Profound Alternative | It Measures, We Change The Page

What Profound measures, and the point at which it stops

It will tell you precisely how invisible you are, and it will do it daily

Starter is ninety nine dollars a month, quoted on yearly billing with two months free, and covers one seat, fifty tracked prompts, fifteen hundred responses a month and ChatGPT by itself. Growth is three hundred and ninety nine for a hundred prompts, nine thousand responses, three seats and three engines. Both run daily. Against four hundred and ninety nine a month here, Starter is a fifth of our price and Growth sits a hundred dollars under us. Every figure on this page came off their pricing table this week.

Fifty prompts on Starter, asked daily, of one engine and no others

The measurement is excellent and nothing here disputes it. Fifty prompts, fifteen hundred responses a month, asked every day, with history kept for all time and no cap on the domains you track. What Starter does not include is a second engine, a second seat, a CSV export or the keyword data. Those arrive at three hundred and ninety nine, and the number they produce still describes a site nobody has touched.

Agents will write you a new page and leave the old one exactly as it was

Profound Agents draft and optimise content against a credit balance, a hundred credits on Starter and four hundred on Growth, and that is more than most of this category attempts. What they produce is new. The page already indexed, already ranking, already answering the question somewhere in its ninth paragraph, is not what an Agent opens. Repairing that page needs write access to your site, and no plan on their pricing table grants it.

Profound does a great deal, and this page argues with the step after all of it

Answer Engine Insights, Prompt Volumes, Profound Sheets, Agents that build against your brief, and Agent Analytics tracing AI referrals through Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly, AWS, Vercel, Netlify, Google Cloud, Google Analytics and WordPress. Enterprise reaches nine engines and adds an API. Almost all of it works and none of it is in question here. What follows argues with the step after the report lands, which is somebody opening the site and changing what the report identified.

Profound

Where Profound fits

If somebody there holds editor access to the site, has the standing to change a published page, and can give it an hour most weeks, buy Profound and skip us. Ninety nine against four hundred and ninety nine is not a contest, and Profound with a competent person behind it beats a retainer nobody chases. The same applies if what you need is the measurement itself across nine engines and several markets, because we do not sell that at all and they are the strongest place on this hub to buy it. We do not resell Profound, we are not affiliates of theirs, and we earn nothing whichever way you go.

Cascadia Web Services

Where the changing is the missing piece

We are for the case sitting underneath that one, where the number matters to revenue and the missing piece is somebody who will open the site and change it, not another view of the number.

Where Profound is strong

Daily measurement, all time history, and unlimited domains on every tier

Prompts run daily rather than weekly, history kept for all time on every plan including the cheapest, and no cap at all on the number of domains you track. Growth analyses nine thousand responses a month across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, and reports who is named ahead of you in each. This is the most thorough measurement product on this hub and pretending otherwise would waste your afternoon.

Agent Analytics traces AI traffic at the network layer, which we do not sell

It reads AI crawler and referral activity through Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly, AWS, Vercel, Netlify, Google Cloud, Google Analytics and WordPress, so you can see which agents arrived and what they took away. We have no equivalent and no plan to build one. Nothing below argues that this fails to work. It argues about what happens in the hours after it tells you something.

Published prices, a free Growth trial, and setup they describe as instant

Both self serve numbers are printed on the page rather than hidden behind a demo, Growth can be tried free, and their own answer to how long setup takes is one word: instant. SOC 2 and single sign on sit on Enterprise. In a category where several rivals will not show you a price at all until somebody has called you, publishing the whole comparison table is worth more than most single features on it.

An enterprise tier reaching nine engines, an API, and more than one market

Enterprise opens ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Claude and AI Overviews, and adds the API, ChatGPT Shopping, single sign on, custom languages and regions, and a named specialist on a twenty four hour response. Both self serve tiers are capped at one language and one region. If you sell in six countries, that top tier is doing something no retainer replaces, and it is an honest reason to skip this page entirely.

All of that stands and none of it is grudging. Every product on this hub measures, and Profound measures furthest. This page turns on a narrower question. Once the dashboard has established that the answer names somebody else, who opens the site on Thursday and changes the page that caused it.

What four hundred and ninety nine buys that a tracking subscription does not

Somebody opens the page the report blamed and rewrites it the same week

The answer moves into the first hundred words instead of the ninth paragraph, the entity markup goes in, the internal links get pointed at it, and it ships. No ticket goes to your developer and no afternoon of yours is spent on it. A dashboard identifies the page. Everything after that identification is the work, and it is what the fee buys.

Nothing here is counted by the prompt, the credit, the seat or the engine

No credit balance that pauses or bills over when an agent runs long, no single seat on the entry plan, no jump to a custom contract in order to look at a second market, and no engine withheld until you upgrade. Four hundred and ninety nine covers prompt selection, page rewrites, structured data, crawler access and monthly citation monitoring. Growth at nine hundred and ninety nine roughly doubles the pages worked on and adds competitor share of voice.

Somebody carries the call, and a flat quarter is ours to explain

A chart that has been flat for two quarters has nobody inside it to ask. The work here runs on a calendar that is ours to keep, and a quarter that went nowhere is ours to explain in writing with a name against it. Thirty days notice from month one, and the first read of what the engines already say about you happens before any money changes hands. Four hundred and ninety nine is what a month costs, and there is no cheaper annual version of it.

Whatever the work needs is bought on our side of the invoice

Citation monitoring, the tooling behind it, keyword data and the crawl checks all sit on our side of the line. No annual commitment to diarise, no credits to top up, no tier to climb, and no page waiting on whoever holds the login this afternoon. You buy changed pages on your own site and the measurement behind them is our cost. That is most of the distance between a service price and a subscription price.

Profound will measure your standing in AI answers more thoroughly than anything else on this hub, every day, without being chased. Our case is entirely about the hours after that measurement lands: which three pages are worth rewriting, who writes the markup, who reopens the crawler path, and who explains a flat quarter afterwards. The same reasoning sits underneath the rest of our managed marketing services.

Onboarding process

What the first ninety days look like when somebody changes the pages

Almost all of the effort sits with us. The reading stage refuses to be hurried, because a tracker will hand you nine thousand responses a month and only a handful of them describe a question somebody holding a budget is actually asking.

Nothing gets changed until we know what the engines currently answer

The questions a buyer would type before they have heard of you, put to the engines, and the answers recorded exactly as they stand today. Which competitors get named, which sources those answers lean on, and whether your pages appear anywhere in the reasoning. We also check whether the crawlers can reach you at all, because a plugin refusing them explains the entire problem more often than anyone expects.

Whatever the engines already half know about you gets repaired first

Pages that answer the question somewhere near the bottom get restructured so the answer sits at the top. Entity markup goes in, inconsistent descriptions of the business across your own pages get reconciled, and anything a model has plainly learned wrong gets corrected at the source. Anything carrying real risk gets staged and talked through before it ships.

The prompt set gets built around margin, and most candidates get struck out

Prompts get chosen with your pricing in front of us rather than by category convention. Being named in the answer to one question that precedes a purchase beats being named in twenty that do not, and which is which depends entirely on what you sell. The set comes back with the rejected prompts still on it and a line each explaining why, because the striking out is the part you are paying for and it should be visible.

Pages start shipping, and a name sits against the quarters that go nowhere

Pages get rewritten, marked up and shipped, and a short summary arrives each month covering which answers named you, which named a competitor, what changed, and what we intend to do about the part that did not move. Answers are noisy, so the report runs on a rolling window rather than a single check. A quarter that produced nothing gets a written explanation with a name attached rather than a chart.

Two ways a rising dashboard and a flat revenue line sit together

Two situations with one thing in common. In both the tracker worked exactly as sold and every number on it was correct. What was missing in each was somebody who would open the site and act on what it said, which is part of what our managed SEO service is for.

A laptop showing a dashboard that nobody has acted on

How this plays out

Eighteen months of daily tracking, and not one page had been edited

The subscription renewed twice and the dashboard was opened most Mondays. Every prompt was tracked correctly and every competitor named correctly. When somebody finally checked the site, the pages the report had been blaming all along had not been touched since before the tool was bought. The tracker had done its job accurately every single day.

A man at a laptop working out how long something has been going wrong

When this comes up

The score never moved because the crawler had been blocked since March

Two quarters of accurate reporting that the brand appeared in nothing at all. The prompts were rewritten, then rewritten again, and the number stayed where it was. A security plugin installed during an unrelated cleanup had been refusing the AI crawlers the entire time. Nothing in the subscription could see that, because it measures answers rather than requests, and nobody had thought to check the least interesting item on the list.

499

Dollars a month, with no prompt allowance and no credit balance behind it

Prompt selection, page rewrites, structured data, crawler access checks and monthly citation monitoring, with nothing metered behind any of it. Growth at nine hundred and ninety nine roughly doubles the pages worked on each month and adds competitor share of voice.

Setup fee, no minimum term, and no annual commitment to reach the price

No onboarding charge, no minimum term, and four hundred and ninety nine is a monthly figure rather than a yearly one divided down. Month to month on thirty days notice. Profound quotes both self serve tiers on annual billing, which is worth holding in mind when the two numbers get set beside each other.

6-12

Weeks before a rewritten page starts turning up in AI answers

Six to twelve weeks in most cases, and considerably longer where a model leans on sources it has trusted for years. The same prompt asked twice in one day can name different companies, so a single check proves nothing either way and we report on a rolling window instead.

Profound alternative and managed GEO FAQs

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Profound alternative?

Anything that tells you how AI answers treat your brand, or changes how they treat it. That covers rival trackers such as Peec AI, Otterly and Scrunch, the AI visibility modules now bolted onto general SEO suites, a freelancer with a spreadsheet of prompts, and managed services such as this one where somebody also edits the site. Profound is the most thorough of the trackers by some distance. We are in the last group, which is a different purchase rather than a dearer version of the same one.

How is Cascadia different from Profound?

Profound observes and we intervene. They put your prompts to the engines every day and record what comes back, which we do not sell at all. We take that finding, open the site, and change the thing responsible for it. Their pricing counts prompts, responses, credits, seats, engines, languages and regions. Ours counts nothing. Which one you need depends on whether you are short of information or short of somebody to act on it.

How does your price compare to theirs?

Ninety nine a month on Starter and three hundred and ninety nine on Growth, both quoted on yearly billing with two months free, against four hundred and ninety nine a month here billed monthly. At the entry plan we are five times the price. At Growth the gap narrows to a hundred dollars. Compare them carefully though, because their annual figure and our monthly figure are not the same kind of number.

Is Profound cheaper than this?

At Starter, substantially, and it is a good product for the money. Ninety nine against four hundred and ninety nine is not close. What that ninety nine buys is one engine, one seat, fifty prompts and no way to export what you find. At Growth it is three hundred and ninety nine against four hundred and ninety nine, near enough that price stops being the argument. Neither plan includes anybody who will change a page.

Why pay this when the tracker starts at ninety nine?

Because measurement turned out to be the cheap half. The expensive part is somebody with editor access who reads the report, decides which three pages are worth rewriting, rewrites them, ships the markup, and is still doing it in month seven. That person costs a great deal more than four hundred and ninety nine whether you employ them or hire them. If they are already on your payroll, buy Profound and keep the difference. We would rather say so than take the order.

Why not buy the subscription and act on it ourselves?

You should, if somebody there will actually do it. It is much the cheaper path and we say so on this page more than once. The reason it goes wrong is not that the reports are hard to read. It is that acting on one means editing a live page, and editing a live page needs access, confidence and a free afternoon. Those three rarely arrive in the same week, so the subscription renews and the site stays exactly as it was.

Should we buy this at all?

Often not, and month one is a much better time to establish that than month six. If nobody in your market is asking a model about what you sell yet, none of this matters, and that is still true of more industries than the category wants to admit. Looking costs nothing and we will tell you plainly. This starts to make sense when buyers are clearly asking, the answers name somebody else, and nobody on your side has the hours to change it.

Do we have to stop using Profound?

No, and there is often good reason not to. If you already pay for it we will work inside your account so the history stays with you rather than restarting somewhere else. The daily measurement is something we do not sell at all, so cancelling it in order to hire us would cost you something and gain you nothing. We will say if the subscription has stopped earning its keep, but that is a separate question from whether to hire us.

Does anything break while you take over?

No. Nothing gets rebuilt and nothing moves. Pages are edited one at a time on the install you already own, and anything carrying real risk gets staged and talked through first. The one change we often make early is to the robots file or a firewall rule, because that is where the problem frequently sits, and you hear about it before we touch it rather than after.

What if our pages were already hit by a search update?

Then that comes first and the timeline stretches. Classic ranking damage and AI invisibility are different problems with a large overlap, and working on the second while the first is unresolved wastes everybody's time. We establish which it is, whether the cause was a manual action, an algorithmic change, or something that merely resembles one, and what has to be rewritten or removed before anything else starts. Anybody offering a date for that is guessing.

Do you host the site or own the content?

No to both. The site stays on your own hosting under your own domain, and every page and every piece of markup belongs to you. This is worth asking of anything in this category. One product on this hub builds a separate agent facing copy of your site, which quietly puts part of your visibility somewhere you do not control. Nothing we do leaves your install.

What is included at each tier?

The first tier is four hundred and ninety nine a month and covers prompt selection, page rewrites, structured data, crawler access checks and monthly citation monitoring. Growth at nine hundred and ninety nine roughly doubles the pages worked on each month and adds competitor share of voice benchmarking and coverage past a single product line or market. Two sizes rather than a metered allowance, and nothing that runs out in the third week. Most businesses starting from nowhere in AI answers belong on the first, and we will say so rather than selling up.

Do you guarantee we will get mentioned?

No, and treat anybody who does with suspicion. Nobody outside the model providers decides what an answer says, the same prompt can name different companies twice in one day, and models retrain without notice. A guarantee here is either hedged until it means nothing or pinned to prompts so obscure that winning them proves nothing. What we commit to is work done, shipped and reported, with the months a number went the wrong way shown beside the months it did not.

What does the monthly report actually contain?

Which answers named you, which named a competitor instead, what we changed on the site, and what we intend to do about whatever did not move. It runs on a rolling window rather than a single day, because one check of a noisy system is not a measurement. There is no dashboard to log into and no seat for anybody to learn, which suits some people and not others.

How long before we see a difference?

Six to twelve weeks for a rewritten page to start turning up, and longer where a model leans on sources it has trusted for years. A crawler that was blocked and is now open can change things faster than that, sometimes inside a fortnight, because the problem was never the page. Anything described as immediate in this category is describing a dashboard refreshing, which is not the same measurement at all.

What if I want to leave?

Thirty days notice ends it and nothing is stranded. The site, the pages and the markup were always yours, so there is no account to migrate and nothing at all to hand back. Standing in AI answers does decay once the work stops, because competitors keep publishing and models keep retraining. That is the nature of the channel rather than a lock in, and we would rather you knew it before signing than after leaving.

A Profound Alternative For The Half The Dashboard Hands Back

Fifty prompts on Starter, asked daily, of one engine and no others

Agents will write you a new page and leave the old one exactly as it was

Profound does a great deal, and this page argues with the step after all of it

Cascadia

Without Cascadia

A page you already published gets rewritten and shipped, not only scored

Tracked prompts weighed against your gross margin rather than your category

The firewall rule quietly refusing the AI crawler gets found and changed

Entity markup written into the page that exists, not into a fresh draft

A named person who explains a quarter in which the number never moved

Old pages merged or taken down when that is what the answer actually needs

A second market or language without moving to a custom enterprise contract

Somebody sitting in on a sales call to hear what buyers actually ask first

Being told AI visibility is not your constraint and to spend it elsewhere

No credit balance, no prompt allowance, and no tier to climb for a third seat