BusinessMCP

The Profound alternative for teams that want grounded AI visibility, not an enterprise contract

Track whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Claude recommend you, with a confidence interval on every number, from $79/mo month-to-month.

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Price
Profound: $99/mo (ChatGPT only) or $399/mo (3 engines), billed yearly; enterprise custom · BusinessMCP: free AI recall, grounded engines from $79/mo
Switching gets you
Grounded probes across up to 5 engines, 95% intervals on every rate, share of voice, the cited-domain list, AI-crawler hits, and analytics + CRM in the same tool.
Stay with Profound if
You need daily re-runs, 9+ platforms, agent credits or an enterprise SLA; Profound goes wider and faster, and its enterprise tier is built for that.
Pricing verified September 15, 2026
Feature comparison — pricing verified September 2026. Sources: public pricing pages + published teardowns.
 BusinessMCPProfound
Entry priceFree (AI recall); grounded engines from $79/mo$99/mo (1 engine) – $399/mo (3 engines), billed yearly
Engines measured (web-grounded)Up to 5: AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude1 (Starter), 3 (Growth), up to 9 (Enterprise)
Web-grounded probes (not model recall)Yes, from Growth ($79); Free/Starter = AI recall onlyYes, all tiers
Confidence intervals on every rate95% Wilson interval, always shownNo
Share of voice vs tracked competitorsYesYes
Cited third-party domains listYesYes
AI-crawler hit tracking (GPTBot, ClaudeBot...)YesYes (crawler analytics on higher tiers)
Bundled with analytics + CRM + AI business analystYesNo

The full picture

Profound is the reference product in AI visibility: it tracks brand mentions and citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and, on enterprise, up to nine answer engines, with daily runs, agent credits and a shopping-and-conversation research layer. Its public pricing page lists two self-serve tiers, both billed yearly: Starter at $99 per month (ChatGPT only, 50 prompts, one seat) and Growth at $399 per month (three engines, 100 prompts, three seats). Enterprise is custom, and published teardowns put those deployments at $2,000–$5,000+ per month.

BusinessMCP measures the same thing — is your brand recommended or cited when someone asks an AI assistant the questions your buyers ask — and prints a 95% confidence interval beside every rate so a small week is never mistaken for a trend. Grounded engines start on the $79 Growth plan (Google AI Overviews + Gemini), Scale adds Perplexity + ChatGPT, Business adds Claude, and every plan is month-to-month. The trade you make is breadth and cadence: five engines at most, measured weekly, alongside the analytics, CRM and AI business analyst that come with the platform.

Why teams switch

Annual billing at $99 and $399 is the floor

Profound’s Starter is $99 per month billed yearly and covers ChatGPT alone; three engines cost $399 per month, also yearly. That is $4,788 up front for the plan most reviews recommend. BusinessMCP’s grounded engines start at $79 per month with no contract, and the free plan already measures AI recall.

A rate without an interval is a guess

Visibility is a binomial proportion measured from a handful of answers. BusinessMCP computes a 95% Wilson interval for every rate and shows it ("42% ±11"), pools by trials rather than averaging percentages, and only calls a change conclusive when the intervals say so. Profound reports point estimates.

The numbers sit next to the traffic they explain

Profound is a standalone visibility suite. BusinessMCP puts citation rate, AI-crawler hits (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot) and the human referrals those crawls eventually send — the AI channel in your first-party analytics — on one dashboard, and the AI business analyst can reason across all three.

The cited-domain list is the PR target list

Both tools show which third-party domains the engines cite. BusinessMCP goes one step further by mining the engines’ own answers for the competitor names they recommend instead of you, so the entities you track are the ones the models actually name.

Real data, not a mockup

What it looks like in BusinessMCP

Recorded on our own site, PII scrubbed — the same product you get on the free plan.

app.businessmcp.com/insights

Today's insights

4 from the daily analysis · Sep 22
Risk

Visitors are getting frustrated on /

17% of clicks on / are rage or dead clicks (32 of 184, 6 people) — a sign of broken, unresponsive or misleading UI.

Ask the analyst
Opportunity

18 "striking distance" keywords to win

You rank on page 1–2 (pos 5–20) for 18 queries with real impressions — e.g. "skills directory" at position 11. Small on-page moves could push these into the top 3.

Opportunity

HubSpot is cited 26 points more often than you

Across your tracked prompts, AI answers name HubSpot in 48% of grounded answers vs your 22% — and 1 other tracked brand also out-rank you. The sources those answers cite are the fastest lever.

Anomaly

Visitors jumped 58%

visitors moved from 118 to 186 week-over-week.

Runs every morning, on every plan. Real cards from our own workspace.

Profound pricing, broken down

PlanPriceNotes
Starter$99/mobilled yearly; ChatGPT only, 50 prompts, 1 seat, 100 agent credits
Growth$399/mobilled yearly; ChatGPT + Perplexity + Google AI Overviews, 100 prompts, 3 seats, daily runs
EnterpriseCustomup to 9 platforms, SSO/SAML, SOC 2, dedicated Slack; teardowns report $2,000–$5,000+/mo
BusinessMCP Growth$79/momonth-to-month; AI Overviews + Gemini grounded, 15 questions, weekly, with analytics + CRM
BusinessMCP Scale / Business$199 / $499/moadds Perplexity + ChatGPT (25 questions), then Claude (40 questions)

Profound self-serve prices are shown "billed yearly, 2 months free" on its pricing page; the enterprise range is from published 2026 teardowns, not from Profound. BusinessMCP Free and Starter include no web-grounded engine and report AI recall, not a citation rate.

Where BusinessMCP is NOT the right choice

An alternatives page you can trust has to cut both ways. Honestly:

  • We measure five answer engines at most (Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude). Profound’s enterprise tier tracks up to nine platforms and Scrunch adds Meta AI; nobody, including us, can probe Copilot or Bing since Microsoft retired those APIs in 2025.
  • We measure weekly, not daily. Profound Growth, Otterly and Semrush’s toolkit re-run prompts every day. If you need to see a change within 24 hours of shipping a page, they are faster.
  • Sample sizes on the cheaper plans are small, so the intervals are wide. Zero mentions in five Gemini answers still leaves a 95% upper bound near 28% — we print that interval instead of a false-precision "0%", which some people find less satisfying than a single number.
  • We do not estimate prompt volume. Ahrefs Brand Radar ranks prompts against a 475M-prompt database and Semrush ships prompt research; we tell you whether you are cited for the questions you chose to track, not how often people ask them.
  • There is no AEO content writer or page-recommendation engine here. We surface the third-party domains the engines cite so you know where to earn placements; writing the content is on you.
  • Free and Starter measure AI recall only — whether a model knows the brand from training data — because those plans include no web-grounded engine. A grounded citation rate starts on Growth, or on any plan once you connect your own OpenAI, Gemini or Anthropic key.
  • API answers are not what a person sees in the chat UI (published overlap studies put brand agreement well under 100%). Every tool in this category has that caveat; we label the numbers directional rather than pretend otherwise.

Frequently asked questions

Is BusinessMCP a full replacement for Profound?

For measuring whether the major assistants recommend and cite you, and for finding the domains they cite instead, yes — with intervals Profound does not show. Profound goes wider (up to nine platforms on enterprise), runs daily, and adds agent credits and conversation research. If you need those, stay.

How much cheaper is BusinessMCP than Profound?

Profound’s three-engine Growth plan is $399 per month billed yearly ($4,788/yr). BusinessMCP’s Scale plan, which grounds four engines (AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity, ChatGPT), is $199 per month with no contract, and includes analytics, a CRM and the AI business analyst. Growth at $79 grounds the first two.

Why does BusinessMCP measure weekly when Profound runs daily?

Visibility rates move slowly and each probe costs real money, so we spend the budget on more samples per engine per week rather than one sample per day. Every question is measured once per ISO week per engine; adding a question probes it immediately rather than waiting for the next week.

What does "AI recall" mean on the Free and Starter plans?

Those plans include no web-grounded engine, so we ask a model without web search whether it knows your brand. That measures training-data recall, which a brand younger than the model’s cut-off can never score on, so we never present it as a citation rate. Grounded measurement starts on Growth or with your own model key.

Do I need an annual contract?

No. Every self-serve BusinessMCP plan is month-to-month; annual billing is optional and gives two months free. Profound’s published prices are billed yearly.

Other honest alternatives

Peec AI

EU-built, self-serve, from €70/mo billed annually with three engines of your choice.

Compare

Otterly.AI

The $29 entry point: 15 prompts on four engines, daily.

Compare

Scrunch AI

Seven platforms including Claude and Meta AI from $250/mo annual.

Compare

How to migrate

  1. 1

    Export your tracked prompts from Profound and paste the unbranded ones into BusinessMCP (Growth allows 15, Scale 25, Business 40 — pick the questions a buyer would actually ask, not variations of one).

  2. 2

    Add the competitors Profound shows you losing to; BusinessMCP will also propose the brands the engines name in their own answers.

  3. 3

    Run both for two weekly cycles and compare the cited-domain lists. Expect BusinessMCP’s rates to carry wider intervals on fewer samples — that is the honest picture, not a bug.

  4. 4

    Connect your own OpenAI, Gemini or Anthropic key if you want those engines grounded on a plan below the one that includes them; BYOK engines are never plan-gated.

Sources & verification

Every price on this page traces to a public source, last verified September 15, 2026. Spotted a change? Tell us and we'll re-verify.

  1. [1]Profound pricing page (verified 2026-09-15)
  2. [2]Indexly — Profound pricing review (updated July 2026)
  3. [3]That Marketing Buddy — Profound pricing 2026
  4. [4]Peec AI pricing page
  5. [5]Otterly.AI pricing page

Keep reading

AI visibility: what we measure and howGenerative engine optimization (GEO), explainedAI visibility metrics that actually mean somethingHow to get cited by ChatGPTGrade your site’s AI readiness (free tool)

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