Quick verdict
Profound is a specialist: it measures how AI assistants describe your brand, in depth, for larger companies, from $99 a month billed yearly and $399 for three engines. Sondavo covers AI answers as one part of a product that also reads Google Search Console and crawls your site, from £49 a month. They are not the same purchase.
Sondavo vs Profound at a glance
The same thirteen rows used across every comparison on this site, so nothing has been selected to flatter either product. Every note is drawn from the sources at the foot of this page.
What the marks mean
- Yes
- Available to a normal customer on a published plan.
- Plan dependent
- Included on some plans and not others. The note says which.
- Limited
- Present, but narrower than the fullest implementation in this table.
- No
- The vendor's own product or pricing pages say it is not included.
- Not published
- The vendor does not publish this, so we will not mark it either way.
- Not directly comparable
- The products measure different things here, so a tick would mislead.
| Compared | Sondavo | Profound |
|---|---|---|
| Getting in, and what it costs | ||
| Usable tools without an accountCan you get a real answer about a website before handing over an email address? | Yes | No |
| ||
| Ongoing free plan for your own siteSomething you can keep using indefinitely on one site you own, without paying. | Yes | No |
| ||
| Cheapest paid planThe lowest published price to get past the free tier. Currencies and billing terms differ, so they are printed as the vendor prints them. | £19/month (Yes) | $99/month (Yes) |
| ||
| People included at the entry paid tierHow many colleagues can log in before you pay more. Relevant to agencies and to anyone who is not working alone. | 1 (Yes) | 1 (Yes) |
| ||
| Google search visibility | ||
| Google Search Console integrationReading your own Google data, which is exact, rather than estimating your traffic from an index. | Yes | No |
| ||
| Keyword and ranking databaseA large licensed or proprietary index you can research with, including for sites you have no access to. | Limited | No |
| ||
| Backlink dataFinding who links to a site, and to its rivals. | Limited | No |
| ||
| Researching a site you do not ownPointing the tool at a competitor's address and getting data back. | Plan dependent | Not directly comparable |
| ||
| Technical SEO | ||
| Crawls your site and reports faultsReading your pages the way a search engine does and listing what is broken. | Yes | No |
| ||
| One off technical checks with no sign inChecking a robots.txt, a redirect chain, a canonical tag or an hreflang set without an account. | Yes | No |
| ||
| AI visibility | ||
| Monitors what AI assistants answerAsking assistants the questions your customers ask and recording who gets named. | Plan dependent | Yes |
| ||
| AI assistants coveredWhich assistants are actually asked. More is better, and Sondavo is not the leader here. | 4 (Limited) | 1 to 9 (Plan dependent) |
| ||
| Full answer text kept, with its sourcesWhether you can read the exact words the assistant said, on the day it said them, and see which pages it read. | Yes | Not published |
| ||
What is Sondavo?
Sondavo reads one website and tells its owner, in plain English, where it stands. It connects to your Google Search Console account, so the figures for your own site are Google’s own rather than an estimate of them; it crawls your pages against eighteen named fault types and explains each one with the pages affected; it produces a ranked list of opportunities from your own data and measures what happens when you act on one; and from the £49 plan it asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity the questions you approve and records who they name.
Plans are £0, £19, £49 and £149 a month in sterling, billed monthly. Eight tools are published free with no account and no card, and they run on any address including one you do not own. There is no research index behind Sondavo, and it does not claim one: the features page lists only what is built today.
What you actually get
What a Sondavo report looks like
The free check on any address, with no account. This one is our own site.
Start with the free check on your own domain, then see what AI monitoring adds. Profound has no free plan, so answering whether assistants mention you at all costs nothing here and $99 a month on a yearly commitment there.
What is Profound?
Profound sells answer engine optimisation. Its named products are Prompt Volumes, Answer Engine Insights, Agents, Agent Analytics, Aim and Shopping, and together they measure how AI systems represent a brand: which prompts lead to it, what the assistants say, how AI crawlers read the site and how the brand fares against rivals inside those answers.
Published pricing is Starter at $99 a month billed yearly, giving 50 unique prompts, 1,500 responses a month, ChatGPT only and one seat; and Growth at $399 a month billed yearly, giving 100 prompts, 9,000 responses, three engines and three seats. Enterprise is custom, with up to nine engines and tailored allowances. There is no standalone free plan, though Growth offers a trial.
The plan descriptions state the intended audience plainly. Starter is for small companies monitoring their brand, Growth for growing companies producing optimised content, and Enterprise for large companies and agencies orchestrating campaigns. The product weight and the pricing both point at the mid market and above.
Written from Profound’s own site, read on 30 August 2026. If any of it is out of date or wrong, tell us and we will correct it.
These products solve different problems
It is tempting to line these two up as rivals because both watch AI assistants, but the shapes are not the same and treating them as interchangeable would mislead somebody making a real decision.
Profound's whole surface is AI answers. Nothing on its product or pricing pages lists a website crawler, a technical audit, Google keyword rank tracking or a Google Search Console integration. That is not a criticism: it is a specialist, and specialists are supposed to leave things out.
Sondavo's AI visibility sits inside a search product. The same subscription reads your Search Console history, crawls your site against eighteen fault types, ranks opportunities from your own data, tracks competitors and then asks four assistants what they say about you. If AI answers are the only thing you care about, that breadth is spend you are not using.
Depth of AI monitoring
On this axis Profound is clearly ahead, and the numbers say so without any interpretation needed.
Prompt volume: Profound Starter tracks 50 unique prompts and Growth tracks 100. Sondavo includes five approved questions per monitored site, with further five question packs at £15 a month. If you want a hundred prompts watched, Sondavo is the wrong tool.
Engine coverage: Profound Growth covers three engines and Enterprise up to nine. Sondavo covers four on every plan that includes monitoring: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. Sondavo beats Profound Starter, which is ChatGPT only, and loses to Profound Enterprise by a distance. Neither product covers everything.
Analysis: Prompt Volumes, Agent Analytics and the rest are purpose built instruments for a team whose job this is. Sondavo reports what was said, who was named, which pages were cited and which of your pages to improve or create as a result. That is enough to act on and it is not an AEO department in a box.
Sondavo data
Four assistants, four different habits
Perplexity and Gemini cited around twenty sources per answer. Claude linked a source in about half its answers and named a business in far fewer.
| Assistant | Answers | With links | Links each | Businesses named |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Perplexity | 60 | 100% | 19.8 | 1.2 |
| Gemini | 60 | 100% | 18.6 | 1.2 |
| ChatGPT | 62 | 98% | 8.2 | 1.7 |
| Claude | 57 | 53% | 3.7 | 0.4 |
The practical consequence: an assistant that rarely links a source is one your pages cannot easily earn a click from, however often it names you. Mentions and citations are different things and a tool that reports only one of them is telling you half the story.
- Sample
- 239 successful answers across 8 monitored sites
- Period
- 20 to 29 August 2026
- Measured
- Per assistant: the share of answers carrying any source link, the mean number of links per answer, and the mean number of businesses named per answer
- Source
- Sondavo aggregate data
Questions were set by the site owners, so topic mix varies between sites. This describes how the assistants behaved on these questions, not a general benchmark.
What Sondavo covers that Profound does not
Google Search Console. Sondavo's primary source is your own Google data, up to sixteen months imported and then retained beyond Google's own window. Profound does not list a Search Console integration.
A technical crawl. Sondavo reads your pages the way a search engine does and reports eighteen named fault types in plain English with the affected pages, ordered by the clicks each page currently earns. Profound lists no crawler or technical audit.
Google rankings and opportunities. Which searches you appear for, what is rising toward page one, and a ranked short list of what to do about it, with before and after measurement when you mark something done.
Free tools. Eight of them, no account, any address. Profound has no free plan at all.
Whether that breadth is worth anything depends entirely on whether you already own tools that do it. A large brand running Profound almost certainly has an enterprise SEO platform alongside it, in which case the overlap with Sondavo is the point rather than a gap.
Why the number of assistants matters more than it looks
The obvious question when comparing AI monitoring tools is how many assistants get asked, and it is easy to treat that as a checkbox. Sondavo's own monitoring data suggests it is not.
Across 53 questions where all four assistants answered on the same day, in the window 20 to 29 August 2026, two thirds of the businesses named were named by only one of the four. Six mentions out of 154 were shared by all four. In other words, a tool watching a single assistant sees a small and unrepresentative slice of who is being recommended.
That is drawn from eight monitored sites, which is a small sample of Sondavo customers rather than a cross section of the web, and the exact percentages should be read as indicative. The direction is not subtle enough to be an artefact of the sample size, and it is the reason Sondavo asks four assistants on every plan that includes monitoring rather than starting with one.
It also cuts against us. Profound Enterprise reaches up to nine assistants, and by this same logic that will surface mentions Sondavo's four never see.
Sondavo data
The same question, four assistants, four different answers
Two thirds of the businesses named were named by only one of the four assistants. Six mentions out of 154 were shared by all four.
Read the top bar first. Of the 154 business mentions recorded across those questions, covering 36 distinct businesses, 103 came from a single assistant that none of the other three agreed with. Only 6 were named by all four.
- Sample
- 53 questions where all four assistants answered, 212 answers, 154 business mentions across 8 monitored sites
- Period
- 20 to 29 August 2026
- Measured
- For each business named in an answer, how many of the four assistants named it for the same question on the same day
- Source
- Sondavo aggregate data
Eight sites is a small sample and they are Sondavo customers rather than a cross section of the web. The spread is wide enough to be worth showing; treat the exact percentages as indicative.
Pricing
Profound publishes in US dollars with yearly billing. Starter is $99 a month and Growth is $399. Sondavo publishes in sterling and bills monthly with no annual commitment: AI monitoring is included from Professional at £49 a month, with extra monitored sites at £19 and extra five question packs at £15.
Comparing the entry prices directly would be misleading in both directions. Profound Starter at $99 buys 50 prompts on one engine and nothing else. Sondavo Professional at £49 buys five questions across four engines plus an entire search and technical product. Neither is the cheaper version of the other; they are different products at overlapping prices.
Where the comparison does become clean is at volume. If you need 100 prompts across three engines, Profound Growth at $399 a month is built for it and Sondavo is not: the equivalent question packs would be an awkward fit for a product designed around a focused question set.
Where Profound beats Sondavo
Every comparison on this site carries this section. If we could not fill it honestly, the comparison would not be worth publishing.
01Prompt volume, by an order of magnitude50 prompts on Starter and 100 on Growth against Sondavo's five per monitored site. If you are tracking a wide prompt set, Profound is built for it and Sondavo is not.
02More engines at the top of the rangeUp to nine assistants on Enterprise against Sondavo's four. On Sondavo's own evidence about how little the assistants agree, that extra coverage is worth something real.
03Purpose built AEO analysisPrompt Volumes, Answer Engine Insights, Agent Analytics and Shopping are instruments for a team whose job is AI visibility. Sondavo reports enough to act on; it is not a specialist platform.
04Built for the size of organisation it servesSeats, campaign orchestration and enterprise support are on the price list. Sondavo tops out at a published fifty sites and fifteen seats.
05Doing one thing onlyIf AI visibility is the only thing you need measured, a product that does only that will be better at it than one for which it is a section.
Where Sondavo has the advantage
01AI answers are not the only thing that matters yetMost sites still get most of their visitors from Google search. Sondavo covers Search Console analysis, a technical crawl, opportunities and competitors alongside AI monitoring on one plan; Profound lists none of those.
02Four assistants on every monitoring planChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity from £49 a month. Profound Starter at $99 a month billed yearly covers ChatGPT alone.
03A genuine free tierEight tools that need no account and run on any address, plus a free plan on one site you own. Profound has no free plan.
04The assistant's words, kept and readableEvery answer stored verbatim with its date, the businesses named and the pages cited, then turned into a short list of pages to improve or create. No jargon and no score standing in for the evidence.
05Reachable for a small organisation£49 a month, monthly billing, one site. Profound's own plan descriptions aim Growth and Enterprise at growing and large companies, and the pricing follows.
Which should you choose?
Find the line that describes you. Several of them point at Profound.
AI visibility is somebody's actual job and you track dozens of prompts
Profound. Volume and engine coverage are what you are buying and Sondavo cannot match them.
You need assistants beyond ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity
Profound Enterprise, which reaches up to nine. Sondavo covers four and no more.
You want AI visibility and Google visibility from one budget line
Sondavo. £49 a month covers both on one site, and Profound does not do the Google half at all.
You have not yet established whether AI assistants mention you at all
Start with Sondavo, or with the free check. Answering that question does not warrant a $99 a month yearly commitment.
You already run an enterprise SEO platform and need AI depth on top
Profound. Sondavo's search and technical coverage would duplicate what you have.
You are an agency adding AI visibility reporting across many small clients
Sondavo's Agency plan at £149 a month covers fifty sites with white labelled reports. Profound is priced and built for fewer, larger brands.
Answer it on your own site first
Before paying anyone, including us: the free check reads Google for any address you give it, and the eight free tools run without an account. Neither asks for a card.
Common questions
- Is Sondavo a Profound alternative?
- Only partly. Both monitor AI assistants, but Profound goes far deeper on prompt volume and engine coverage, while Sondavo covers Google rankings and technical SEO that Profound does not touch. Which is the alternative depends on which half of that you need.
- How much does Profound cost?
- Starter is $99 a month billed yearly for 50 prompts, 1,500 responses and ChatGPT only. Growth is $399 a month billed yearly for 100 prompts, 9,000 responses and three engines. Enterprise is custom, with up to nine engines. Read from Profound's pricing page on 30 August 2026.
- Does Profound do traditional SEO?
- No. Its product and pricing pages list no website crawler, no technical audit, no Google keyword rank tracking and no Search Console integration. It is a specialist AI visibility platform.
- Which AI assistants does each one cover?
- Sondavo asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity on every plan that includes monitoring. Profound covers ChatGPT on Starter, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews on Growth, and up to nine assistants on Enterprise.
- Does Profound have a free plan?
- No standalone free plan is published. The Growth plan offers a trial. Sondavo has eight free tools that need no account and a free plan on one site you own.
- Is five questions enough to monitor AI visibility?
- It is enough to answer whether you are named for the questions that matter most, which is the decision most small sites face. It is not enough to run AI visibility as a programme. If you need dozens of prompts watched, that is the point at which Profound is the right purchase.
Sources and method
Every claim about Profound on this page was read from Profound’s own published pages on 30 August 2026 and is linked below. Nothing has been converted between currencies. Where Profound does not publish an answer, the comparison table says so rather than assuming one. Figures drawn from Sondavo’s own database are aggregated, carry their sample size and window, and identify no customer or customer website.
- Profound pricingPlan names, prices, prompt and response allowances, answer engines per plan, seats, and the stated audience for each plan. Read 30 August 2026.
- Profound product overviewThe named products Profound sells, and the absence of a site crawler, rank tracking or Search Console integration from them. Read 30 August 2026.
- Sondavo pricingSondavo plan names, sterling prices, and what each plan includes. Read 30 August 2026.
- Sondavo featuresThe full list of what Sondavo does today, with nothing planned or in beta included. Read 30 August 2026.
- Sondavo free toolsThe eight free tools, and that none of them asks for an account. Read 30 August 2026.
Pricing and features checked 30 August 2026. Product features and pricing can change, and a plan that included something when this was written may not next quarter. Check the vendor’s own page before you buy. If something here is wrong, tell us and we will correct it rather than leave it.
Search breadth against AI reach
The two axes that separate these products, both counted from published facts rather than judged. Sondavo and Semrush land on exactly the same point, which is the useful part: on raw capability they are close, and what separates them is price, currency and everything one of them does outside search.
Sondavo
5.5 of 6 search stages, 4 AI assistants.
ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity on every monitoring plan
Searchable
4.5 of 6 search stages, 9 AI assistants.
Nine named and selected at onboarding, though their FAQ calls three of them custom add-ons
Profound
1.5 of 6 search stages, 3 AI assistants.
Three on Growth. Up to nine on a custom Enterprise contract
Ahrefs
5.5 of 6 search stages, 6 AI assistants.
AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot
Semrush
5.5 of 6 search stages, 4 AI assistants.
ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini and Perplexity on the published toolkit
Which one should you choose?
Start from what you need rather than from the product. Three of these six point away from us, which is the honest answer for the people they describe.
- 01You need a large backlink database, or you research sites you have no access toAhrefs is the stronger buy, and Sondavo is not a substitute for an index.
- 02You run paid media, social or content programmes alongside searchSemrush. One subscription across all of it beats a cheaper tool covering a quarter of it.
- 03AI visibility is somebody's full time job and you track dozens of promptsSearchable or Profound. Prompt volume and engine coverage are what you are buying, and neither is what we sell.
- 04You want AI content written and audited for citation, not just measuredSearchable. Content tooling and an agent over your own data, from $125 a month.
- 05You want to check something on any website right now without an accountSondavo's free tools. Eight of them, no sign in, any address.
- 06You have one site, you own it, and you want to know what to fixSondavo. Your own Search Console data, a crawl and a ranked list, from £19 a month.
- 07You want Google visibility and AI visibility from one budget lineSondavo Professional at £49 a month covers both on one site.
Compare something else
- Sondavo vs SearchableSearchable goes deep on AI answers alone. Sondavo covers Google search first and AI answers as one part of it.
- Sondavo vs AhrefsAhrefs sells you a database of the web. Sondavo sells you a reading of your own site.
- Sondavo vs SemrushSemrush is a suite you grow into. Sondavo is one instrument that answers one question.
- All comparisonsThe full library, the overview matrix and the decision guide.