Profound vs Semrush: what each costs, what each tracks, and who should buy which

What are Profound and Semrush's AI visibility tools?

Profound is a standalone AI search platform that tracks how answer engines describe your brand and then runs agents that draft and stage content to improve it. Semrush's AI visibility product is a toolkit inside a much larger SEO suite, sold alone for $99 a month or bundled into Semrush One. Both report mentions, citations and sentiment; they differ in scope, buyer and price model.

Profound was founded in August 2024 and sells mainly to large brands. In September 2026 it closed a Series D of $180 million that valued it at $1.8 billion, with Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins co-leading, and its release says it now serves over 1,000 enterprise brands. Its homepage now calls it "The AI marketing platform", and its AI Marketer is pitched as software that finds pages losing citations, rewrites them and stages the drafts in your CMS for approval. Tracking is the input; the agents are the product Profound wants you to pay for.

Semrush has been an SEO suite for years, and Adobe completed its acquisition of the company in April 2026, according to Semrush's own customer FAQ dated 28 April 2026. Its AI work sits in the AI Visibility Toolkit: a research database of more than 317 million prompts and responses, Brand Performance reports on how AI describes you, Prompt Tracking for your own prompts, and AI checks in Site Audit. For the report-by-report detail, our Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit review walks through each one and its limits.

The useful question is which buying model suits you: a specialist platform priced by quote, or an add-on to a suite your SEO team may already log into every morning.

How much do Profound and Semrush cost?

Semrush publishes prices for every self-serve option; Profound publishes one agency price and asks brands to take a demo. We read both pricing pages in a regular browser session for this comparison, since some vendors serve automated fetchers an older page, and every figure below is the US list price those pages showed.

Semrush plans with AI visibility

Semrush's SEO and AI Search pricing page lists four plans. The cheapest, called SEO, shows its AI features crossed out, so AI tracking starts at Starter. The standalone toolkit sits on a separate AI Visibility pricing tab.

Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit help page fills in the add-ons: a $60 monthly pack of 50 extra prompts, $99 a month per additional Brand Performance domain, and a $99 license for every additional user who needs access. It also says plainly that the toolkit "does not offer a free trial". The Semrush One plans carry a "Try for free" button instead, and the pricing FAQ says your card is not charged until the trial ends.

Two details changed recently and still trip up comparison articles. Advanced no longer shows a monthly price, and the plan card and the plan table disagree on its prompt count, so get the number in writing. And the SEO plan is $139.95 billed monthly, the price most "Semrush starts at" lines quote, but it no longer includes any AI tracking.

Profound plans

Profound's pricing page has a brands tab and an agencies tab. The brands tab has no dollar figure anywhere.

The trial is useful for seeing the interface and less useful for judging your own numbers. The pricing FAQ is explicit: "Trial plan users receive a recommended prompt set based on their industry and cannot customize their prompts." On Enterprise you can edit, disable or add prompts. Agents are metered in credits; the agency plan includes 400 a month per client workspace, and the FAQ says your account can either bill overage or pause when the allotment runs out.

Several top-ranking comparisons still quote a Profound Starter at $99 and a Growth plan at $399 for brands. Neither appears on Profound's pricing page now. The $399 that survives is the agency client workspace, which only an agency can buy.

What does each tool cost per tracked prompt and per 1,000 answers?

On published prices, Semrush is cheapest when you already pay for its SEO plan: the step up to Semrush One Starter works out to $1.18 a tracked prompt, or about $39 per 1,000 AI answers. Profound's agency workspace costs $3.99 a prompt but runs each prompt on three engines, which brings it to $44.33 per 1,000 answers. The standalone Semrush toolkit is the most expensive per answer.

The unit that makes tools comparable is the answer: one prompt, on one engine, on one day. Per-prompt pricing flatters whichever plan runs fewer engines. Semrush's Prompt Tracking setup asks you to choose ChatGPT Search, Google AI Mode or Gemini for each campaign, so the math below assumes each tracked prompt runs on one engine. Semrush's help pages don't say whether tracking the same prompt on a second engine uses a second slot; ask before you buy if you need two.

Two readings come out of this. If you are a Semrush SEO customer, the Starter upgrade is cheap tracking because you pay the SEO bill anyway, though dedicated trackers can still beat it per answer: Peec AI's published plans work out to roughly $16 to $21 per 1,000. If you are not, the comparison flips: the toolkit's $132 per 1,000 answers is about three times the Profound workspace rate, and you would be buying an SEO suite to get the Semrush One discount. Our AI visibility tool pricing research runs the same per-answer math across the wider market if neither number looks right.

Profound's per-answer advantage only exists on the agency plan, which is the one price it publishes. A brand buying Enterprise gets a number in a sales call. Take your prompt count and engine list into that call and ask for the cost per 1,000 answers, so the quote can sit next to the table above.

Which AI engines does each tool track?

On self-serve plans Semrush covers more engines in total, but your own tracked prompts run on just three: ChatGPT Search, Google AI Mode and Gemini. Profound's trial and agency workspaces cover three engines each, and its Enterprise plan reaches nine. Claude and Copilot are top-tier only on both sides.

The catch with Semrush is that each report has its own engine list. The research database behind Visibility Overview covers AI Mode, AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Gemini; Brand Performance adds Perplexity but refreshes weekly and uses Semrush's prompts; Prompt Tracking, the only place your own prompts run daily, offers ChatGPT Search, AI Mode or Gemini. Semrush's methodology page also names AI Overviews for Prompt Tracking while the Prompt Tracking help page does not, so check inside the product. Profound's lists are simpler but shorter at the bottom.

Profound's Enterprise list has shifted over time. Its changelog said in August 2025 that it tracked ten answer engines, including Grok and Meta AI. Today its pricing page caps Enterprise at "Up to 9 Answer Engines tracked" and its capability list names nine: ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Anthropic Claude, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek and Exa Search. Whichever nine you need, write them into the order form.

For a B2B buyer the practical gap is Perplexity and Claude. Semrush can't run your own prompts on either below Enterprise AIO. Profound's agency workspace includes Perplexity; Claude needs Profound Enterprise. If your sales team hears "I asked Claude" on discovery calls, both vendors will send you to a quote.

Where does each tool's data come from, and how fresh is it?

Semrush runs two kinds of data: a pre-built research database refreshed daily on a rolling basis, and your own tracked prompts checked daily. Profound runs your prompt set every day on the engines in your plan and adds a Prompt Volumes dataset drawn from real conversations. Both vendors warn that the same prompt can return a different answer tomorrow, so read either one as a trend line.

Semrush's prompt tracking and research data are described on its methodology page: more than 317 million prompts and responses, 117 regional databases, and responses "captured from real requests and not via any APIs of LLMs". The prompts come from AI search clickstream data and Google keyword data, grouped into topics. Brand Performance refreshes weekly; Prompt Tracking and the research reports refresh daily; Site Audit runs on demand. Prompt Tracking supports desktop results only, and Semrush says share of voice and estimated traffic are not available there.

Profound says its trial analyses 50 prompts daily and that Enterprise "includes ongoing daily tracking". Its own information page describes the conversation panel behind Prompt Volumes as hundreds of millions of opt-in conversations, and claims coverage of 30+ languages and 150+ regions, against one language and one region on the trial. Profound's help center says new agency workspaces take 24 to 48 hours to fill with data.

The meaningful difference is who writes the prompts. Semrush's research reports work on day one because Semrush chose the prompts; you type a domain and get an AI Visibility Score. That is fast, and it is also Semrush's idea of your market. Profound's trial has the same trait, since it picks your 50 prompts. On both, the numbers that matter for your pipeline are the ones from prompts you wrote yourself, which means Semrush Prompt Tracking or a Profound paid plan. For how many runs it takes before a change in mention rate is real, see our guide to measuring AI visibility.

What would a five-person team pay?

For teams, seats can matter more than prompts. Semrush includes one user on every plan and charges per extra user; its AI Visibility Toolkit needs a separate $99 license for each person who uses it. Profound lists unlimited seats on both its brand trial and Enterprise plans, and five agency seats on Agency Growth.

The help page adds a detail that matters for planning: the toolkit "cannot be shared via shared limits", so access has to be bought and assigned per person. Brand Performance campaigns are visible to everyone who holds a toolkit license; other reports have to be exported or rebuilt in My Reports. A five-person team on the standalone toolkit pays nearly $500 a month before buying a single extra prompt.

Where does each tool go deeper?

Semrush goes deeper on search: keywords, backlinks, rank tracking, site audits and AI research on any domain. Profound goes deeper on AI execution and measurement: agents that draft and stage content, AI crawler and referral analytics with CDN integrations, ChatGPT Shopping and prompt-demand data from real conversations.

The agents row is where Profound puts its weight. Semrush's self-serve plans give you diagnostics and leave the writing to your team or to its separate content tools. Profound's pitch is that the same system that spots a page losing citations should draft the fix. Whether that is worth an enterprise contract depends on whether your bottleneck is knowing what to change or having the people to change it.

The crawler row cuts in Profound's favour too. Semrush's Site Audit tells you whether AI bots are blocked; Profound's Agent Analytics, which its pricing page lists on both the trial and Enterprise columns, shows which AI agents actually visit which pages once you connect your CDN or analytics.

Worked example: a 100-prompt program (hypothetical)

This example is hypothetical, built only from list prices. A B2B software company with three marketers already pays for Semrush's SEO plan. It wants 100 buyer prompts tracked daily on ChatGPT and Google AI Mode, and it would like to see Perplexity too.

For this team, switching to Semrush One Pro+ beats bolting the toolkit onto the SEO plan: $299 against $358.95, with SEO limits rising from 5 websites to 15. Adding the two other marketers takes it to $459. That covers ChatGPT and AI Mode, but only if the team accepts running its 100 prompts on one engine per campaign or confirms with Semrush how a second engine counts. Perplexity would come only from weekly Brand Performance data on Semrush's own prompts.

Profound covers the full brief, Perplexity included, on Enterprise. We have no basis for guessing that quote, and you shouldn't trust anyone who claims to. The useful move is to ask Profound for the price of 100 prompts on four engines, daily, which is 12,000 answers a month, and divide. If the quote lands near the $44 per 1,000 its agency workspace implies, that is about $532 a month; anything far above it is a negotiating point.

What Profound's comparison pages say about Semrush, checked

Profound wrote two of the top three results for this query, and both describe Semrush in ways Semrush's own pages contradict. Its "Profound vs Semrush" landing page credits Semrush with "3 models", "a handful of countries" in English only, and "100M+ prompts". Semrush's methodology page says more than 317 million prompts across 117 regional databases; its toolkit pricing page counts brand mentions in Perplexity, Gemini, ChatGPT and Google AI; and its help center lists 42 markets for the research reports and 220+ countries and territories for Prompt Tracking.

The same landing page says Profound tracks all ten major answer engines out of the box, while Profound's pricing page gives the trial three engines and Enterprise up to nine. Profound's longer May 2026 article on the matchup quotes "2B+ real user prompts", where its own information page says hundreds of millions of conversations; we use the lower, vendor-stated figure. That article also sets Semrush's self-serve plans against Profound Enterprise features, which flatters Profound on almost every row.

The third-party pages ranking for this term are mostly out of date on price. Of the four third-party comparisons we read in full, all four still describe a Profound Starter or Growth brand plan that is no longer on Profound's pricing page, two list Semrush Guru and Business tiers that no longer appear on Semrush's pricing page, and one gives Semrush One Advanced as $549, a price Semrush has replaced with a demo request. None works out a cost per answer, counts seats, or charts the numbers. Treat any comparison, this one included, as a starting point and open both pricing pages before you sign.

Pick Profound if, pick Semrush if

Most teams can decide with three questions: does someone already pay for Semrush SEO, do you need Perplexity, Claude or Copilot on your own prompts, and how many people need access.

Pick Profound if

AI visibility has its own budget line; you need Perplexity, Claude or Copilot tracked daily on prompts you write; your security team will ask for a SOC 2 report and SSO through SAML or OIDC; more than a handful of people need access; or you want agents that draft and stage fixes, plus AI crawler analytics through your CDN.

Pick Semrush if

Your team already works in Semrush for SEO; ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Gemini cover your buyers; you want AI research on any competitor's domain with no setup; you need a published price under $300 a month; or one or two people will run the reports.

Look elsewhere if

You want Perplexity or Claude on your own prompts without an enterprise contract. Our Profound alternatives list covers cheaper trackers with those engines on entry plans, and Profound vs Peec AI compares Profound with the most common self-serve pick.

Some teams end up with both. The pattern that makes sense is Semrush for SEO and AI research across the market, and Profound for daily tracking and content work on the prompts that drive pipeline. The pattern that doesn't is paying for Semrush's standalone toolkit and Profound at the same time for the same 25 prompts.

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