Profound and Arda get shortlisted together, and the two are not really competing for the same job.

Profound is a measurement platform. It tells you how often your brand is named inside AI answers, which competitors are named instead, and which prompts drive that visibility. Arda is an autonomous agent. It runs the recurring SEO and AEO work itself, drafts the fixes, and ships them to your CMS once your team approves.

So the choice is not really "which tool is better." It is whether your blocker is knowing where you stand or getting the work done. Those are different problems and they need different purchases. Below is where each of us wins, including the places Profound beats us outright.

The short comparison

	Profound	Arda
Built for	Measuring AI visibility	Running SEO and AEO end to end
Core output	A score and a prompt set	Drafted, CMS-ready work
Covers classic SEO	No	Yes, same loop as AEO
Engines tracked	Up to 8, tier dependent	5, plus Google rankings
Who does the work	You, or agent credits	The agent, you approve
Publishes to your CMS	Via agents, credit metered	Yes, after approval
Prompt volume data	Yes, real demand estimates	No, inferred from keywords
Entry price	$99/mo	Quoted per account, pilots from $1k/mo
Learning curve	Low, it is a dashboard	None, it is not a dashboard

Pricing checked July 2026 on Profound's pricing page.

What Profound is genuinely good at

Profound is the most established name in AI visibility tracking and the depth shows. It tracks across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Claude, Grok, Meta AI, and DeepSeek depending on tier. Two things it has that most competitors, us included, do not:

Prompt Volume. Actual demand data for AI search, meaning an estimate of how often people ask a given question of an assistant. Everyone else is inferring demand from keyword data and category knowledge. If you are an enterprise brand allocating a large budget and you need defensible numbers in a deck, this is real and it matters.

Enterprise readiness. SSO, SAML, SOC 2, multiple companies under one account, unlimited domains, API access. If you are an agency running many client brands, or a company with a procurement process, Profound clears that bar today.

If either of those is a hard requirement, the rest of this page is academic. Buy Profound.

Where Profound stops

It tells you the score. Closing the gap is still your job. The Agents feature does add action taking, but it runs on a credit model, and credits are the constraint that shapes what you can actually do with it. Starter gets 100 agent credits a month, Growth gets 400, and a complex multi-step agent burns more than a simple one. Recurring content and technical work is not a monthly allowance of 400 anything.

It does not do classic SEO. This is the more structural gap. Profound is an AI visibility product, so your crawl issues, thin pages, internal linking, and Google rankings live in somebody else's tool and somebody else's meeting. The two halves of the same problem never get prioritized against each other, which means nobody can answer the only question that matters on a Monday morning: what do we fix first.

Somebody still has to sit in the middle. Teams running Profound usually also run Ahrefs or Semrush for the SEO half, plus a person to translate between the two dashboards and turn findings into shipped changes. That middle seat is the actual job, and it is the expensive one.

Where Arda is different

Arda is an agent rather than a dashboard, and the difference shows up in what lands on your desk. You do not get a score to act on. You get drafted work waiting for approval.

One loop across SEO and AEO. Arda crawls your pages, content, and structured data, measures the signals both Google and the assistants use, and runs the buying-intent queries in your category daily across Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude. Same system, same prioritized queue. A thin page and a lost citation compete for the same slot, which is the only way to know what to fix first.

It ships, and you stay in control. Arda drafts CMS-ready pages, on-page fixes, comparison pages, and structured data, then publishes to your CMS or opens dev-ready tickets once your team approves. Nothing goes live without sign off, every change carries its reasoning and a before-and-after, and there is a full audit trail. Agencies tell us that last part is what sold them: you can show a client exactly what changed and why.

Alerts on what costs you leads. When a competitor surges, or you stop being cited for a query you used to win, you hear about it when it happens rather than in next month's report.

No credits to ration. Priced like a hire, not per seat. That is a deliberate trade, and it means our pricing is quoted per account rather than published.

Where Profound beats us

More engines tracked, real prompt-volume demand data, a published entry price at $99 a month, and a longer enterprise track record with the compliance paperwork to match. We are the newer product and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

There is also a scenario where Profound is simply the right call and we are the wrong one: you want to check a hunch cheaply this month. A $99 tracker answers that. A quoted engagement does not.

How to choose

You need to report AI visibility to executives with defensible numbers. Profound.
You have procurement, SSO requirements, and many domains. Profound Enterprise.
You want to know whether you have a problem at all, cheaply. Profound Starter, or run the queries by hand for free.
You already know you are losing visibility and nobody has time to fix it. Arda.
Your SEO and your AI visibility are two separate meetings that never talk to each other. Arda.

The honest test: look at your last three months. If the blocker was not knowing where you stood, buy measurement. If the blocker was knowing exactly what to do and having nobody free to do it, another dashboard will not help.

Frequently asked questions

Does Profound do SEO? No. Profound measures visibility inside AI answers. Traditional SEO work, meaning crawl health, technical issues, internal linking, and Google rankings, sits outside its scope, so most teams run an SEO tool alongside it.

What are Profound credits and how far do they go? Credits meter the Agents feature, which is the part of Profound that takes action rather than reporting. Starter includes 100 a month and Growth includes 400, as of July 2026. A complex multi-step agent consumes more than a simple one, so the practical ceiling depends heavily on what you ask it to do.

How much does Profound cost? As of July 2026 Profound publishes Starter at $99/mo and Growth at $399/mo, with Enterprise quoted. Arda is quoted per account, with founder-delivered 90-day pilots for a small number of design partners each quarter.

Is there a Profound alternative that actually does the work? That is the gap Arda was built for. Profound reports the problem, Arda drafts and ships the fix under your approval. If you want prompt-volume demand data specifically, Profound remains the stronger buy and the two are not mutually exclusive.

Does Arda replace Profound? For most mid-market teams, yes, because it covers measurement, the decision, and the shipping in one loop across both SEO and AI search. If you specifically need prompt-volume data or enterprise compliance paperwork today, those are things Profound does that we do not.

How do I find out where I actually stand? Run the questions your buyers ask before choosing a vendor like you, across the assistants your market uses, and write down who gets named. If you would rather see it done for you, we will run them and show you the real answers, including who is named instead of you.

Arda vs Profound: a scoreboard, or the work itself?