CoreCited · Compare
Profound vs Semrush AI Visibility
Both track whether AI engines mention your brand. They differ sharply on price, engine coverage and whether they tell you what to do about it. Every figure below was read from each vendor's own pricing page on — blog roundups in this category get this wrong more often than they get it right.
Profound
Semrush AI Visibility
Entry price
$99/mo
$99/mo
Free option
A free one-off AEO report. No free tracking tier; the paid plans have a 14-day trial. Free grader only
7-day trial. Trial only
Engines
ChatGPT ($99), 3 engines ($399), up to 10 (Enterprise)
Multiple (daily AI rankings)
Prompts
50 (Starter) → 100 (Growth)
25
Action layer
Yes — AI content agents, opportunities panel. $399+ only.
Part of the wider Semrush suite.
What the headline price hides
Profound: $99 tracks ChatGPT ONLY, with 50 prompts. Multi-engine tracking starts at the $399 Growth plan — so the real entry price for the product most people think they're buying is 4× the headline.
Semrush AI Visibility: $99/mo PER DOMAIN (annual), for 25 tracked prompts and 1 domain. Extra prompts are $60/mo per 50; extra domains are $99 each; extra users $45/mo.
Profound
Strengths
- ✓The category leader, and the research backs it: their prompt-volume dataset (1.5B+ real user prompts, licensed from opt-in consumer panels) is a genuine moat nobody else has.
- ✓AI crawler analytics (GPTBot, ClaudeBot) via CDN/server-log integration — enterprise-grade, and not something a budget tool can replicate.
- ✓They published the volatility problem themselves, which is intellectually honest.
Gaps
- ✕Their own blog states "40-60% drift makes single data points meaningless" — yet their product docs show no error bars, no confidence intervals, no uncertainty anywhere. They diagnosed the disease and shipped the symptom.
- ✕The action layer (content-generation agents) is locked behind the $399 tier.
- ✕Their own Head of Growth writes publicly that "entry pricing is above the purpose-built trackers, so SMBs testing the waters may want to start in lane 2".
Semrush AI Visibility
Strengths
- ✓If you already live in Semrush, the data sits next to your SEO work.
- ✓A 261M-prompt dataset across 32 countries.
Gaps
- ✕Priced per domain — costs escalate fast for anyone tracking more than one brand.
- ✕25 prompts at $99 is the tightest prompt-per-dollar ratio in the category.
What neither of them will tell you
Both report AI visibility as a single confident number. But AI citations churn — SISTRIX measured 56% weekly source churn across 82,619 prompts. So a large share of the week-to-week movement in either dashboard is noise, and neither tool separates the noise from the signal, or tells you whether you hold a durable position or merely rotated through this week.
Where CoreCited is different
1. We tell you if you're in the core, or just the carousel
AI answers churn — SISTRIX measured 56% weekly source churn in Google AI Mode across 82,619 prompts. But the same study found that 86.5% of prompts keep a stable core of 1–5 names that persist week after week, while ~89% of everything else rotates. So "am I mentioned?" is close to a coin flip. The question that matters is whether you're in the durable core or the churn. No other tool distinguishes these.2. We show you the error bars, and grey out the noise
Share of voice is estimated from a finite sample, so it carries sampling error. On a realistic sample, brands sitting at 27%, 25% and 22% are statistically indistinguishable — their confidence ranges overlap completely. Every other dashboard renders that as a confident 1–2–3 ranking. We mark it as a tie and tell you not to act on it.3. We tell you when the fix didn't work
Mark a content brief published and we snapshot where you stand, then measure whether it actually moved you — and we'll say "no movement" or "you slipped" when that's the truth. A loop that can only report success is marketing, not measurement.Compare something else
How we sourced this: every price and limit above was read from the vendor's own pricing page in July 2026 — not from a roundup article. We checked, and blog roundups in this category get it wrong more often than not. Vendors change pricing frequently, so verify before you buy: tryprofound.com · semrush.com. Spotted something out of date? Tell us and we'll fix it.