SEMrush vs Profound: Which SEO Tool Is Better?

SEMrush is the best all-in-one SEO platform for traditional search, keyword research, backlinks, and basic AI visibility monitoring. Profound is the definitive choice for enterprises that need deep Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and AI search intelligence. They solve fundamentally different problems — and the smartest teams in 2026 are using both.

Introduction: Why This Comparison Matters in 2026

The SEO landscape has changed more in the last 18 months than in the previous decade combined. AI search engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot — are no longer a novelty. They are now primary discovery channels for millions of consumers every single day.

Traffic from AI platforms grew 527% year-over-year in 2025, and over 70% of searches now end without a click because users get direct answers from AI-powered interfaces. That's an enormous shift that demands new tools, new strategies, and a completely new way of thinking about visibility.

Enter two very different platforms: SEMrush, the veteran all-in-one SEO suite trusted by over 117,000 paying subscribers, and Profound, the purpose-built AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) platform that raised $20 million in seed funding in 2025 to solve the AI visibility problem from the ground up.

So which one should you use? The answer depends entirely on what problem you're trying to solve. This guide breaks down every dimension — features, pricing, data quality, use cases, and real-world results — so you can make an informed decision.

If you're still building your SEO foundations, check out our guide on what is SEO and why it matters before diving in. And if you want to understand the broader ecosystem of tools, our roundup of 10 powerful free SEO tools that actually work is a great starting point.

What Is SEMrush? A 2026 Overview

SEMrush was founded in 2008 by Oleg Shchegolev and Dmitry Melnikov. It started as a keyword research tool and grew into one of the most comprehensive digital marketing platforms on the planet, now offering 55+ individual tools covering SEO, PPC, content marketing, social media, competitive intelligence, and local SEO.

As of early 2026, SEMrush has rebranded its flagship offering as Semrush One — a bundled subscription that includes the full SEO toolkit alongside its newly launched AI Visibility Toolkit, designed to help brands track their appearance across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.

Core SEMrush Features (2026)

Keyword Research & Intelligence SEMrush's keyword database remains industry-leading, with access to billions of keywords across 140+ countries. The platform's AI-powered "personalized data" feature has become arguably the most advanced keyword research system available in any SEO tool as of 2026.

Backlink Analysis With one of the largest backlink databases in the industry, SEMrush lets you analyze your link profile, spy on competitor backlinks, and run toxic link audits — essential for maintaining domain authority.

Site Audit SEMrush's technical SEO crawler checks over 140 on-site issues including crawlability, Core Web Vitals, mobile usability, structured data, and HTTPS implementation. For a deep understanding of these metrics, read our breakdown of how Core Web Vitals affect your rankings.

Competitive Analysis The Traffic Analytics and Market Explorer tools let you benchmark against competitors, identify traffic sources, and uncover strategic gaps — all from one unified dashboard.

AI Visibility Toolkit SEMrush's newer addition tracks brand mentions across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Perplexity, and Gemini. It includes prompt research, brand performance reports, sentiment analysis, and competitor AI visibility — all integrated into the same workflow you already use for SEO.

What Is Profound? A 2026 Overview

Profound launched in 2024 as the first enterprise-grade platform built exclusively for Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). Unlike SEMrush, Profound does zero traditional SEO — no keyword tracking, no backlinks, no site audits. It assumes you already have an SEO tool and focuses 100% of its energy on how AI engines understand, discuss, and cite your brand.

Profound raised $20 million in seed funding in June 2025 and was named the G2 Winter 2026 AEO Leader — a significant validation for a platform that didn't exist before 2024.

The platform operates on a database of 400+ million prompts and uses real-time crawler analytics to understand how AI systems reference brands across different contexts, languages, and geographies.

Core Profound Features (2026)

Multi-LLM Brand Tracking Profound tracks brand visibility, citation frequency, sentiment, and competitor comparisons across ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, and more — with the breadth expanding on higher-tier plans.

Prompt Intelligence The platform surfaces what users are actually asking AI engines in your niche — critical intelligence when ChatGPT answers overlap with Google search results just 12% of the time, meaning 88% of AI-cited content is completely invisible to traditional SEO tools.

Citation Analysis Profound identifies which sources AI engines cite when answering prompts in your category, then shows you exactly what it would take to get your brand cited more frequently.

Sentiment & Misinformation Monitoring For enterprise brands, knowing what AI says about you is as important as knowing if it says anything at all. Profound monitors tone, accuracy, and brand narrative across AI responses.

Agent Analytics (Enterprise) A unique feature that tracks how AI agents — autonomous buying and research bots — interact with your brand and content. This is particularly important as agentic commerce begins reshaping consumer behavior.

SEMrush vs Profound: Head-to-Head Feature Comparison

Data Quality: Database vs Real-Time Scraping

This is one of the most important technical distinctions between the two platforms — and it's frequently overlooked.

SEMrush maintains a database of 130M+ prompts with historical AI responses. When you query the platform, results are returned quickly and include trend data. However, this database approach means the data may not reflect what AI engines are saying right now.

Profound uses real-time scraping — it queries AI interfaces directly and captures actual current responses. You see what real users see at that moment. The trade-off is slightly slower data collection.

Why does this matter? Research shows that 40–60% of domains cited in AI responses change every single month:

• Google AI Overviews: 59.3% citation drift
• ChatGPT: 54.1% citation drift
• Microsoft Copilot: 53.4% citation drift
• Perplexity: 40.5% citation drift

AI search results are extraordinarily volatile. Traditional SEO tools built for static blue-link rankings simply weren't designed to track this kind of churn. If your enterprise strategy depends on AI visibility, real-time data is not optional — it's foundational.

Pricing Breakdown: SEMrush vs Profound (2026)

SEMrush Pricing

To access AI visibility tracking on an "SEO Classic" plan, you'll pay $99/month on top of your existing subscription — resulting in approximately $238.95/month at the entry level. The Semrush One bundle at $199/month is better value if AI visibility is a core need.

Profound Pricing

Profound's Starter plan focuses primarily on ChatGPT with a limited number of tracking prompts. The real depth and multi-LLM coverage kicks in at Growth ($399/mo) and Enterprise (custom pricing via sales conversation).

The bottom line on pricing: If you're choosing between the two purely on cost for AI visibility, Profound's Starter ($99) is comparable to SEMrush's AI add-on ($99) — but you'd lose all of SEMrush's traditional SEO capabilities. For teams that already have an SEO tool, Profound is a natural complement. For teams building their first tool stack, Semrush One offers more overall value.

Use Case Scenarios: Who Should Use What?

Choose SEMrush If You:

• Are a freelancer, small business, or agency building a complete SEO stack from scratch
• Need keyword research, backlink analysis, rank tracking, and site audits all in one place
• Want AI visibility as a feature within a broader marketing platform
• Are already a paying Semrush subscriber and want to add AI monitoring affordably
• Prefer a single workflow for all things search — traditional and AI combined
• Have a limited budget and need maximum coverage across SEO disciplines

For a deeper look at what a comprehensive SEO workflow looks like, explore our guide on how to develop an effective SEO strategy.

Choose Profound If You:

• Already have a solid SEO tool in place and want dedicated AI search intelligence
• Are an enterprise brand where AI visibility is a boardroom-level priority
• Need multi-LLM tracking with real-time data and deep citation analytics
• Require SOC 2 compliance and enterprise-grade security for sensitive brand data
• Want actionable, specific optimization recommendations (not just monitoring dashboards)
• Need to track how AI agents interact with your brand as part of an agentic commerce strategy

Use Both If You:

• Operate a large marketing team with dedicated SEO and AEO functions
• Need to compete aggressively in both traditional search and AI-generated answers
• Have the budget to maintain best-in-class tooling for each discipline independently

Many enterprise teams use this exact approach: SEMrush for traditional SEO and competitive research, Profound for AI visibility and AEO strategy. The two platforms complement each other because they're designed for fundamentally different problems.

AI Features Deep Dive: SEMrush One vs Profound

SEMrush's AI Visibility Toolkit

SEMrush's AI Visibility Toolkit was built to sit inside the same workflow you already use for traditional SEO — and that's both its greatest strength and its biggest limitation.

What works well: The Prompt Research Report is genuinely valuable for SEO professionals because it bridges the familiar keyword-research mindset with AI-first query intelligence. When you enter a phrase, you get a breakdown of how that topic is discussed across AI platforms — enabling you to turn relevant prompts into tracking campaigns or feed them into content optimization workflows.

The brand performance reports offer excellent insight into sentiment, perception, and how your brand compares to competitors in AI-generated responses. For many teams experimenting with AI visibility, this level of insight is sufficient.

Where it falls short: SEMrush currently tracks a narrower set of AI engines compared to Profound, and its database approach means data may lag behind real-time AI behavior. The platform also lacks advanced features like Agent Analytics and AI shopping visibility — critical for forward-thinking AEO teams.

Profound's AEO Platform

Profound was built from the ground up around a single question: how does AI actually talk about your brand? This singular focus results in dramatically deeper intelligence for teams that need it.

The platform's citation analysis is particularly powerful — it doesn't just show whether you appear in AI responses, it shows which sources AI engines trust in your category and what those sources have in common. That means actionable link-building and content strategies, not just dashboards.

Profound's actionable recommendations are widely cited as more specific and implementable than SEMrush's suggestions. While SEMrush provides more AI opportunity recommendations in volume, Profound's tend to be of higher quality with clearer rationale and step-by-step implementation guidance.

Technical SEO: SEMrush Wins Decisively

Profound doesn't do technical SEO. Full stop. If you need to audit your site architecture, fix crawl errors, improve Core Web Vitals, optimize your robots.txt, or fix broken links — you need a different tool alongside Profound.

SEMrush's technical capabilities are comprehensive and battle-tested:

• Crawl budget optimization for large sites
• Core Web Vitals monitoring and recommendations
• Structured data validation
• Mobile-friendliness checks
• HTTPS/SSL analysis
• Log file analysis integration

For a complete technical SEO framework, our guides on how to audit your technical SEO and what is technical SEO and why you need it provide detailed walkthroughs. You can also run a quick check using our website SEO score checker.

Backlinks & Off-Page SEO: SEMrush Wins Again

Profound has zero off-page SEO features. No backlink database, no link prospecting, no toxic link analysis.

SEMrush's backlink toolkit is among the best in the industry, featuring:

• One of the largest backlink indexes available
• Toxic link identification and disavow file generation
• Competitor backlink analysis (Backlink Gap tool)
• Link-building outreach opportunity discovery
• Historical backlink data

For a complete guide to building authority through links, explore our resources on best strategies to build high-quality backlinks and how backlinks impact your SEO score.

Content & Keyword Research: SEMrush Is the Standard

SEMrush remains the gold standard for content-driven SEO strategies. Its keyword magic tool, content gap analysis, topic clusters, and SEO writing assistant have no equivalent in Profound's feature set.

For teams building content strategies around traditional search and AI search simultaneously, SEMrush's prompt research feature provides a bridge — helping you identify what questions users are asking AI engines, then building content strategies around those high-intent queries.

Pair this with strong on-page SEO practices. Our guide on how to optimize your blog posts for SEO is an excellent companion resource.

Local SEO: SEMrush Has the Edge

Neither platform is purpose-built for local SEO, but SEMrush includes local listing management, Google Business Profile optimization guidance, and NAP consistency checking — all features with no equivalent in Profound.

If local search matters to your business, check our detailed guides on local SEO for small businesses and how to optimize your Google Business Profile.

User Experience & Learning Curve

SEMrush has a mature, polished interface that will feel familiar to anyone who's used Ahrefs or Moz. The learning curve is moderate — there's a lot to explore, but logical categorization makes navigation intuitive. With 55+ tools, new users can feel overwhelmed initially.

Profound has been reported by some users as complex with a longer deployment curve, particularly at the Enterprise level. The platform is purpose-built for sophisticated AEO teams, not SEO generalists. If you're new to AI visibility, expect to invest time in understanding the platform's framework before extracting full value.

Support: SEMrush offers broad general support across all its tools. Profound offers dedicated AEO expertise — their support team understands AI visibility deeply, not just generically. For enterprise brands investing seriously in AEO, this specialist support can be a meaningful differentiator.

What the Data Says: The Case for AEO in 2026

Before concluding, it's worth contextualizing why this comparison matters so much right now.

The shift to AI-mediated search is not incremental. Consider these 2025–2026 benchmarks:

• ChatGPT answers overlap with Google search results just 12% of the time — meaning 88% of AI-cited content is completely invisible to traditional SEO analysis
• AI search traffic grew 527% year-over-year in 2025
• 40–60% of domains cited in AI responses change monthly — creating volatility that database-model tools cannot track effectively
• AI search is now "an exciting new problem space that is rapidly becoming a boardroom concern for large enterprises"

The implication is clear: traditional SEO remains essential, but it's no longer sufficient. Brands that rely exclusively on blue-link rankings are flying blind across an increasingly large portion of their potential audience.

Understanding how AI is changing SEO is no longer optional for modern marketers. Equally important is understanding how voice search affects SEO strategy — the same conversational query patterns that drive voice search now drive AI answer engines.

Verdict: SEMrush vs Profound — Which Is Better?

There is no single winner in the SEMrush vs Profound debate — because they're not playing the same game.

SEMrush wins for:

• All-in-one traditional SEO (keyword research, backlinks, site audits, rank tracking)
• Small to mid-size businesses, freelancers, and agencies on a single budget
• Teams that want AI visibility as part of a broader search marketing workflow
• Existing Semrush users who want to add basic AI monitoring without switching platforms

Profound wins for:

• Enterprise brands that prioritize AI visibility as a strategic pillar
• Teams that already have SEO covered and need a dedicated AEO layer
• Marketers who need real-time, multi-LLM citation tracking with deep analytics
• Brands operating in highly competitive industries where AI search dominates early-stage discovery

The smartest approach in 2026: If budget allows, use both. SEMrush handles the traditional SEO foundation. Profound handles the AI visibility layer. Together, they provide complete coverage across every major discovery channel — traditional and AI-powered alike.

If you're just starting out, run a free audit of your current SEO health using our website SEO score checker and explore the best free SEO tools for beginners before committing to a paid platform.

10 Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1. Is SEMrush better than Profound for traditional SEO?

Yes, without question. SEMrush offers a comprehensive suite of 55+ SEO tools covering keyword research, backlinks, rank tracking, site audits, and competitive analysis. Profound does not offer any traditional SEO features whatsoever — it's built exclusively for AI visibility and AEO. If traditional SEO is your primary need, SEMrush is the clear choice.

2. What is AEO and why does it matter in 2026?

AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization — the discipline focused on earning, measuring, and improving your brand's presence within AI-driven answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity. With AI platforms capturing a rapidly growing share of search queries (traffic grew 527% year-over-year in 2025), optimizing for AI answers is becoming as important as optimizing for traditional Google rankings.

3. Can I use Profound without having SEMrush?

Yes. Profound is a standalone platform and doesn't require any other tool to operate. However, since Profound doesn't offer keyword research, backlink analysis, or technical SEO auditing, you'll need a separate SEO tool (like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or a free alternative) to cover those functions.

4. How much does Profound cost vs SEMrush?

Profound starts at $99/month (Starter), $399/month (Growth), or custom pricing for Enterprise. SEMrush starts at $139.95/month (Pro plan) for traditional SEO, with AI visibility features available either as a $99/month add-on to existing plans or bundled in the Semrush One plan starting at $199/month.

5. Does SEMrush track AI search results like ChatGPT and Perplexity?

Yes, SEMrush now tracks AI visibility across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, and Gemini through its AI Visibility Toolkit. However, SEMrush uses a database approach (130M+ prompts with historical data), while Profound uses real-time scraping. For brands where real-time citation accuracy is critical, Profound's data tends to be more current.

6. Which tool has more LLM coverage — SEMrush or Profound?

Profound covers more LLMs overall, especially at higher-tier plans (Growth and Enterprise). Semrush One covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and AI Mode across all plans. Profound's Enterprise plan expands to one of the broadest multi-LLM coverage sets available in the market, including platforms that SEMrush doesn't currently track.

7. Is Profound worth the price for small businesses?

For most small businesses, Profound's pricing is difficult to justify unless AI search is a core growth channel. The Starter plan at $99/month provides limited coverage (primarily ChatGPT with a restricted number of prompts). Small businesses with limited budgets are generally better served by SEMrush's AI toolkit add-on or by less expensive alternatives like Promptmonitor ($29/month), which track AI brand mentions across multiple platforms.

8. How do SEMrush and Profound handle data freshness?

This is a key technical difference. SEMrush uses a database of historical prompts and AI responses — fast retrieval but potentially lagging behind current AI behavior. Profound uses real-time scraping, querying AI interfaces directly to capture live responses. Given that 40–60% of AI-cited domains change every month, real-time data is significantly more accurate for brands making time-sensitive optimization decisions.

9. Can SEMrush replace Profound for enterprise AI visibility?

For most enterprises with mature AEO needs, SEMrush's AI Visibility Toolkit is likely insufficient as a standalone solution. Its Google-centric view misses a significant portion of AI-driven product discovery, and its database model can't track citation volatility as effectively as Profound's real-time approach. Enterprises serious about AI visibility typically layer Profound on top of their existing SEO tools rather than relying on a general-purpose platform's AI features.

10. What's the best way to get started with SEO and AI visibility in 2026?

Start with the foundations. Use a free tool like our keyword research tool and website SEO score checker to audit your current position. Build a solid on-page SEO foundation using our on-page SEO checklist and 30-day SEO plan for new websites. Then evaluate paid tools like SEMrush once you have a clear picture of your needs. Layer in Profound only when AI visibility becomes a strategic priority with dedicated budget and team resources.

Final Thoughts

The SEMrush vs Profound comparison ultimately reflects the broader transformation happening across the search industry in 2026. Traditional SEO is not dead — it remains the foundation of any credible digital visibility strategy. But it's no longer the whole game.

SEMrush is the best all-in-one platform for teams that need comprehensive traditional SEO with AI monitoring included. Profound is the best purpose-built platform for enterprises that need AI search intelligence at the depth and precision that a generalist platform simply cannot provide.

The key question to ask yourself: is AI visibility a feature you want, or a strategic pillar you need to own? Your answer determines your tool stack.

For more expert SEO resources, explore our comprehensive guides on SEO for beginners, how to do an SEO audit, and the most important SEO metrics to track.