I Tried the 5 Best Affordable Profound AI Alternatives

In nearly a decade of working in content and SEO, I have tested more tools than I can count. Most of them promise insights, but very few are built with action in mind. They flood you with dashboards and data exports, then leave you to figure out what to do next. That was exactly how I felt when I first saw the Profound dashboard at a friend’s company. The tool looked impressive at first glance. It had visibility graphs, prompt data, even a conversation explorer that shows you how your brand shows up in AI responses. 

But the more I looked, the more it felt like a reporting tool disguised as a strategy engine. The platform was expensive, and on top of that, it demanded constant manual work. You either needed someone from your own team to analyze and act on the insights, or you had to rely on Profound’s GEO account managers to do it for you. Either way, it slowed everything down.

That friction is what pushed me to search for something better. I tested everything I could find and narrowed the list down to five tools that solve the core problems I ran into with Profound. These are: 

• Probe Analytics, which is the most comprehensive and affordable generative engine optimization tool for SMBs.

• Ahrefs Brand Radar, which works well if you already live inside a traditional SEO stack. 

• Peec AI, which gives you a fast, simple look at where you’re showing up in AI prompts. 

• AthenaHQ, which gives enterprise teams full control over their GEO workflows. 

• And LLMrefs, which is the easiest and most affordable way to get started with AI visibility.

Each one offers something Profound doesn’t. In the sections below, I’ll break down what stood out, how each tool compares, and why it might be a better fit depending on your needs.

Probe Analytics: Best for comprehensive SMB-grade GEO optimization

Top Probe Analytics features

• AI Crawler Intelligence that scans how your brand and competitors appear across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Copilot, and more.

• Site AI Accessibility Intelligence to flag crawl gaps, structured data issues, and rendering problems that block AI engines from accessing your site.

• AI Visibility Intelligence that shows real-time brand citations, share of voice, and sentiment across answer engines.

• Competitor Intelligence with side-by-side benchmarks so you can see where competitors are earning citations you’re missing.

• Prompt Intelligence that tracks, suggests, and analyzes prompts, surfacing which ones generate visibility and which ones don’t.

• Traffic Attribution that connects AI visibility back to site visits, letting you quantify the business impact of GEO.

Compared to the other tools in this list, Probe is the only platform built to be end-to-end for SMBs. LLMrefs offers a lightweight starting point but lacks depth beyond visibility snapshots. Peec AI gives prompt-level visibility but no insights or action items. Ahrefs Brand Radar integrates into SEO workflows but is expensive and leans on modeled “prompt volumes.” AthenaHQ is powerful at the enterprise tier but quickly becomes cost-prohibitive and overly complex for leaner teams.

Probe brings these threads together in one place. Instead of just reporting data, it provides the diagnostics, competitor benchmarking, and attribution that SMBs actually need to turn GEO insights into outcomes. The balance of accessibility, breadth, and actionability is what makes Probe the most comprehensive option for businesses that want to compete in AI-driven search without enterprise overhead.

Probe Analytics vs. Profound AI

Ahrefs Brand Radar: Best for traditional SEO stack integration

Top Ahrefs Brand Radar features

• Seamlessly integrated into the Ahrefs ecosystem—accessible via tools like Site Explorer, Alerts, and Keywords Explorer—so you don’t need a separate dashboard.

• Tracks AI citations across platforms such as ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity using Ahrefs’ AI visibility database of over 100 million prompts.

• Provides competitor benchmarking for AI visibility to identify visibility gaps and content opportunities.

• Offers modules like Search Demand and Web Visibility to show branded search trends and mention growth over time.

• Included in Ahrefs Lite plans during the beta phase, making AI visibility accessible without additional cost—though full access may eventually require add-ons.

I was able to drop Brand Radar directly into my normal SEO workflow, viewing AI visibility alongside traditional metrics like backlink profiles and keyword ranks. It felt like turning a new corner in the same familiar house. Profound on the other hand is a standalone GEO platform—powerful, yes, but separate. It’s expensive, requires manual setup, and often means managing two different systems.

Brand Radar’s dashboards are built for exploration and discovery. I could easily pivot between AI mention trends and existing backlink gaps to target high-impact areas for optimization. With Profound, I’d see the data—but then rely on account teams or internal bandwidth to translate it into action. The familiar Ahrefs interface cuts that friction.

However, this convenience comes with a trade-off. Ahrefs doesn’t share where its “100 million prompts” come from or how representative they are of real AI behavior. The prompt volume metrics are modeled estimates—not based on publicly verifiable logs—which carries a risk of misrepresenting actual query behavior. Grouping prompts into categories and assigning volume scores may mislead users into treating them like traditional SEO keywords—when AI queries behave fundamentally differently.

Ahrefs Brand Radar vs. Profound AI

Peec AI: Best for simple, prompt-level visibility

Top Peec AI features

• Built with a clean, intuitive interface—most users become familiar with it in under 30 minutes.

• Automatically analyzes your website to suggest relevant prompts; helps you focus where you already show up in AI responses. 

• Tracks brand visibility across major AI platforms—ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and more—while supporting multi-country and multi-language monitoring. 

• Offers detailed, real-time analytics including mention frequency, prompt-level positions, and a live mentions feed for monitoring in-action visibility. 

• Transparent pricing with a 7-day free trial and tiered plans starting around €90/month—making it the most accessible option for budget-conscious teams. 

Peec AI let me get up and running in record time. There was no heavy onboarding and no siloed dashboards. I could instantly see how often my brand appeared in AI responses, where it ranked, and which prompts triggered those mentions. The prompt suggestions saved hours of trial-and-error, especially compared to Profound’s steeper learning curve. While Profound offers deeper analytics and workflows, Peec is the tool I’d rely on when I want quick clarity around how my brand is showing up with minimal overhead.

But for doing simply that, Peec felt expensive. It’s essentially an overview tool. It tells you where you show up and how often, but just like Profound, it leaves you hanging when it comes to what to do next. There are no insights, no content prompts, and no recommended actions. The data is clear and real-time, but the strategy is still on you.

Peec AI vs. Profound AI

AthenaHQ: Best for full-scale enterprise GEO workflows

Top AthenaHQ features

• Built for full-stack Generative Engine Optimization, tracking visibility, sentiment, competitor moves, prompt analytics, and content gaps across platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, and Google AI Overviews.

• Massive grounded catalog—over 3 million response records mapping citations to 300,000+ unique sites—for unmatched speed and real-time visibility tracking. 

• Comes with an “Action Center” that delivers razor-sharp, actionable recommendations across text, image, and video formats—so you’re not just seeing where you rank, you're told how to improve. 

• Pricing tiers from $270/month (Lite) to $2,000+/month (Enterprise), with credits for flexible scaling and extra options available for buying more. 

• User experience is intuitive and fast to learn; workflows use AI itself to set up prompts and tracking—so onboarding doesn’t feel painful.

AthenaHQ is positioned as a true generative engine optimization platform. It gives you sophisticated dashboards, a broad view of AI coverage, and the ability to measure how your brand shows up in emerging AI-driven search experiences. Compared to Profound, Athena felt less like a raw reporting platform and more like a strategic co-pilot. The Action Center in particular was a step forward—it connected visibility data to concrete next steps in a way that Profound did not. Where Profound required either manual interpretation or help from its GEO account managers, Athena offered more immediate guidance inside the platform itself.

That said, AthenaHQ is far from perfect. The most common frustration is its steep monthly price, starting at $270 and climbing quickly for larger deployments. This instantly places it out of reach for many small and mid-sized teams. Even when you do buy in, the platform sometimes delivers too much dashboard depth without enough practical translation. It excels at showing you what’s happening, but not always at clarifying what matters most.

Athena also carries a strong enterprise orientation. Its compliance features and credit-based scaling are well-suited to large brands with dedicated SEO or GEO staff, but they can overwhelm lean teams that simply want speed and clarity. The limited trial access makes it harder for smaller companies to test the platform before investing, which adds another layer of friction.

LLMrefs: Best for budget-friendly, AI visibility tracking

Top LLMrefs features

• Tracks brand visibility across major AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude using keyword-based monitoring rather than raw prompts.

• Offers live keyword crawling, weekly (and for Pro users, daily) trend reports, and a proprietary visibility metric known as the LLMrefs Score (LS).

• Enables competitor benchmarking alongside visibility tracking, complete with AI-generated snippet previews for deeper insight.

• Freemium model available; Pro plan around $79/month brings expanded tracking (up to 50 keywords), daily updates, team features, and CSV export.

• Designed with simplicity in mind—freestanding dashboards that automatically aggregate visibility data without complex onboarding.

LLMrefs was the tool I turned to when I needed straightforward visibility data without breaking the bank. In no time, I was tracking how my brand showed up in AI-generated answers for core keywords, monitoring competitors, and watching trends unfold—all without jumping through hoops. It didn’t overwhelm me with dashboards or require hand-holding from consultants.

Unlike Profound, which provides deep exploration tools like Conversation Explorer and advisory support, LLMrefs delivers baseline visibility in a dashboard anyone can use. It’s perfect for solo marketers, startups, or SMBs looking to get their feet wet in GEO without committing to a big price tag—or a lot of complexity.

Of course, that simplicity comes with trade-offs. LLMrefs’ dataset is smaller, the analysis is shallow compared to enterprise platforms, and daily coverage only comes with higher-tier plans. But for basic, affordable AI visibility—especially your first exposure to GEO—it delivers exactly what you need.

LLMrefs vs. Profound AI