Key takeaways
- ByDefault starts at $99/month with published pricing and no sales call, but it tracks only 4 of 8 major AI engines and skips Perplexity answer tracking entirely, making it the easiest line item to approve and the hardest to defend at renewal.
- Profound no longer sells a self-serve brand plan. As of its September 2026 Series D, the $99 Starter and $399 Growth tiers are gone, replaced by a 7-day free trial and custom Enterprise pricing, so "it's cheap" is no longer a valid pitch.
- Scrunch AI's Core plan ($250/month) is now the only self-serve, published-price entry point among the three enterprise-grade platforms, which actually makes it the easier budget conversation despite the higher sticker price.
- All three platforms are fundamentally monitoring and diagnosis tools. None of them autonomously turns an insight into a published page, which is the gap a marketing director will eventually ask about once the first "here's our visibility score" deck gets old.
- If your director's real question is "what do we do about this," not just "how do we measure this," it's worth looking at platforms built around content execution, like Promptwatch, alongside any of these three.
Why this comparison is harder than it looks
Every GEO vendor comparison on the internet right now answers the wrong question. They tell you which tool tracks more AI engines, or has a nicer dashboard, or raised more money. Your marketing director doesn't care about any of that in the first meeting. They care about one thing: can you explain, in two sentences, why this line item belongs in next quarter's budget instead of another headcount or another paid media test.
That's a different exercise than feature comparison. It means weighing published pricing against sales-call pricing, weighing "we track 9 engines" against "we actually use 4 of them," and being honest that half the GEO market changed its pricing structure in the last six months without updating the comparison articles that still rank for it.
So let's go through ByDefault, Profound, and Scrunch AI with that lens specifically: what's the actual cost to get started, what's hidden behind the sticker price, and which story is easiest to tell a skeptical budget owner.
The three platforms, in plain terms
ByDefault is the newest and smallest of the three, built around a simple pitch: "become the product ChatGPT and Claude recommend by default." It targets small and mid-size teams, with customers like Upstash, Context7, and Monad Foundation. It's developer-adjacent in tone and far less enterprise-polished than the other two.
Profound is a well-funded Answer Engine Optimization platform. It raised a $180M Series D in September 2026, reportedly pushing its valuation past the $1B mark set at its February 2026 Series C. Its signature data asset is a dataset of 1.3 billion real user prompts, broken down by intent, age, income, and region, which it uses to power prompt-level volume estimates that most competitors can't match.
Scrunch AI positions itself as the broadest-coverage, most enterprise-compliant option: SOC 2 Type II certified, with RBAC, SSO, and a developer-grade data API. Its standout feature is AXP, the Agent Experience Platform, which serves AI-optimized content directly to AI crawlers at the edge without touching what human visitors see. That feature, though, is locked to the Enterprise tier.
Pricing: what's actually published vs. what requires a sales call
This is where the comparison gets interesting, and where most existing articles on this topic are already out of date.
| Platform | Entry price | What's published | Engines on entry tier | Content generation included |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ByDefault | $99/mo (Starter) | Full pricing, no sales call | 4 of 8 | None on Starter; 5 articles/mo starts at $249 Growth |
| Profound | Free trial only (7 days) | No self-serve paid tier anymore | 3 engines on trial | Not applicable without Enterprise contract |
| Scrunch AI | $250/mo (Core) | Full pricing, no sales call | 4 of 9 | Basic generation on Core; AXP is Enterprise-only |
The detail that matters most here: Profound quietly removed its $99 Starter and $399 Growth self-serve plans around its Series D in September 2026. A lot of still-indexed comparison articles, including some on G2 and several independent review sites, still quote that old three-tier ladder as current. If you walk into a budget meeting citing Profound at $99/month, you're going to get corrected by whoever actually requests a quote, and that's a bad way to lose credibility on a pitch.
That leaves Scrunch Core as, somewhat ironically, the only self-serve-priced entry point among the two "enterprise-grade" platforms. ByDefault is cheaper still, but it's not really competing in the same tier. Its own third-party comparisons note it has no persona tracking, no multi-turn conversation tracking, and counts "citations" via crawler fetches rather than citations pulled from actual AI answers, which is a meaningfully different (and weaker) measurement than what Profound and Scrunch report.
What each tool is gating behind higher tiers
A recurring pattern across all three: the headline price is not the "real" functionality. Multiple independent reviews flag this directly, including one that bluntly called Profound's old $99 tier "a single-engine orientation tier, not a working plan." The same logic applies today, just at different price points.
- ByDefault Starter ($99/mo): 50 prompts, 4 models, zero content generation. You need the $249 Growth tier just to get 5 AI-written articles a month.
- Scrunch Core ($250/mo): 125 prompts, 4 LLMs, basic content generation, but no AXP, no API access, no SSO beyond Google, and a hard 25-page sitemap limit on audits.
- Profound: there's no paid self-serve tier left at all. Everything beyond the 7-day trial requires an Enterprise conversation, which means your first real cost data point comes from a sales call, not a pricing page.
Methodology differences your director will eventually ask about
If your marketing director has any procurement savvy, they'll ask how each tool actually gets its data, because "we track AI visibility" means different things depending on the vendor.
Profound uses front-end browser querying that mirrors what real users see, running daily prompt runs across tracked engines. Scrunch combines browser automation with official platform APIs and validates responses against a continuously updated dataset. ByDefault also uses real browser sessions rather than API calls with live web search, but its reported "citations" come from crawler fetch logs, not from citations observed inside actual AI answers. That's a real distinction: a crawler visiting your page doesn't guarantee the AI model cited you in a response a user actually saw.
This matters for your pitch because "we'll know if ChatGPT mentions us" is a much stronger argument than "we'll know if ChatGPT's crawler visited our site," and your director deserves to know which one they're buying.
How many citation slots are you even competing for
Here's a number worth putting in your deck regardless of which tool you pick. According to Promptwatch's analysis of citation behavior across major AI engines, ChatGPT cites roughly 5 sources per web-search-enabled response, while Google AI Overviews cites around 10, and Perplexity sits consistently near 10 as well, the most stable of any engine measured. Microsoft Copilot has swung wildly, from under 2 sources per response to nearly 17 within a few weeks, before settling back down.
That's useful context for a budget conversation because it reframes the ask. You're not asking for money to "monitor AI mentions" in the abstract. You're asking for money to compete for a genuinely scarce slot, roughly 5 positions per ChatGPT answer, where your competitors are also trying to show up. Scarcity framing tends to land better with finance-minded stakeholders than feature lists do. (Source: Promptwatch's average sources per response data, based on an analysis of 26 billion-plus citations.)
Which platform is easiest to actually pitch
Honestly, it depends on what kind of "easy" you need.
If your director wants the smallest number on the invoice and the fastest yes, ByDefault wins on price alone. $99/month with no sales call is about as frictionless as it gets. But be ready for the follow-up question six months later: "why aren't we tracking Perplexity, and why does our citation count keep moving around." That's where the cheap option gets expensive to defend.
If your director wants a name they can say out loud in a board meeting and feel confident about, backed by a large funding round and a widely cited prompt-volume dataset, Profound is the easier emotional sell, even though it now requires a sales conversation to get an actual number. You'll need to budget time for that negotiation, not just the invoice.
If your director is the type who asks IT and legal to sign off on every new vendor, Scrunch's SOC 2 Type II certification, RBAC, and SSO support make the procurement conversation shorter. Its published $250/month Core tier also means you can bring an actual number to the first meeting instead of "we'll find out."
| Your director's priority | Easiest platform to justify |
|---|---|
| Lowest possible starting cost | ByDefault |
| Brand recognition / funding story | Profound |
| Security and procurement sign-off | Scrunch AI |
| Budget certainty before the first meeting | Scrunch AI (Core) or ByDefault |
| Actual content execution, not just tracking | None of the three, by design |
The question none of these three answer well
Here's the uncomfortable part. Monitoring tools answer "were we mentioned." They don't answer "what do we do about it." Profound and Scrunch both hand execution back to your team, which is fine if your team has the bandwidth to turn a dashboard full of gaps into published, optimized pages every week. Most marketing teams don't, and that's usually the second budget conversation, the one where someone asks why you bought a visibility tool six months ago and still can't point to new content that resulted from it.
This is the gap platforms like Promptwatch are built to close. Instead of stopping at "here's your visibility score," it adds AI crawler logs that show exactly when ChatGPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and 400-plus other crawlers hit your pages and what they read, citation analytics down to which specific page got cited and which Reddit thread or YouTube video is feeding an AI answer about you, and Content Agents that plan, write, and publish GEO-optimized articles straight to your CMS, Webflow, Framer, or WordPress, on a schedule you control. It also includes Unified Actions, an AI-generated to-do list ranked by what will actually move your visibility, so the follow-up meeting with your director becomes "here's what we shipped," not "here's what we found."
Promptwatch is used by 1,840-plus brands and agencies including Duolingo, Yelp, Typeform, and agencies like Monks, and is rated 4.7/5 on G2. Pricing starts at $95/month for the Essential plan (1 site, 50 prompts, 5 AEO articles included), scaling to $245/month for Professional, which adds automated content generation and shopping insights, a tier structure that's comparable to Scrunch's Core and well below what a Profound Enterprise contract typically runs.
A quick framework for the actual budget meeting
If you're presenting this to a director who wants a decision in one meeting, structure it around three questions instead of a feature grid:
- What's our real starting cost, including the content work we'll need to do manually if the tool doesn't generate it. ByDefault and Scrunch both have published numbers here. Profound does not.
- What happens after month three, when the first dashboard review is done and someone asks what changed on the site. This is where pure monitoring tools create an awkward silence.
- What's our exit cost if this doesn't work. Monthly, no-contract platforms are an easier yes than anything that implies a year-long enterprise commitment.
For a deeper look at how the wider GEO category stacks up, including platforms not covered here, the directory at bestgeosoftware.com is worth a scan before you lock in a vendor. And if the real conversation at your company is less about which tool to buy and more about whether you have the internal capacity to act on what any of these platforms find, that's a resourcing problem an agency like 1001 SEO Media is built to solve, combining GEO strategy with the content production to actually close the gaps a tool surfaces.
Bottom line
ByDefault is the cheapest yes and the hardest tool to defend past the first renewal, because its engine coverage and citation methodology are thinner than what the price suggests. Profound is the strongest brand story but no longer the easy budget line it used to be, since there's no published self-serve price to point to. Scrunch AI, somewhat unexpectedly, has become the most budget-meeting-friendly of the enterprise pair, with a published price and a compliance story that shortens procurement.
But the question worth asking before any of these gets approved is whether your director actually wants a tracker or a result. If it's the latter, weigh all three against a platform built to close the loop from insight to published content, not just report the gap.