Profound tells you you're invisible. Authority makes you visible.
Profound is a strong AI visibility monitoring tool — and it's priced toward enterprise teams with a budget for one. Authority is a productized service that does the work to move the score, not just measure it.
Profound pricing as of May 2026. Plans evolve quickly — verify on tryprofound.com before comparing.
| On | Authority | Profound |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Productized service. Audit + ongoing retainer that produces content, ships schema, earns mentions, and reports. | AI visibility monitoring SaaS. Tracks citations across LLMs and reports trends. |
| Content production | ●4–16 optimized pages per month, depending on tier. Net-new comparison, alternatives, problem-led pages with FAQ/HowTo schema. | None — you produce content yourself or hire a separate agency. |
| Schema implementation | ●Top 10–50 pages get full schema in month 1. Every new page ships with schema. | None — you implement yourself. |
| Earned mentions | ●2–5 placements per month per tier. G2, Reddit, podcasts, trade press. | None — you do digital PR yourself. |
| Pricing | $1,490 audit. $2,490–$6,490/mo retainer. | Tooling at $499+/mo. Plus the cost of the team executing the work. |
| Best for | $1–10M ARR B2B SaaS without a content team and digital PR person — or with one that's already at capacity. | Enterprise teams with full content + PR + technical SEO bandwidth who need a monitoring layer. |
When Profound wins
If your team can produce 4–8 AI-optimized pages every month, has a technical SEO who deploys schema cleanly, and runs digital PR for earned mentions — Profound is a solid monitoring layer. The score they show you reflects work your team is already doing. Pay for the visibility into how that work is performing across engines.
When Authority wins
If you have Profound and your citation rate hasn't improved in 3 months, that's the gap. Tools surface problems but don't fix them. The work is in the production, the schema, the earned mentions, the comparison pages — not in the tracking. Authority does the work; Profound (or our internal Audit Engine) does the tracking.
You can also run both. If you keep Profound for executive dashboards, Authority's monthly Loom report layers on top for the tactical breakdown. They don't conflict.
See also: vs SEO agencies, vs DIY GEO.