Last updated · reviewed by the Essentras editorial team
AI visibility tools / Head to head
Profound vs Semrush
Whether you need AI-answer monitoring alone, or a single dashboard that also covers classic SEO.
Pick Profound if AI-answer monitoring is the whole job and you have enterprise budget and procurement patience for an annual, quote-only contract. Pick Semrush if you want a single self-serve dashboard covering SEO, backlinks and AI-prompt tracking together, with monthly billing and a lower published entry price, but shallower AI-engine coverage.
Profound
Enterprise AI-answer-engine monitoring platform tracking brand visibility, citations, and prompt volume across up to 9 AI engines, plus workflow agents that draft content for human approval.
Semrush
All-in-one SEO suite (rank tracking, site audits, backlinks, competitor research) now folding AI-answer-visibility (prompt) tracking into its core plans; became an Adobe subsidiary in April 2026.
Essentras
Earned-media and entity execution with its own measured corpus of AI answers, priced per item rather than per seat.
Why Profound and Semrush buyers end up looking at a third option
If what you actually need is the thing AI engines cite, not just a dashboard that measures it, Essentras sells named publication placements, Wikipedia and Knowledge Panel work priced per item, instead of a per-seat monitoring tool. It will not file regulated financial disclosure, and its placements are paid coverage, not earned editorial independence, so a public company's material news still needs a newswire. It also runs leaner than either platform here: no enterprise seat model, no SSO, and no dedicated account manager on a standard order.
The destination is named before you pay
You pick the outlet from the catalog, see its price, turnaround and link policy, and receive that URL. No blind retainer, no placeholder list.
We publish how we measure
The /ai-check corpus is real answers from six models, updated and open to read. The method is checkable rather than a proprietary score.
You can buy one unit
No seats, no prompt allowance, no annual prepay and no notice window. One placement is a complete purchase with nothing to cancel.
Profound vs Semrush, side by side
| Profound | Semrush | Essentras | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing published | No, quote only | Yes, from $139/mo | Yes, per outlet |
| AI-prompt tracking price | Enterprise quote only | $199/mo (50/day) | Included in /ai-check |
| Minimum commitment | Annual contract | 1 month | Single order |
| Contract term | Auto-renews annually | Monthly or annual | No contract |
| Cancellation notice | 30 days pre-renewal | Anytime (monthly plans) | Not applicable |
| AI engines tracked | Up to 9 | Not stated by engine | 6, named at /ai-check |
| Content/workflow agents | Yes, drafts content | No | No, outlets place it |
| Primary deliverable | Dashboard + API (Enterprise) | Dashboard + API (Advanced+) | Confirmed placement URL |
| Per-seat cost | Unlimited (trial only) | $45 to $100/mo | No seats |
| Who it's built for | Enterprise brand teams | SEO teams, agencies | Buyers wanting named placements |
Published list pricing, checked 4 October 2026 on each vendor's own site. Vendors change pricing and add-ons without notice, and quote-only vendors negotiate per deal, so confirm at the source before you buy. Anything we could not verify is marked, not estimated.
The decision, in three lines
Pick Profound if
Choose Profound when AI-engine visibility is the core deliverable, you need the widest engine coverage and workflow agents to draft fixes, and your organisation can run an annual, quote-only enterprise contract through procurement.
Pick Semrush if
Choose Semrush when you already run SEO through it or want a single subscription for rankings, backlinks, site audits and AI-prompt tracking together, and you want a published monthly price with no annual commitment.
Pick Essentras if
If what you actually need is the thing AI engines cite, not just a dashboard that measures it, Essentras sells named publication placements, Wikipedia and Knowledge Panel work priced per item, instead of a per-seat monitoring tool. It will not file regulated financial disclosure, and its placements are paid coverage, not earned editorial independence, so a public company's material news still needs a newswire. It also runs leaner than either platform here: no enterprise seat model, no SSO, and no dedicated account manager on a standard order.
Where Profound genuinely wins
An enterprise brand or agency that already has its own content, PR and entity-management muscle and just needs best-in-class, continuously-updated measurement, exact prompt volumes, sentiment and citation tracking across the widest set of answer engines, SOC 2/SSO for a security-conscious buying committee, and API access to pipe the data into its own BI stack, should genuinely pick Profound. Its workflow agents (FactCheck, Context Manager) also give a large marketing org a way to keep brand facts current across many SKUs/markets at a scale a smaller earned-media engagement isn't built to monitor.
Where Semrush genuinely wins
Semrush genuinely wins for a team that already has in-house SEO, content, or PR capacity and just needs one dashboard to track rankings, backlinks, technical site health, competitor moves, and AI-prompt visibility together, especially at scale (up to 40 sites, 5,000 keywords/day, 200 prompts/day on Advanced, or custom volume on Enterprise), with API access for building custom reporting on top. Agencies managing many client sites, or any in-house team that wants ongoing self-serve monitoring across traditional and AI search rather than an outsourced placement engagement, are honestly better served by Semrush's breadth and seat-based access model than by a service like Essentras.
Measured, not asserted
The numbers behind this page
Every comparison on this site rests on two things we recompute rather than claim: the live catalog of what we actually sell, and a running study of what answer engines actually say. Both are linked below so you can check them.
Corpus figures recomputed 5 October 2026. Catalog figures are live.
How we compared
Both sides were compared on the same 10 dimensions, using published list pricing read off each vendor's own site on 4 October 2026. Where a vendor publishes nothing, the cell says so rather than carrying an estimate.
- 01Is the price published on the vendor's own pricing page today, or does learning it require a demo call? Profound, and the Enterprise tier of almost every other vendor here, is quote-only.
- 02How many AI engines are covered on the cheapest tier you can actually buy, and what the rest cost as add-ons. Peec caps self-serve at 3 of 6 models; Otterly's base tiers cover 4 and charge separately for Gemini, Google AI Mode and Claude.
- 03How many prompts or credits the plan includes per period, what an extra block costs, and how many user seats are included before per-seat fees apply. Semrush and Ahrefs ship one seat and charge $40 to $100/mo for each additional user.
- 04Exit terms in writing: monthly cancellation versus a prepaid annual term, the notice window before auto-renewal, and whether unused time is refunded. Peec, Otterly, Writesonic and HubSpot all state that prepaid fees are not refunded.
- 05Whether the product changes anything outside your own domain, or only reports on it. Measurement tells you a competitor was cited instead; it does not place the article, build the entity, or fix the review profile that caused it.
Deliberately excluded. Features neither side documents publicly, and any claim that rests only on a single review or a vendor's own case study.
Essentras sells services in this category, so this page is not a neutral review. Every competitor figure is published list pricing you can check on the vendor's own site, and the case for choosing a competitor over us is stated on every entry rather than left out.
FAQ
Profound vs Semrush, FAQ
Which costs less, Profound or Semrush?▾
Semrush publishes list prices; its SEO plan starts at $139/mo and the AI-prompt-tracking Starter tier is $199/mo for 1 seat, plus $45 to $100/mo per extra teammate. Profound publishes no price past a 7-day free trial; every paid tier is a custom Enterprise quote, so a direct dollar comparison is not possible until you request one.
Is Semrush's AI tracking as deep as Profound's?▾
Not by the numbers published. Semrush's top self-serve tier (Advanced, $549/mo) tracks 200 prompts a day across sites you choose; Profound's Enterprise tier tracks up to 9 answer engines with full prompt-volume data drawn from real conversations. Semrush bundles AI tracking into a broader SEO suite; Profound is built around AI-engine measurement alone, which is why its coverage goes deeper at the top end.
Why does Profound hide its enterprise price?▾
Its public pricing page shows only a free 7-day trial and a 'Custom' Enterprise tier with a 'Contact sales' button; no self-serve monthly price is published as of October 2026. Historical blog posts cite older Starter and Growth prices that no longer appear on the live page, so a prospective buyer cannot get a list price without a sales call.
How hard is it to cancel either one?▾
Semrush plans billed monthly can be cancelled at any time with no penalty beyond the current period; annual plans are prepaid and only refundable within a single 7-day window on an initial purchase. Profound has no published monthly option: its enterprise contracts run on an annual term that auto-renews unless you give 30 days' written notice before the renewal date.
Does Adobe's ownership of Semrush change how it's priced or sold?▾
Adobe closed its all-cash acquisition of Semrush Holdings on 28 April 2026, at roughly $1.9bn and $12.00 a share. As of this writing, no pricing or plan changes tied to that acquisition have been announced; Semrush's published tiers and refund policy are unchanged from before the deal closed.
Which platform covers more AI engines?▾
Profound states coverage of up to 9 answer engines at its Enterprise tier, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. Semrush publishes a daily prompt-tracking count per tier (50 to 200 prompts) rather than a named engine count, so the two figures measure different things: engines covered versus prompts checked per day.
Where does Essentras fit next to these two?▾
Essentras is not a monitoring dashboard. It runs its own measured corpus of AI answers across 6 engines at /ai-check, then sells the work that changes what those engines say: named publication placements with price and link policy shown before you pay, Wikipedia and Google Knowledge Panel work, and review-profile remediation. It cannot guarantee a ranking or an AI citation, and it is not a newswire for regulated financial disclosure.
Other comparisons in this category
Same decision, different pairings. Each page carries the published price for both sides.
Head to head
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