Alternatives · researched 15 September 2026
By Advik Jain, Co-founder & CEO, Optivus Technologies · Published 11 September 2026 · Updated 15 September 2026
Profound is built for enterprise analytics, and teams that look past it usually want more engines for less. We list the alternatives in the order our published scoring rules put them, with Veritas, our product, scored by the same rules.
Stay with Profound if you need prompt volume data and crawler analytics at enterprise depth. If you mainly need several engines tracked on a budget, these cover more for less.
Ordered by the score our published rules calculate, with Profound included for reference. Veritas is ours, is scored by the same rules, and sits where they put it.
| Tool | Best for | From | Engines | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Frase | Writers who want tracking attached to a content workflow | $49/mo | At least 1 of 7 | 74 |
| Writesonic | Teams that want prioritised GEO fixes and outreach | $79/mo | 3 of 7 | 70 |
| VeritasOurs | Mid-market teams that want five engines plus SEO and cited drafts | ₹20,000/mo | 5 of 7 | 68 |
| Semrush | Teams that want AI tracking inside a full SEO suite | $199/mo | At least 5 of 7 | 68 |
| Scrunch | Broad engine coverage and control of how AI agents read your site | $300/mo | 6 of 7 | 67 |
| Otterly.AI | Budget monitoring with daily refresh for the whole team | $29/mo | 4 of 7, +3 add-ons | 61 |
| AthenaHQ | Starting free and paying per AI response | Free plan | 5 of 7 | 57 |
| Profound The tool you are comparing against | Enterprise brands that want the deepest AI answer analytics and an agent layer to act on it. | $99/mo | 1 of 7 | 48 |
From is the cheapest published plan that tracks AI answers, with any add-on that tracking requires. Veritas bills in rupees, excluding GST; everything else is in US dollars as each vendor publishes it.
Five engines, plus the content that closes the gaps
Veritas tracks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, then drafts each fix from your own documents with every knowledge-based claim cited.
On the cheapest plan that tracks AI answers. Most vendors list more engines than that plan includes, so this is what you get at the price shown, not the brochure maximum.
| Tool and plan | ChatGPT | Claude | Gemini | Perplexity | AI Overviews | AI Mode | Copilot |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Frase Starter | Included | Not on this plan | Not on this plan | Not on this plan | unclear | unclear | Not on this plan |
Writesonic Starter | Included | Not on this plan | Included | Not on this plan | Included | Not on this plan | Not on this plan |
VeritasOurs Content + SEO Premium | Included | Included | Included | Included | Included | Not on this plan | Not on this plan |
Semrush Starter | Included | Included | Included | Included | Included | unclear | unclear |
Scrunch Starter | Included | Included | Included | Included | Included | Included | Not on this plan |
Otterly.AI Lite | Included | add-on | add-on | Included | Included | add-on | Included |
AthenaHQ Essential (free) | Included | Not on this plan | Included | Included | Included | Not on this plan | Included |
Profound Starter | Included | Not on this plan | Not on this plan | Not on this plan | Not on this plan | Not on this plan | Not on this plan |
A tick is included. Add-on means an extra monthly fee. Pick means you choose a limited number of platforms. Unclear means the vendor’s wording does not say.
The cheapest published plan that fits each team, over twelve months, with seat fees and required add-ons. Where no published plan fits, the note says why instead of guessing.
| Tool | One marketer, one brand1 seat, 50 tracked prompts, 1 brand | Team of five, one brand5 seats, 100 tracked prompts, 1 brand | Agency, three brands10 seats, 300 tracked prompts, 3 brands |
|---|---|---|---|
| Frase | $588lowest | $2,244lowest | $5,328lowest |
| Profound | $1,188 | No published fit1 | No published fit1 |
| Otterly.AI | $2,268 | $2,268 | $5,868 |
| Semrush | $2,388 | $5,748 | No published fit1 |
| Scrunch | $3,600 | $4,200 | $5,700 |
| VeritasOurs | $3,780 | No published fit1 | No published fit1 |
| AthenaHQ | No published plan fits any of these setups2 | ||
| Writesonic | No published plan fits any of these setups3 | ||
Bars share one scale across the whole table, so cost growth shows as well as rank. A figure far above the rest is marked off scale.
Standard monthly rates, without annual discounts unless a vendor publishes only a yearly price. Taxes, overage and negotiated terms are excluded. Indian rupee figures are converted at 95.2 INR to the US dollar, a rate we maintain by hand and review periodically. It is an approximation, not a live rate, and Veritas bills in rupees.
Veritas’s price covers keyword research and site audits as well as tracking and cited drafting.Start a 7-day trialSee pricing
Best for writers who want tracking attached to a content workflow.
The most complete research-to-publish loop among content optimisers, at a low entry price.
Article generation is capped at 10, 40 or 100 a month by plan.
Best for teams that want prioritised GEO fixes and outreach.
Measurement, prioritised fixes, page rewrites and outreach in one product.
Starter to Growth track three platforms; the full ten are Enterprise-only.
Best for mid-market teams that want five engines plus SEO and cited drafts.
Every knowledge-based claim in a draft opens the passage it came from, so review is a check rather than a rewrite.
AI answers are re-checked every two weeks, with on-demand checks in between. Several dedicated trackers refresh daily.
Best for teams that want AI tracking inside a full SEO suite.
The deepest historical keyword and backlink data of any tool compared here.
Daily prompt tracking starts on the $199 Starter plan; the $139 SEO plan shows no tracked-prompt allowance.
Best for broad engine coverage and control of how AI agents read your site.
Seven engines on every plan, the broadest coverage at a self-serve price.
The entry price is $300 a month, or $250 billed annually.
Best for budget monitoring with daily refresh for the whole team.
The lowest paid entry point among dedicated trackers, with daily refresh on every plan.
Claude tracking costs $29, $109 or $439 a month on top of Lite, Standard or Premium.
Best for starting free and paying per AI response.
A free plan, so tracking can start before a budget conversation.
Usage is metered in credits, where one credit is one AI response.
On prices read 11 September 2026, AthenaHQ’s free Essential plan covers five engines within 300 credits, and Otterly.AI’s $29 Lite plan tracks four engines daily. Veritas tracks five engines on Content + SEO Premium, which also includes the content and SEO toolkit.
At self-serve prices, Scrunch comes closest with seven engines on every plan, and AthenaHQ Starter covers 11 models. Profound lists up to nine on Enterprise; Writesonic lists ten platforms on its Enterprise tier.
Some do. Veritas drafts cited content, Writesonic rewrites pages for GEO, Frase drafts with an AI agent, and AthenaHQ offers a content optimisation agent. Otterly.AI and Scrunch focus on monitoring, audits and recommendations.
Every feature, price, pro and con, each fact linked to the vendor page it came from.
Best for: Writers who want tracking attached to a content workflow
Frase adds AI visibility to research, drafting, optimisation, site audits and publishing from $49 a month, widening engines by plan up to five on Scale. Article generation is capped at 10, 40 or 100 a month.
Frase began as a SERP research and brief tool and now covers the loop from research to publishing: topic clusters, an AI agent that drafts with your brand in context, brand voice, content optimisation for Google, GEO optimisation for AI citation, site audits, backlinks with drafted outreach, Content Guard for ranking decay, and its own FraseCMS.
AI visibility tracking covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google AI across its plans, widening as the price rises. It publishes to WordPress, Webflow, Sanity and Wix, and connects to Claude and Cursor through MCP and a CLI.
Trial: 7 days, no credit card. source, 11 Sept 2026
Not the right fit for: Teams that need every claim traced to their own documents, or high monthly volume without article caps.
frase.ioBest for: Teams that want prioritised GEO fixes and outreach
Writesonic pairs tracking with an Action Center, page rewrites for GEO and drafted outreach to sites citing competitors, from $79 a month. Self-serve plans track three platforms, Perplexity and the rest are Enterprise-only, and seats run from one user on Starter to three on Growth.
Writesonic began as an AI writer and now presents itself as a generative engine optimisation platform. It tracks AI visibility, ranks opportunities in an Action Center by visibility and citation impact, and uses an AI agent to rewrite pages for GEO with FAQ blocks and comparison tables.
It also audits robots.txt, schema, indexing and broken pages from AI bot visits, surfaces the Reddit threads, YouTube videos and listicles citing competitors with drafted outreach, and connects to Google Analytics, Search Console, Looker Studio, WordPress, an API and MCP. It says more than 10,000 marketing teams use it.
Trial: Free trial, no credit card. source, 11 Sept 2026
Not the right fit for: Teams of more than three, or anyone who needs Perplexity or Claude tracked without an enterprise contract.
writesonic.comBest for: Mid-market teams that want five engines plus SEO and cited drafts
Veritas tracks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews on Content + SEO Premium, at a lower entry point than Profound’s three-engine plan, and adds keyword research, site audits, backlinks and an editor that drafts from your documents with a citation on every claim. It re-checks every two weeks, has no prompt volume data and no API, and does not match Profound’s enterprise analytics.
Veritas is an AI content and SEO platform built by Optivus Technologies. It organises a company’s own documents into a knowledge graph and drafts marketing content from it, attaching a numbered citation to every knowledge-based claim that opens the passage it came from. Claims it cannot trace to your material are left out rather than filled in.
Around the editor it bundles keyword research and gap analysis, competitor and SERP analysis, a live content score, site audits, backlinks, Google Analytics with Search Console, and AI visibility tracking across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. Plans are priced per workspace in INR with users included.
Trial: 7 days on one SEO domain; nothing is charged until it ends. source, 12 Sept 2026
Not the right fit for: Solo writers, teams that need market-wide historical SEO data or an API, and anyone who needs AI answers re-checked daily.
See Veritas pricingBest for: Teams that want AI tracking inside a full SEO suite
Semrush tracks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and AI Overviews, 50 to 200 prompts a day by tier from $199 a month, alongside the deepest keyword and backlink data in this list. Extra users cost $45 a month each.
Semrush is an all-in-one search marketing platform covering keyword research, competitor analysis, backlinks, rank tracking, local search visibility, technical site audits, digital PR and content creation. Its keyword database holds over 27.3 billion keywords, by its own count, which is the depth most teams buy it for.
It has moved hard into AI search. Its Research and Track toolkits now include AI Visibility, Prompt Research and AI Brand Sentiment across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and AI Overviews. Adobe completed its acquisition of Semrush on 28 April 2026, and says customers can expect an expanded roadmap as the two integrate.
Trial: 7 days on SEO, Starter and Pro+; none listed on Advanced. source, 11 Sept 2026
Not the right fit for: Small teams that mainly need content and AI visibility and do not want to pay per user.
semrush.comBest for: Broad engine coverage and control of how AI agents read your site
Scrunch includes seven engines on every plan, including Claude and Meta, with persona and geography benchmarks, a real-time feed of AI bot traffic and AXP for machine-readable pages. At $300 a month it is not a budget option, but it is the widest self-serve coverage here.
Scrunch is an AI visibility platform for brands and agencies. It tracks performance for prompts, topics and entities with citations, competitors and rankings, benchmarked by persona, topic and geography, across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, AI Overviews and Meta on every plan.
Beyond monitoring it shows how AI bots crawl your site in a real-time feed, flags pages AI bots cannot crawl, analyses the sources AI relies on, and offers AXP, an agent experience platform that serves compressed, machine-readable versions of pages to AI agents while leaving the human site unchanged. It says more than 500 companies and agencies use it.
Trial: Trial of 7 days on Starter, no card required. source, 11 Sept 2026
Not the right fit for: Teams on a tight budget, or teams that want content drafted in the same tool.
scrunch.comBest for: Budget monitoring with daily refresh for the whole team
Otterly.AI tracks ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot on every plan from $29 a month, refreshed daily, with unlimited team members and API and MCP access from Standard. It audits content and writes briefs rather than drafting, and Claude and Gemini cost extra.
Otterly.AI is a monitoring-first platform for AI search. It tracks how brands are mentioned and websites cited across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot on every plan, with Claude, Google AI Mode and Gemini as paid add-ons, refreshing daily with unlimited team members.
Around monitoring it adds AI Prompt Research, a Content Audit with crawlability checks and content briefs, GEO optimisation recommendations, Agent Analytics, ChatGPT Ads tracking, and API and MCP access on its higher plans. It says more than 40,000 marketing professionals use it, and was named a Gartner Cool Vendor for AI in Marketing in 2025.
Trial: Free trial offered from its homepage; terms not listed on the pricing page. source, 11 Sept 2026
Not the right fit for: Teams that want the tracker to draft and publish the fixes, or need Claude and Gemini without add-on fees.
otterly.aiBest for: Starting free and paying per AI response
AthenaHQ has a free plan covering five engines and a $295 Starter with 11 models, plus sentiment analysis, hallucination detection, a recommendation engine and a citation engine for link building. Usage is metered in credits, so costs rise with the volume of responses you track.
AthenaHQ tracks brand visibility across 11+ AI models with sentiment analysis, real-time brand mention alerts and hallucination detection, and pairs it with a recommendation engine that suggests on-page and off-page actions.
Its Athena Citation Engine analyses citation sources for link building, a content optimisation agent and AI-friendly templates help produce content, and a Shopify integration ties AEO content to revenue. It integrates with GA4, Search Console, Webflow, Framer, Tableau, Power BI and Looker, with API access as a paid add-on.
Trial: Free Essential plan. source, 11 Sept 2026
Not the right fit for: Teams that want predictable flat pricing or SEO tooling in the same product.
athenahq.aiWhere a figure below is missing, the charts say so rather than estimate it.
Every fact about a tool other than Veritas comes from that vendor’s own pricing page, product pages, documentation or announcements. Each one is linked where it appears, with the date we read it.
We build Veritas and use it every day. We have not run paid accounts of every other tool on this page, so we describe what each vendor publishes rather than scores from tests we did not run. Where a capability was not described on a vendor’s pages, the table says exactly that, which is not the same as saying the product lacks it.
G2, Capterra and TrustRadius blocked our automated reads, so any rating shown is the figure the vendor publishes about itself, labelled as such.
Prices and plans change. We re-read every vendor page at least every 90 days and record what changed in the update log below.
The scores and cost figures on this page are calculated, not assigned. Our full methodology sets out every rule, what each criterion is worth, and where our evidence runs out.
Disclosure. Veritas is our product. It appears on this page because it competes in this category, and we have tried to state its limits as plainly as anyone else’s. If anything here is wrong or out of date, write to support@getveritas.io and we will correct it and note the change in the log.
How this page was made. Veritas is our product. This page was written with AI assistance and checked against the vendor pages linked beside each fact, on the dates shown. Scores and costs are calculated by our published rules.
7 days on one domain. Nothing is charged until the trial ends.
