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Comparison
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14 min read
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Updated
Liam Karlsson
Co-founder & CEO
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About the author
Liam Karlsson
Co-founder & CEO
Co-founder and CEO of Citera. Writes about how AI search picks the brands it recommends, and what teams can actually do about it.
TL;DR
Profound is the deepest AI visibility dataset on the market. Citera is the one that does the work for you. At the same $399 price point, Citera Scale tracks 5 AI models, 200 prompts and 5 seats; Profound Growth tracks 3 models, 100 prompts and 3 seats. Claude, Gemini and Microsoft Copilot are not available on any Profound self-serve plan. Both platforms publish content, but only Citera posts off your own property and deploys technical fixes automatically. Profound wins decisively on data depth, enterprise assurance and track record: 1.3 billion real user conversations behind its prompt data, SOC 2 Type II, an independent HIPAA assessment, and more than 700 enterprise customers. If you need those, buy Profound. Citera is three people in Sweden with 1,000+ users, and the security table below is not favorable to Citera.
OUR PRODUCT
Where Citera fits
Citera automates owned and earned surfaces, and its default is that nothing waits for you. Connect your site, analytics and social accounts in about two minutes, and the agent fixes the site, writes the content, publishes it, and posts on Reddit, Quora and LinkedIn. Human approval is a toggle, off by default. Whether that is a feature or a liability depends on how much you trust automation and how many people you have. If drafts are sitting unapproved in a queue right now, that is your answer.
Why this comparison exists
Citera and Profound get compared constantly because they overlap on the surface — both tell you how AI engines describe your brand — and diverge completely underneath. Profound is a measurement platform of unusual depth. Citera is an execution layer that measures well enough to act. This page sets out what each one publishes about price, coverage, capability, security and support, so the choice rests on the record rather than on positioning.
One convention runs through every table. A cell reads Unknown when the vendor has not published an answer, and No only when the vendor states it or a reviewer has confirmed it. That standard cuts against Citera in places — Citera's SOC 2 row is the obvious one — and the rows are printed as they are rather than as Citera would like them to read.
Pricing: what $399 actually buys
At $399 the two products give you materially different things. Citera tracks all AI models at that price, with 200 prompts a month and five seats, and every country and language is included on every plan — including the $219 tier. Profound gives you three engines at $399 with three seats, and Claude, Gemini and Copilot sit behind an Enterprise contract you have to negotiate.
The terms differ as much as the contents. Citera bills monthly with no lock-in and carries a 90-day money-back guarantee. Profound publishes no guarantee, its trial is contested in public reviews, and its discounting is tied to annual commitment. if the risk is signing and not seeing a return, those are not equivalent positions.
None of which makes Citera cheaper in every case. It makes the money buy breadth and reversibility rather than depth of dataset — which is the trade the rest of this page is really about.
Coverage: models, prompts, geography
Coverage is where Citera’s flat pricing shows up as a practical advantage. All AI models are tracked, and geography is not a lever: all countries and all languages are available on every plan, so a brand selling into six markets does not get routed to a sales conversation for the privilege.
Profound’s ladder works the other way. Its engine coverage broadens as you climb, with the models many teams specifically want — Claude, Gemini, Copilot — reserved for Enterprise. Its published regional and language coverage is also the one place its own record is inconsistent: vendor claims and reviewer accounts conflict, which is why those cells read Unknown rather than a number.
If your requirement is “watch these particular engines in these particular markets”, price the contract that actually delivers that combination rather than the tier headline.
Monitoring depth: Profound wins this
This is the section where Profound wins, and pretending otherwise would waste your time. Its prompt volumes come from more than 1.3 billion real user conversations and can be sliced by demographics. Citera's prompt-demand figures are an approximation model — a calculation of likely demand, not a record of observed conversations. Those are different classes of evidence and should be weighed as such.
Profound extends that lead with tooling built for analysts: Agent Analytics monitoring AI crawlers at the CDN layer, query fanout analysis, and citation tracking down to the individual chunk of a page. Citera refreshes daily and is customisable, but it does not match that depth of instrumentation, and as a company founded in 2025 it holds less historical data than a platform that has been collecting since 2024.
If your job is to explain precisely why a competitor is cited more often and to defend that analysis to people who will interrogate it, Profound is the stronger instrument.
Execution on your own property
On your own property, the split reverses. Citera publishes directly into your CMS and deploys technical site fixes automatically, with rollback — so a finding becomes a shipped change without a ticket, a sprint and a handover. Profound's CMS publishing is partial, which in practice means the recommendation still lands in someone's queue.
That difference compounds. A measurement platform produces a backlog; an execution layer draws it down. For a lean team without a dedicated content operation, the constraint is almost never knowing what to fix — it is having the hands to fix it, which is exactly what automated publishing and reversible deployments replace.
The caveat is trust in automation. Anything writing to your live site needs rollback and review, which is why Citera ships both — but it is a control you should exercise rather than assume.
Execution off your property
Off your own property is the clearest capability gap on this page. Citera posts to Reddit, Quora and LinkedIn — the third-party surfaces AI engines quote heavily when they answer questions about tools and vendors. Profound does not post off your property at all.
That matters because a large share of what an AI answer says about you is assembled from places you do not own. Improving your own pages is necessary and insufficient; if the citation is coming from a Reddit thread, the fix lives in that thread. A tool that only measures can tell you the thread exists, and then the work is yours.
Weigh it against the security column before deciding. Citera has no SOC 2 Type II and runs a small 2025 team, while Profound holds the certificate. If your reviewer treats that as a hard requirement, this advantage never gets a chance to matter — and that is a legitimate reason to choose the other product.
Feature comparison
Every value below is taken from each vendor’s published pricing or documentation. Where a vendor does not publish a detail, the cell reads Unknown rather than assuming a gap.
What all icon means:
✓
Supported
✗
Not supported
◐
Partial
—
Unknown / not published
The 60-second table
Citera
Profound
Best for
Lean teams who need execution, not another dashboard
Enterprise marketing teams with analysts and procurement
Entry price
$219/mo
$99/mo (ChatGPT only)
Realistic working price
$219–399/mo
$399/mo; Enterprise for full coverage
Models on $399 plan
5 of 9
3 — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews
Prompts on $399 plan
200/mo
100/mo
Seats on $399 plan
5
3
Countries & languages
All countries, every plan
Unknown — vendor and reviewers conflict
Publishes to your CMS
✓
◐
Posts off your property
✓
✗
Prompt-volume data
Approximation model, not observed conversations
1.3B+ real user conversations
SOC 2 Type II
✗
✓
Free trial
3 days
Contested — verify at time of reading
Guarantee
90-day money-back
None published
Contract
None, monthly rolling
Annual discount available
The table splits along one line: Profound is built to measure AI search, Citera is built to act on it. Profound's edge is its dataset — 1.3B+ real user conversations behind its prompt-volume numbers, plus SOC 2 Type II for buyers whose security review demands it. Citera trades that depth for coverage and execution: all AI models tracked against Profound's three at the same $399, five seats instead of three, publishing straight into your CMS, and off-property posting that Profound leaves to you. The commercial terms differ just as much — Citera starts at $219 a month on monthly rolling terms with a 90-day money-back guarantee, while Profound's $99 entry plan covers ChatGPT only and full coverage lands at $399 with annual discounting. If you need the deepest read on what AI engines are saying, Profound. If you need the gaps closed, Citera.
Citera and Profound are aimed at the same problem from opposite ends of the workflow. Profound is a measurement platform with unusual depth: prompt volumes built on 1.3B+ real user conversations, AI crawler monitoring at the CDN layer, query fanout analysis and per-chunk citation tracking, backed by SOC 2 Type II and a Series C balance sheet. Citera is an execution layer that measures well enough to act: all AI models tracked, 200 prompts and 5 seats at that price, every country and language included even on the $219 plan, and — the part Profound does not do — it publishes to your CMS, posts to Reddit, Quora and LinkedIn, and deploys technical site fixes automatically with rollback. The honest gap runs the other way on data and trust. Citera's prompt-demand figures are an approximation model rather than observed conversations, it has no SOC 2 Type II, and as a 2025 startup it holds less historical depth than a platform that has been collecting since 2024; Profound's coverage of Claude, Gemini and Copilot also requires an Enterprise contract that Citera's flat tiers do not. Commercial risk splits just as cleanly: Citera is monthly rolling with no lock-in and a 90-day money-back guarantee, while Profound publishes no guarantee, runs a contested trial and discounts on annual terms. Buy Profound if the deliverable is the deepest possible read on what AI engines say and someone on the team owns interpreting it. Buy Citera if the deliverable is the gap closed, and you would rather the tool do the work than describe it.
Overview
Citera
Profound
Category
AI visibility
AI visibility
Best for
Lean teams who need execution, not another dashboard
Enterprise marketing teams with analysts and procurement
Company stage
Early stage
Series C
Free trial
✓
—
Onboarding time
~120 seconds, self-serve
Self-serve on Starter/Growth; sales-led Enterprise
Pricing & plans
Citera
Profound
Entry price
$219/mo
$99/mo (ChatGPT only)
Pricing model
Tiered, monthly rolling
Fixed tiers, coverage ladder
Billing
Monthly rolling, no lock-in
Monthly; annual shown as 2 months free
Seats included
5 on Scale
3 on Growth
Usage caps
Agent jobs per tier
Agent credits per tier
Annual discount
Unknown
2 months free
Contract minimum
None, monthly rolling
Annual discount available
Platform coverage
Citera
Profound
ChatGPT
✓
✓
Google AI Overviews
✓
✓
Google AI Mode
—
◐
Gemini
—
◐
Perplexity
✓
✓
Claude
—
◐
Copilot
—
◐
Grok
—
◐
DeepSeek
—
◐
Meta AI
—
◐
Regional coverage
All countries, every plan
Unknown — vendor and reviewers conflict
Language coverage
All languages, every plan
Unknown — vendor and reviewers conflict
Capabilities
Citera
Profound
Prompt tracking
✓
✓
Prompt volume
Approximation model, not observed conversations
1.3B+ real user conversations
Competitor tracking
✓
✓
Share of voice
✓
✓
Citation tracking
✓
✓
Sentiment
◐
✓
Content generation
✓
✓
Publishing
✓
◐
Backlinks
✓
✗
Recommendations
✓
✓
Technical
Citera
Profound
API
—
◐
Native integrations
WordPress (.com and self-hosted), Webflow, Framer, Wix, Shopify
WordPress, Sanity, Contentful; Cloudflare, Akamai, AWS CloudFront, Fastly, Netlify, Vercel
GSC / GA4
✓
—
CMS integrations
✓
✓
Schema.org output
✓
—
llms.txt support
✓
—
AI-crawler access checks
—
✓
Refresh frequency
Daily, customisable
Daily, via front-end browsers not APIs
Security & compliance
Citera
Profound
SOC 2
✗
✓
GDPR
✓
—
SSO / SAML
◐
✓
Role permissions
—
✓
Support
Citera
Profound
Channels
24/7 priority chat, email, Slack
Per tier
Implementation help
Founding team sets up Enterprise
Dedicated onboarding on Enterprise
Citera
Tracks and improves how brands appear across AI search
Strengths
Publishes to your CMS and posts to Reddit, Quora and LinkedIn
Deploys technical site fixes automatically, with rollback
All countries and languages on every plan, including the $219 tier
Limitations
Prompt-demand data is an approximation model, not observed conversations
No SOC 2 Type II; three-person team founded 2025
Less historical depth than platforms collecting since 2024
Profound
AI visibility analytics platform
Strengths
Prompt Volumes built on 1.3B+ real user conversations, filterable by demographics
Agent Analytics monitors AI crawlers at the CDN layer
Query Fanouts Analysis plus per-page and per-chunk citation tracking
Limitations
Dashboard can feel overwhelming given the number of data points tracked
Self-learning recommendations need published volume before they improve
Claude, Gemini and Copilot require an Enterprise contract
Which should you choose
Citera
Nobody on your team has time to execute recommendations. You need Reddit, Quora and LinkedIn worked rather than analysed, technical fixes deployed rather than described, and you operate in more than one country or language without wanting that priced as an upgrade. You want more models, prompts and seats for the same $399, on monthly rolling terms.
Profound
Your procurement process requires SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA assurance, SSO and audit logging — a hard gate Citera does not clear. You need real prompt-demand research; the 1.3 billion conversation dataset has no equivalent anywhere, including here. You have analysts whose job is to sit in the data, infrastructure-level crawler analytics matter, and a single unreviewed post would be an unacceptable brand risk.
How we compared
Every figure is taken from each vendor's published pricing or documentation on the date shown, and each row carries the source it came from. Where a vendor publishes nothing, or where the vendor's own content and independent reviewers conflict, the cell reads Unknown rather than assuming a gap. Profound's geographic coverage is one such conflict: Profound's comparison content states 50+ countries and 15+ languages from the entry plan, while several independent reviewers state both Starter and Growth are limited to one region and language. the published claims conflict, so the comparison flags it rather than pick the version that favors Citera. Citera publishes this page and competes with Profound, which is stated plainly in the section marked as Citera’s product. Nothing here is paid placement and no vendor reviewed it before publication.
Sources & references
Profound pricing — official plan information.
Profound Answer Engine Insights — official product documentation.
Citera platform and pricing — official execution and coverage details.
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