Profound Charges $399 to Show ChatGPT Citations. Otterly Starts at $29.
Search Engine Land's AEO tools roundup on May 4, 2026 named Profound as "the most direct way" to see how AI platforms cite a brand. Profound's pricing page lists $99 a month for Starter, $399 a month for Growth, and custom Enterprise. The cheaper floor in the same category is Otterly.AI at $29 a month, named a Gartner Cool Vendor in 2025 and a G2 High Performer in Winter 2026.
What changed in twelve months
A year ago, "AEO" was a label SEO consultants used to charge a 20% premium for the same content audit they were already running. The tooling did not exist, the metrics were not real, and most reports were screenshots of ChatGPT typed by hand. That is not the situation now.
Profound, founded in 2023, has raised $58.5M from Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, and Sequoia, and counts MongoDB, Ramp, Figma, Docusign, and Zapier on its customer page. It tracks brand citations across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, and Google AI Overviews in something resembling real time. That product did not exist eighteen months ago. Now it has competitors at every price point, including Otterly at $29, Peec AI's multi-language tracking tier, and a half-dozen aggregator dashboards trying to ride the same wave. The category went from theoretical to crowded in less than a year.
Tanguay's framing in the Search Engine Land piece is that AEO tooling is still catching up to AEO as a discipline. I think he's underselling it slightly. The tooling caught up enough that the question for an in-house marketer or a retainer agency is no longer "is there anything to buy?" It is "which tier am I willing to pay for, and what does the cheap one actually leave on the table?"
The price gap is wider than the feature gap
Profound's Starter plan at $99 a month tracks ChatGPT only and gives you 50 prompts. That is not enough to run a program. It is enough to convince an SEO director that the platform exists. The features that justify Profound, Agents content generation, the Opportunities panel, multi-platform tracking, and GA4 attribution, only show up at the $399 Growth tier. Multiple reviewers, including Airefs's review piece, point this out: $99 is a demo, $399 is the actual product.
Otterly's Lite plan at $29 a month gives you 15 prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, and Copilot. The Standard tier at $189 jumps to 100 prompts. Per-prompt cost is roughly equivalent, but Otterly opens with multi-platform tracking on the cheapest tier. Profound does not. So the practical gap between the $29 and the $399 platform is not breadth of coverage. It is volume, attribution, content tooling, and SOC 2 compliance.
What that means in practice: a solo founder testing whether AEO matters for their category should not start at $99 on Profound. They should start at $29 on Otterly, run 15 prompts that actually mirror their target queries, and see if their brand shows up. If yes, they have a budget case. If no, they have a content gap. Either answer is worth $29. Spending $99 to track only ChatGPT in 2026 is a strange product decision and I think Profound knows it. The Starter tier reads like a price anchor, not a real plan.
Free tools still do the load-bearing work
Tanguay puts Google Trends, Keyword Planner, Search Console, and GA4 in his top seven, which surprised me until I thought about it. The paid AEO platforms tell you what AI engines are saying right now. The free Google stack tells you what humans are searching for, what queries are gaining or losing momentum, and what is actually pulling traffic. Without the second half of that picture, AEO becomes a vanity exercise where you optimize for citation share on prompts nobody is running.
The data from ALM Corp's 2026 study backs this up. Google AI Overview citations from top-10 ranking pages dropped from 76% to 38% over the past year. Citations are now drawn from outside the top 10 roughly 62% of the time. If you optimize only for AI citation rate and ignore the underlying query patterns, you are chasing a dataset that drifts every quarter. GSC and GA4 have well-documented sampling and 48-72 hour reporting delays, but they remain the only place to triangulate which AI-cited pages actually drove traffic and conversion.
The 5W AI Platform Citation Source Index, built from more than 680 million citations across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, found that about 85% of brand mentions originate from third-party pages, not owned domains. So the citation game is mostly an earned-media problem. The free Google stack does not fix that, but it is where you will see the click-through impact of the third-party mention.
Aside: I found it telling that two of Tanguay's seven recommendations are basically "the AI assistants themselves, used analytically." Running structured prompts against ChatGPT and Claude is still the cheapest competitive intelligence tool in marketing. It does not show up on a tooling spreadsheet because it is free and feels like cheating. Use it anyway.
What I would actually buy first
If I had to write a 30-day stack for a marketing team that has never spent on AEO before, the order is roughly:
- Free, week one. Google Search Console regex queries on AI-referrer hostnames (chat.openai.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com), plus 90 minutes of structured prompt testing in ChatGPT and Claude on the queries you most care about. This costs nothing and produces a baseline.
- $29, week two. Otterly Lite, set 15 prompts against your top branded and category-defining queries. Run for two weeks, screenshot the citation share weekly. If you are already cited on more than half, reinvest in content for the missing half. If you are below 20%, you have a structural authority problem and a tracker will not fix it.
- $399, month three (optional). If the first two steps showed measurable lift, then Profound Growth makes sense. The Opportunities panel and multi-platform GA4 attribution are the features I would actually pay $4,800 a year to keep, not the dashboard alone.
Ahrefs, Tanguay's sixth pick, slots in if you do not already have it. It is not an AEO tool. But the content-gap and Content Explorer features tell you which third-party pages already get cited in your category, and that tells you which outlets to pitch. Brand mentions in cited outlets is the closest thing AEO has to backlink-building today. If you read our piece on Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode running on separate stacks, the same earned-media logic applies twice, because each surface ranks slightly differently.
The trap I would avoid
The mistake I keep seeing is teams buying Profound Growth at $399, never integrating it into their content calendar, and reporting "share of voice" numbers monthly to a CMO who does not yet care. Six months later the contract gets cut. The tool was fine. The integration was the problem.
From what I have seen, AEO programs that survive their first renewal cycle have one trait in common. Somebody on the team writes a weekly two-paragraph summary tying citation share movement to actual content shipped or not shipped. No tool delivers that summary. A person does. So before you commit to $4,800 a year or $348, ask whether anyone owns that two-paragraph weekly write-up. If nobody does, the tool will not pay for itself, regardless of which tier you pick.
By Notice Me Senpai Editorial
