | SOC 2 Type II | Not listed |
| Review rating | 4.8/5 on G2 | 4.5/5 on G2 | 4.4/5 on G2 (Semrush 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, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and other answer engines mention and cite a brand. It then uses an AI Marketer and a set of Agents to research, draft, optimize and publish content from that data. It is built for enterprise and mid-market marketing, SEO and content teams, plus agencies, that want deep analytics and can buy through a sales-led, credit-based package.
The standout is how much sits in one place. Profound reports visibility, rank, share of voice, URL-level citations, sentiment and query fan-outs, and it adds Prompt Volumes demand data and server-log crawler analytics. The Agents can publish approved drafts to WordPress, Sanity, Contentful, Webflow and several other CMSs.
The main limit is cost and clarity. Profound's pricing page shows a free seven-day Trial and a custom Enterprise package, and no price for paid plans. Agent runs use credits, and the overage rate is not stated. Seven of the nine listed engines are Enterprise only. On review sites, Profound is rated 4.5/5 on G2 from 1,130 reviews (checked September 2026). Reviewers praise the visibility and competitor analytics, and some call it expensive or mention a learning curve.
Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit
The Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit sits inside the Semrush platform and measures how often ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini and Perplexity mention and cite a brand. It is sold standalone at $99 a month, or bundled in Semrush One from $199 to $549 a month. Semrush has been owned by Adobe since April 2026. It suits SEO and marketing teams that already use Semrush.
The standout is the research database. Semrush says its reports run on 317M+ prompts, so you can benchmark any domain without building a tracking campaign first. Prompt Tracking runs daily and shows average position next to your Google rankings, and Competitor Research compares you with up to four rivals.
The real limit is that the toolkit does not write or optimize content, and the standalone plan is small, with 25 tracked prompts, one Brand Performance domain, and a separate $99 license for each extra user. Ratings cover Semrush as a whole, not this toolkit. Semrush is rated 4.4/5 on G2 from 4,046 reviews (checked September 2026), and suite reviewers often describe pricing and add-ons as expensive for smaller teams.
DeepSmith: the alternative that tracks and writes on one self-serve plan
Neither tool in this comparison gives a Semrush customer both halves of the job on terms they can see up front. The Semrush toolkit reports and recommends but does not write, so the content gets made somewhere else. Profound does write and publish, but its agents run on credits under a custom contract, with no public price for paid plans.
DeepSmith tracks and produces in one platform. The AEO module checks the questions you define on a schedule and reports mention rate, citation rate, share of voice, sentiment, the pages AI cites, and which competitor pages win citations. Opportunity Agents then turn that data into content ideas, each one carrying the data point behind it. The Writer takes a planned idea and produces a finished, publish-ready article that is researched, internally and externally linked, and comes with a cover image and metadata. Deep IQ stores your product, personas and brand voice, so every article is grounded in them, and Autowrite can take an article all the way to published on its scheduled date. Produced Content publishes straight to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful, or to your own webhooks.
The price is on the page. Pro is $99 a month ($80 billed annually) with 20 articles, 50 tracked prompts and 5 seats. Grow is $199 with 40 articles and 100 prompts, and Scale is $399 with 90 articles and 200 prompts. There is a 7-day free trial and no long-term contract. DeepSmith is rated 4.8/5 on G2.
Engine coverage
In the Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit vs Profound comparison, Profound is ahead on engine coverage, though mostly on its Enterprise package. Enterprise tracks up to nine engines: 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. Profound's other pages name Grok and Meta AI too, but the pricing page does not list them, so it is unclear whether you can buy them.
The Semrush toolkit covers five engines, and which ones depends on the report. Perplexity appears only in Brand Performance, and Google AI Overviews is not listed there. Claude, Microsoft Copilot, Grok, Meta AI and DeepSeek are not tracked by the self-serve toolkit. Semrush says its Enterprise AIO covers 10 LLMs but does not name them.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith covers ten engines: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Grok, Meta AI, Microsoft Copilot and DeepSeek. Coverage rises by plan, with Pro on ChatGPT, Grow adding Perplexity, Scale adding Gemini, and Enterprise covering all ten.
Tracking depth and data method
Profound has the deeper tracking. It runs each prompt daily by default and stores the full answer, and it reports visibility rank, URL-level citations sorted into source types, sentiment themes and the sub-queries an engine ran. It says it collects data from the consumer interfaces of each engine through the browser, not from API outputs.
Semrush is stronger as a research tool, and that is useful when you want a quick read on a market before you set up tracking. Its Visibility Overview, Competitor Research and Prompt Research reports work on any domain from a shared database that Semrush says is captured from real requests, not API calls. Prompt Tracking is daily, but Brand Performance sentiment and share of voice refresh weekly. Semrush does not describe fan-out tracking, and it does not state how long answer history is kept.
The two methods are hard to compare directly, because neither vendor publishes sampling details. Since AI answers vary from run to run, it helps to judge either tool by trends over several weeks, not by one day's score.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith checks your tracked prompts on a schedule and keeps the full answer history for each one. It shows which of your own pages AI cites and the share of your citations each page earns, and a competitor leaderboard ranks tracked rivals by citation rate.
Pricing and value
Semrush wins on published pricing, and Profound wins on what is included at the top end. The Semrush toolkit lists $99 a month, though it is not stated whether that needs annual billing, and the add-ons add up. Another 50 prompts cost $60 a month, another domain or location costs $99 a month, and each extra user needs a $99 license. Semrush One bundles start at $199.
Profound has no public price for paid plans. Enterprise is custom and credit-based, with an AI Marketer credit amount set per contract and an overage rate that is not stated. Profound lists an Agency Growth plan with 400 credits per client workspace each month, but no verified price. That makes cost hard to forecast, and some reviewers call Profound expensive. For a team that already pays for Semrush, the toolkit is also the smaller change to the budget, since the team already knows the platform.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith publishes four plans and the price of each. Pro at $99 a month includes 20 articles, 50 tracked prompts and 5 seats, so tracking and a fixed article allowance sit on one bill. Enterprise is the only custom plan.
Reporting and platform access
This axis is a split. Semrush is ahead on white-label reporting, with branding and white-labeling through the $20 Pro Report add-on. Profound is partial there, offering client-ready sharing but no described white-label branding. Profound is ahead on data access and security, with a REST API on Enterprise, an MCP server, and SOC 2 Type II. The Semrush API does not document AI visibility endpoints, and SOC 2 is not mentioned for the toolkit.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith is SOC 2, GDPR and ISO certified, and its read-only REST API and 23-tool MCP server expose visibility, Content Map and content data. DeepSmith's plans don't list white-label reporting, and Multi-Workspace keeps each brand or client isolated with its own context, content and plan.
From insight to action
Profound wins this one. Its Agents draft briefs and full articles from live citation data and brand context, and publish approved drafts to a CMS, with an approval step before anything goes live. Profound describes the output as ready for human review. The Semrush toolkit gives AI-generated insights and strategic opportunities, but it does not write content, and the knowledge base points to other toolkits for that. Content briefs, page rewrites and CMS publishing are described only for the separate Enterprise AIO or other Semrush tools.
For a Semrush customer, this is the real fork. With the toolkit, the report is the end of the job and the writing happens elsewhere. With Profound, the report feeds agents, at a credit-based price.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith closes the loop on a public plan. Tracking shows the gap, Opportunity Agents return ideas with the evidence attached, and the Writer produces the publish-ready article. You can review it in Produced Content and publish, or let Autowrite run it hands-off.
Which should you choose
- DeepSmith: for a marketing team that wants to see where it shows up in AI answers and publish the content that closes the gaps, without a sales process. It suits teams that value a published price and a fixed monthly article allowance, and agencies that need separate workspaces per client.
- Profound: for an enterprise or mid-market team that can run a sales-led, credit-based contract and wants the widest engine coverage, crawler analytics and prompt demand data. Between the two, it is the better fit when you want agents acting on the data.
- Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit: for a team already inside Semrush that mainly needs measurement, white-label reports and rankings side by side with Google, and has writers or another tool for content. Between the two, it is the cheaper way in at $99 a month.
Start a free DeepSmith trial to see tracking and publish-ready writing on one plan.
