Profound vs Semrush: which AI visibility tool should you choose? (2026)

Profound vs Semrush comes down to focus: pick Profound if AI search is its own program and you want tracking across up to nine engines. Pick Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit if your team already runs SEO in Semrush and wants AI visibility on the same screen, from $99 monthly. Want both under one contract? Then price Semrush Enterprise AIO too, because it pairs nine engines and fan-out analysis with Semrush's SEO data.

Searchmaxxed is ours, so here's our take. Both tools show where your company appears in AI answers from ChatGPT to Gemini and Google, and where rivals beat you. Closing that gap takes better pages, technical fixes and mentions on trusted sites. If you want to be the company those answers recommend, start with us.

What's the difference between Profound and Semrush?

Profound is a platform built only for AI search, while Semrush is an SEO suite that added AI visibility tracking to its existing tools. Everything else follows. Price, depth, engine coverage and even who on your team logs in each day all trace back to that split. Both serve AEO and GEO (answer engine and generative engine optimisation), the work of getting your company named in AI answers.

Look at who each vendor sells to. Semrush's knowledge base says its AI Visibility Toolkit is "built with SMBs, agencies, and mid-market companies in mind", while its enterprise plans serve "complex organizations managing multiple brands, regions, and teams". Profound's pricing page pitches its Enterprise plan at "companies operationalizing AI Search insights and running marketing agents at scale".

Prices and engine lists come from Semrush's AI Visibility, SEO + AI Search and Enterprise pricing pages and Profound's pricing page, as of 1 November 2026.

Semrush wins on breadth. One login puts your AI mentions beside keyword research, rank tracking, backlinks and site audits for the same topics. Profound wins on depth. Prompt-demand research, AI crawler analytics and marketing agents that draft and plan work from your AI search data all live in one place.

Semrush AI Toolkit vs Profound: what does each one track?

Both track whether AI answers mention your brand, which sources they cite, how they describe you and how you stack up against competitors. That core is the same. The differences sit in the extras, where Profound adds crawler analytics and agents and Semrush adds its whole SEO dataset.

Sources: Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit guide and Profound's pricing page and Answer Engine Insights documentation.

The data underneath differs too. Semrush says its prompt database holds more than 317 million prompts, drawn from AI search clickstream data and Google's keyword dataset for AI Overviews. Volume comes per topic, not per prompt. Profound says its Prompt Volumes data draws on more than 1.5 billion real AI conversations, licensed, cleaned and modelled.

Check your markets first. Semrush's prompt research covers 42 countries, Australia and the United States among them, and its prompt tracking reaches over 220 countries and territories. Profound's own documentation says its prompt-demand coverage "is strongest in the US, UK, and select European markets".

Which AI engines do Profound and Semrush cover?

Both enterprise plans list nine engines, while Semrush's entry plans cover five and Profound's trial covers three. That gap matters. If your buyers use Claude or Microsoft Copilot, only the enterprise tiers list them.

Read the Semrush column closely. Its daily Prompt Tracking runs in ChatGPT search, Google AI Mode, AI Overviews and Gemini. Perplexity appears in the weekly Brand Performance reports instead.

Coverage matters because each engine leans on different sources, so a brand can win one engine and vanish in the next. Our own agency panel showed it:

Perplexity cited a review directory (Semrush Agencies, Clutch, DesignRush and the like) in 36 of 44 agency answers. ChatGPT did it in 20 and Claude in 15. One agency's Clutch profile had six reviews and was cited 20 times.

Start with the engines your buyers use, and for B2B software that means ChatGPT first. G2's April 2026 report calls it the dominant AI chatbot for B2B software research, at 63%.

Which tool tracks query fan-out?

Profound shows the fan-out queries for every prompt you track, and Semrush shows actual fan-out queries in Enterprise AIO while its self-serve toolkit approximates them. Query fan-out is the set of hidden web searches an AI engine runs to build one answer.

Why care? An engine reads far more than it cites, and those hidden searches decide what it reads in the first place. Our ChatGPT panel measured the gap:

We put 300 Australian agency-buyer questions to ChatGPT three times each, with search on. It pulled 17,870 search results into those 900 answers and kept 4,389 as sources. Being found is the easy part. About three in four results it reads never make the answer.

Profound's Query fanouts view sits inside Answer Engine Insights and lists, for each tracked prompt, the Query Count and the Average Queries Per Execution. Expand a prompt to see the searches. Its Query Fan Out page adds each variation's share, the words the engine adds or drops, date tokens that favour fresh content and persona differences.

Semrush launched Query Fan-Out Analysis inside Enterprise AIO on 15 January 2026. It reveals "the Google search queries that fuel AI responses in systems such as ChatGPT", plus the domains ranking for each one. That ties fan-out to Google rankings. For the self-serve toolkit, Semrush's own fan-out guide says the toolkit "approximates the subqueries that AI systems may generate".

Track fan-out over weeks, not once. Profound studied 10,000 prompts over 14 days and found 91% of ChatGPT's fan-out queries were unique, against 14% for Perplexity. So a single ChatGPT check catches one route out of many.

What are the best query fan-out tracking tools?

The best ones capture the searches an engine ran for your tracked prompts. Free generators predict likely searches for any phrase, which helps you plan content but tells you nothing about a live answer.

Then comes the real work. You map each search to a page that answers it, and our guide to query fan-out walks through that mapping for an enterprise site.

How much do Profound and Semrush cost?

Semrush publishes its prices: the AI Visibility Toolkit costs $99 monthly, and Semrush One bundles start at $199 monthly. Profound lists a free seven-day trial and custom Enterprise pricing for brands.

Sources: Semrush's pricing pages and toolkit guide, and Profound's pricing page, as of 1 November 2026.

A worked example. Say you want 100 buyer questions tracked daily in ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI answers. The toolkit plus two 50-prompt add-ons gives you 125 prompts for $219 monthly. Semrush One Pro+ covers 100 for $299 monthly and throws in the whole SEO toolkit, from keyword research to site audits.

Profound prices Enterprise on request. Ask the sales team to quote your exact prompt count, engines, regions and languages, plus the Agent credits you'd burn each month.

Which should an enterprise, B2B SaaS or cybersecurity team choose?

Pick on who will use it. If your SEO team owns AI visibility, Semrush keeps it in one place; a dedicated AEO team gets more from Profound.

Picture a cybersecurity company that sells email security to firms of around 500 staff, whose buyers ask ChatGPT which tool suits a company that size. They also ask whether it works with Microsoft 365.

In Semrush, the team sees its AI Visibility Score against competitors and tracks those questions daily, right beside its Google rankings for email security. In Profound, it sees the searches ChatGPT ran behind each question. It also sees which pages ChatGPT cited and which AI crawlers fetched the product pages. Same goal, different lens.

If the team also needs Claude tracked or real fan-out data tied to Google rankings, the shortlist becomes Profound Enterprise against Semrush Enterprise AIO. Our Profound alternatives guide covers cheaper trackers if neither enterprise plan fits the budget.

How should you test Profound and Semrush before you buy?

Run the same buyer questions through both for two weeks. Then ask each vendor to trace one finding to one change on your site. A fair test takes six steps:

1. Write 25 unbranded buyer questions. That matches the toolkit's base limit.
2. Compare on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. Those are the three engines Profound's trial covers and Semrush tracks daily.
3. Ask Profound for a configured demo. Its trial runs a recommended prompt set that you can't customise, so your 25 questions need a demo.
4. Check Semrush's trial terms. The standalone toolkit has no free trial. Semrush One plans carry a free-trial button.
5. Compare the results after two weeks. Look at the brands each answer names, the sources it cites and the fan-out searches behind it.
6. Ask for one fix. Each vendor should take one gap it found and show you the page to change, what to change and why it should move the answer.

For a fuller enterprise demo checklist, our Profound vs Conductor comparison lays out the questions to bring.

Do you need an AI visibility tool, a search team, or both?

You need a tool to measure and people to move the numbers. Whether those people sit on your team or ours is the real decision.

The stakes are high. G2 surveyed 1,076 B2B software buyers in March 2026 and found AI chatbots were the top source shaping their shortlists. Worse, 69% chose a different vendor than they'd planned because of chatbot advice. If ChatGPT names three competitors and skips you, you lose deals you never see.

Getting named takes three kinds of work. Your pages must answer the buyer's exact questions, AI crawlers must reach them, and trusted sites must name you. Our guide to showing up in AI search covers all three, and our AI visibility tracking guide shows how to measure with free data first.

Is Searchmaxxed right for you?

We're a strong fit if you're a law firm, clinic or premium builder that's losing ground in Google or missing from AI answers. Maybe your SEO team hasn't caught up. You want your company named when buyers ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google who to choose.

Here's what you get. You talk to the people doing the work, with no account manager in between. We go after the searches and AI answers that bring buyers, then put your name on the pages those answers trust. Our top managed program tracks AI answers across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews. We also track which searches and AI answers turn into revenue, through your CRM as well as GA4. You own the site, content and data.

See the full scope on our AI search optimisation service page.

One client came to us with a website that wasn't working. Three months later he was on page one for one of the most competitive searches in his industry. Now he has more high-intent leads than he can handle, and we're building the systems to handle them.

The bigger picture:

Searchmaxxed's work has generated more than $15 million in revenue through search for its clients.

"I can't believe this worked." That's what we hear. Clients tell us they finally found a growth partner in search that keeps its word and gets things done.

We're the wrong call in three cases. If you only want a dashboard to run in-house, buy Profound or Semrush and keep the rest of the budget. If you need leads this month to survive, search takes longer than that. And if you're shopping for the cheapest retainer, look elsewhere.

What should you do next?

Start today with the 25 questions your best buyers want answered before a sales call, written in their words. Run them in ChatGPT, Gemini and Google, and note who gets named.

Want us to do it with you? Get your free search analysis. We'll benchmark you against your top competitors across Google, ChatGPT and the other AI engines. We'll show you where they're named instead of you, and the few moves that will matter most.

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