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 26 September 2026 — blog roundups in this category get this wrong more often than they get it right.
Profound
Semrush AI Visibility
Entry price
Not published
$99/mo
Free option
A free 7-day trial with unlimited seats. There is no ongoing free plan: after the trial, tracking is Enterprise, priced by sales. Trial only
Semrush's own knowledge base says the AI Visibility Toolkit "does not currently offer a free trial". Its main SEO plans have a free plan and a trial; this toolkit does not. No free option
Engines
ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews (trial), Up to 9 answer engines (Enterprise)
ChatGPT, Google AI Mode
Prompts
50 a day on the trial; tailored on Enterprise
25
Action layer
Yes: AI Marketer agents, Context Manager and Sheets. Ongoing use is Enterprise.
Part of the wider Semrush suite.
What the headline price hides
Profound: No price is published. The pricing page shows a free 7-day Trial (50 prompts a day on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews) and a custom-priced Enterprise plan that tracks up to 9 answer engines.
Semrush AI Visibility: $99 a month for 1 domain and 25 tracked prompts. Extra prompts cost $60/mo per 50, extra domains $99/mo each, and extra users $99 each.
Profound
Strengths
- ✓The category leader, with a Prompt Volumes dataset of real AI conversations that nobody else has at the same scale.
- ✓AI crawler analytics through CDN and server-log integrations: enterprise-grade, and not something a budget tool can replicate.
- ✓A broad platform beyond tracking, with AI Marketer agents, Context Manager and Sheets, all available even on the trial.
- ✓They published the volatility problem themselves, which is intellectually honest.
Gaps
- ✕No published price: you cannot see what ongoing tracking costs without talking to sales.
- ✕Their own blog states "40-60% drift makes single data points meaningless", yet their product docs show no error bars or confidence intervals.
Semrush AI Visibility
Strengths
- ✓If you already live in Semrush, the AI data sits next to your SEO work in one login.
- ✓Semrush One bundles SEO and AI search tracking for teams that want both.
Gaps
- ✕Priced per domain, so costs escalate fast for anyone tracking more than one brand.
- ✕25 prompts at $99 is one of the tightest prompt-per-dollar ratios in the category.
- ✕No free trial of the toolkit.
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 in AI Mode 86.5% of prompts keep a stable core of 1–5 domains that persist week after week, while 89% of the remaining domains rotate weekly. 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 website on 26 September 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.