AEOeye vs Profound: Which Should You Use?

Pick by the job, not the brand. Use AEOeye to learn whether ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Google AI and Perplexity name you; use Profound to run AI visibility as a continuing program.

• Pick AEOeye if you are a founder, small team or consultant who needs a baseline this week, with no contract and no seats to configure.
• Pick Profound if you need daily tracking, all-time history, exports, an API, SSO/SAML or SOC 2, and you are happy to buy through a sales conversation.
• Pick neither yet if you cannot list the ten questions your buyers ask AI. Both tools are only as good as the questions you put into them.

Most teams should run the free check first. If it shows you absent, you have a reason to spend more; if it shows you named, you have saved a sales cycle.

AEOeye is built for a single, fast answer to "do AI engines recommend us?"; Profound is built to run AI visibility, content and reporting continuously for a team. The difference is a snapshot versus a system.

AEOeye. The free audit asks ChatGPT three unbranded buyer questions live, shows the real answers in full, names the competitors it recommended instead, and adds a score and starter fixes. The $29 one-time report adds Claude, Gemini, Google AI and Perplexity, ten questions instead of three, a 5-layer SEO foundation audit and a fix roadmap, with a PDF emailed to you. There is no subscription and no ongoing tracking.

Profound. Its pricing page pitches an "AI Marketer" that runs on credits, with Agents, a Context Manager and Answer Engine Insights for prompt tracking. Answer Engine Insights covers prompt tracking, citations, sentiment and a FactCheck feature for inaccurate claims about your brand. The page also says Profound is not only for AI search, so you are buying a marketing workbench as well as a tracker.

Profound's brand plans are a free 7-day Trial and a custom Enterprise plan with no list price, per its pricing page as of October 2026. AEOeye is free for a ChatGPT check and $29 once for five engines. The full side-by-side is in the table below.

Three differences matter more than the rest:

• Price basis. AEOeye's costs are fixed and public. Profound's paid cost depends on a quote for prompts, engines and credits, so you cannot budget before talking to sales.
• Engines at entry. Profound's Trial tracks ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews; Enterprise lists up to nine. AEOeye's free check is ChatGPT only; the other four engines are in the $29 report.
• What you keep. Profound's Trial lists no history, exports or API; Enterprise lists all-time history, CSV/JSON and an API. AEOeye gives you the report and an emailed PDF, not a running archive.

One correction for readers of older comparisons: the $99 Starter and $399 Growth brand plans often quoted for Profound are not on the current page. A $99 figure now appears only as the base of its agency plan.

Profound is stronger at everything that needs repetition: daily tracking, history, more engines, crawler analytics and enterprise controls. A one-off audit cannot do those things, and we will not pretend it can.

Repetition matters because AI answers are not stable. In SparkToro's study, 600 volunteers ran 12 prompts through ChatGPT, Claude and Google's AI a combined 2,961 times. There was less than a 1 in 100 chance that ChatGPT or Google's AI gave the same list of brands twice. The author's conclusion was that appearance across many repeated runs, a "visibility %", is the sound metric, and that you need to ask 60-100 times to see it. A single run per question, which is what our audit does, tells you whether you are present, not your precise rate.

Profound also lists things we do not offer:

• Breadth. Enterprise supports up to nine answer engines, including Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, DeepSeek and Google AI Mode, plus ChatGPT Shopping, per its pricing page.
• Crawler and traffic data. Agent Analytics tracks which AI bots crawl your site and how AI-driven visits convert.
• Procurement. Enterprise lists SSO/SAML and SOC 2, with unlimited seats and tailored support.

AEOeye is stronger when the real question is "do we even have a problem?" It costs nothing to ask, needs no call, and tests each engine at the default tier a free user would see.

• Cost of finding out. The first answer is free. The full five-engine picture is $29 once, with no seats, credits or renewal to manage.
• Answers in full. You read what ChatGPT actually said to each buyer question and which competitors it named, instead of a score you have to trust.
• No stronger-than-buyers models. Each engine is tested at the default tier a free user gets, so the result reflects what a typical buyer sees.
• Fixes included. The report adds a 5-layer SEO foundation audit and a fix roadmap, not just a mention count.

The honest limit is the mirror image of Profound's strength: one run, no history, no ongoing tracking. If you need to watch a number move over months, use a monitor.

We fetched both sites' robots.txt, llms.txt and homepage HTML on 2026-10-03 as part of our crawler access study. Neither blocks AI bots. Treat this as a fact box, not a verdict on either product.

• aeoeye.com: blocks no AI bots, names six explicitly (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, CCBot, Applebot-Extended), serves an llms.txt, and has Organization, WebSite, SoftwareApplication, Offer and FAQPage markup in the served HTML.
• tryprofound.com: blocks no AI bots, names none explicitly, returned 404 for /llms.txt, and showed no JSON-LD in its served HTML. That last point can mean the markup is injected by JavaScript: Google renders JavaScript, while many AI crawlers do not.

We attach little weight to llms.txt itself, since no major engine has documented using it. The per-site data is in the study CSV.

Run the cheap test first and escalate only when it shows a gap. That order costs at most $29 before you know whether a platform is worth a sales conversation.

1. Run the free check at aeoeye.com and read which brands ChatGPT names instead of you.
2. Buy the $29 report only if you are absent, to see whether Claude, Gemini, Google AI and Perplexity agree.
3. Fix the cause. Our guide to getting recommended by AI covers the common ones.
4. Then trial a monitor. Write your own ten buyer questions first: Profound's Trial uses a recommended prompt set for your industry that you cannot edit, so you need your own list to judge how well it fits.

For the full cost ladder, see our Profound pricing guide and Profound review. If Profound's entry route is the obstacle, our Profound alternatives page compares self-serve options, and the best AI visibility tools guide covers the wider market.