Profound vs. Crawlytics: Profound is the high-end share-of-voice tool for enterprise; Crawlytics is the technical stack for bot tracking, llms.txt, and WebMCP commerce from $49.99/mo.
Quick answer
Profound is the enterprise share-of-voice dashboard for AI search — it runs hundreds of prompts daily across every major model, charts your visibility against named competitors, and ships executive-ready reports. It starts in the four figures monthly and earns it for the brands it serves. Crawlytics is the technical stack underneath — per-bot server log analytics, llms.txt generation, per-LLM UTM attribution that recovers ChatGPT/Claude/Perplexity referrals from "(direct)" in GA, and WebMCP agentic commerce — at $29.99-$49.99/mo. They overlap in the citation-tracking question but optimize for different customers. Pick Profound if you're a $100M+ brand that needs share-of-voice reporting. Pick Crawlytics if you're a sub-$50M business that needs bot tracking, llms.txt, attribution recovery, or WebMCP. Run both if you're large enough that both jobs apply — they overlap less than 20%.
This is the comparison post I get asked for most. Profound (tryprofound.com) is the best-funded, best-marketed entrant in the AI brand visibility space, and they've done a clean job of defining the share-of-voice category. Crawlytics covers a different surface — the technical AI-readiness stack — at a price point that doesn't compare. People want to know which to pick.
The honest answer is that for most companies it's not a choice between them. They solve different jobs at different price points for different customers. Below I'll walk through what Profound actually does well, where Crawlytics genuinely wins, where Profound clearly wins, and the decision tree for picking one (or both) by company size.
Five things, all done well:
That's a real product, well-executed, and the customers I've talked to who use it at scale (large CPG, large fintech, large travel) consistently say it earns its price. The category Profound defined did not exist three years ago and they put a flag in it convincingly.
The overlap with Profound is exactly one feature: tracking whether AI assistants cite your URLs.
Crawlytics approaches this from the server side: it tells you which AI bots (ChatGPT-User, Claude-User, Perplexity-User, OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot) fetched which of your pages, when, how often. Real fetch traffic, real URL-level granularity, real-time, from your access logs.
Profound approaches it from the prompt side: it asks the models questions a buyer would ask and records whether your URL shows up in the cited sources. Synthetic prompts, full response text, share-of-voice math, daily cadence.
Both signals are valid. They answer different versions of the same question. Profound's prompt-test catches the case where you're "in the index but not cited" — you're being read but not surfaced. Crawlytics' log signal catches the case where you're "cited but not being fetched" — your training-era reputation is carrying you and the models aren't refreshing. You want both signals; you usually don't need to pay for both at the same price tier.
Five places where Profound is straightforwardly better, and the gap isn't going to close from Crawlytics' end any time soon:
Profound's share-of-voice chart is the artifact a marketing team brings to a stand-up. It compresses "how visible is our brand in AI search" into a single number, trended over time, with named competitor bars next to yours. Crawlytics does not have this view. Per-bot fetch counts are a different question and a different audience.
Running 500-2,000 curated prompts daily against five models is a real infrastructure problem. Profound has solved it, runs it as a service, and curates prompts by vertical so you don't have to design your own test bench. Crawlytics' citation tracking on the roadmap is going to be smaller-scale and DIY-flavored — 50-200 prompts on a slower cadence. Different product.
Branded PDF exports, scheduled executive digests, white-glove account management, custom dashboards for the CMO. Profound has built the enterprise-buying surface — and the price reflects it. If you need the report to look like McKinsey wrote it, Profound delivers; Crawlytics produces dashboards designed for the operator, not the C-suite.
Capturing the full response text and analyzing the language models use about your brand — "fast, reliable, expensive" vs "innovative, complex, premium" — is a qualitative layer that requires both the prompt automation and an NLP layer on top. Profound ships it. It's a real input to brand and positioning work that no log-analytics tool reproduces.
Profound tracks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot in one dashboard. Crawlytics tracks every named AI bot that hits your server (which is broader on the crawler-coverage side) but doesn't yet run synthetic prompts against all five models. For "are we cited in Gemini's answer to this buyer question," Profound is the answer today.
Five places where Crawlytics is straightforwardly better, and where Profound either doesn't compete or hasn't shipped:
Profound asks the model what it knows about you. Crawlytics watches your server and reports who fetched what, when. That distinction matters: server-log signal catches every fetch from every bot the moment it happens — not just the prompts in your test set. If a new AI client launches tomorrow and starts crawling your site, Crawlytics shows the traffic on day one. Profound shows it the first time you add a prompt that surfaces the new model. Different latency, different completeness.
Profound does not ship an llms.txt file. They're a measurement layer, not a publishing layer.
llms.txt — llms-full.txt
from your sitemap, re-crawls daily, and serves the files at stable URLs every AI bot knows to look for. The publishing layer is where AI-readiness starts — measurement comes after.
When a ChatGPT user clicks your citation, the in-app browser strips the Referer header and Google Analytics logs the visit as (direct) / (none). Profound does not solve this — they measure citations, they don't fix the downstream attribution gap. Crawlytics injects per-LLM UTM tags into the AI-Optimized HTML it serves to bots, so citation clicks arrive at your site with utm_source=chatgpt instead of being invisible. Full mechanics here. Different surface entirely.
Profound does not ship a WebMCP layer. They don't expose tools to in-browser agents, they don't handle cart-assembly, they don't attribute conversions back to the agent that drove them. Crawlytics' Commerce tier ($49.99/mo) does all three. If your business model includes agents being able to buy things on your site — not just cite them — Profound is the wrong tool. WebMCP explainer here.
Crawlytics tops out at $49.99/mo. Profound starts in the high three figures and goes up from there. That gap is the single biggest reason to pick Crawlytics for any business under about $50M revenue — at that scale you can't justify a four-figure monthly AI visibility line, but you absolutely can justify $29.99 for the bot tracking and llms.txt.
Profound publishes pricing only on request. Based on public mentions and customer disclosures in 2026, the entry tier sits somewhere between $1,000 and $1,500/mo, and enterprise plans for the brands they market to most heavily (large CPG, large tech, large retail) run several thousand per month. The pricing matches the customer — those plans include custom prompt curation, account management, and the executive reporting layer that justifies the cost for a CMO with a $5M+ annual marketing budget.
Crawlytics has three published tiers:
For a sub-$50M business, the math is decisive. Crawlytics Commerce is roughly 2-5% the cost of Profound's entry tier and covers a strictly different — and in most cases more technically essential — set of jobs.
For a $100M+ brand with a real CMO and a board-level AI visibility narrative, Profound's price is reasonable for what it delivers. It's a tool for marketing teams, not a tool for engineering teams. Different buyer, different budget line.
The honest matrix:
Crawlytics, almost certainly. You need bot tracking, llms.txt, and attribution recovery. You don't yet need a share-of-voice dashboard against named competitors — at your size you can hand-run 20 prompts against ChatGPT once a month and get most of the signal Profound provides. The $29.99/mo Visibility tier covers the technical ground. Skip Profound until you've outgrown DIY prompt-testing.
Crawlytics, with an honest conversation about whether you need share-of-voice yet. At this size you might be approaching the point where a Profound-style dashboard pays for itself — particularly if your category is competitive in AI search and your marketing team needs the benchmark to justify content investment. But the technical AI-readiness stack (bot tracking, llms.txt, WebMCP if you sell online) is non-negotiable and Crawlytics delivers it at a price the CFO won't blink at. Start there. Add Profound when the share-of-voice question becomes a quarterly discussion at the executive level.
Probably both, sequenced. Crawlytics for the technical stack — you need llms.txt, bot tracking, attribution, and (if you sell online) WebMCP. Profound for the share-of-voice dashboard your CMO will use in board updates. The combined monthly cost is still negligible against revenue at this size, and the two tools overlap less than 20% — you're getting two different jobs done for two different audiences inside your company.
Both, definitively. Profound is the share-of-voice tool you brief the C-suite with. Crawlytics is the engineering-team tool that ships the publishing layer (llms.txt), recovers the attribution your data team is missing in GA, and enables agentic commerce if you have a transactional surface. They are complementary, not competitive, at this scale.
The case for running both is stronger than people expect. Profound tells you whether you're cited; Crawlytics tells you whether you're being fetched. Profound tells you what share of voice you have against Competitor X in branded prompts; Crawlytics tells you which of your pages those citations are landing on and whether the traffic converts. Profound's qualitative conversation analytics shapes the language you use in your copy; Crawlytics' WebMCP layer captures the conversions that copy drives.
The two products are sufficiently non-overlapping that for any brand above $50M revenue running them together costs less than 0.1% of marketing budget and produces strictly more signal than either alone. The mistake is treating them as alternatives when they're complements.
Written by Crawlytics Team. Crawlytics tracks AI bots, generates llms.txt, and powers WebMCP commerce, all from one snippet on any stack. See how it works →
For the brands they're built for — $100M+ revenue, CMO-led AI search strategy, board-level reporting requirements — yes. The share-of-voice dashboard, the prompt-set scale, and the executive reporting layer compound into a real input to brand strategy. For smaller brands, the price is hard to justify against what a $29.99/mo log analytics tool plus a monthly hand-run prompt audit can produce.
No. Crawlytics does not run automated prompt sets at Profound's scale, does not produce share-of-voice dashboards against named competitors, and does not ship executive reporting in the same form. If those things are your buying criteria, Crawlytics is the wrong tool. Crawlytics covers a different (and at enterprise, complementary) set of jobs.
Not in the per-server-log sense. Profound is a prompt-side measurement tool — it asks the models questions and records the answers. It does not analyze your access logs to tell you which AI bots fetched which pages, and it doesn't generate or audit your llms.txt. For that you need a server-side tool like Crawlytics or a custom log pipeline.
They measure different things. Profound has higher accuracy on "am I cited in synthetic ChatGPT prompts" because that's literally what they measure, repeatedly, with controlled prompt sets. Crawlytics has higher accuracy on "is ChatGPT-User fetching my pages" because that's literally what they measure, from real server logs. Neither is a stand-in for the other.
For prompt-side measurement at the Profound scale: Otterly.ai, AI Brand Rank, and Peec.ai are positioned as more affordable share-of-voice tools, though none have matched Profound's coverage and reporting depth as of mid-2026. For the technical stack Crawlytics covers (bot tracking, llms.txt, attribution, WebMCP), the alternative is DIY — grep your access logs, hand-write your llms.txt, build your own UTM injection, write your own WebMCP integration. That's a real option for engineering-heavy teams and a multi-week project for most others.
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