Key takeaways
- Attribution has three layers: crawler activity (bots reading your pages), referral visits (humans clicking from an AI answer), and conversions (what those visitors did). Few tools cover all three.
- Profound's pricing page now lists only a free 7-day trial and custom Enterprise pricing, according to Alhena's July 2026 roundup. "Cheaper alternative" mostly means "has a published price."
- Promptwatch is the most complete option I found for connecting crawls, citations, clicks and conversions in one place. Trakkr, Passionfruit, LLMclicks.ai, Alhena and Similarweb each cover part of the chain.
- ChatGPT dominates AI referrals. Conductor reportedly puts it at 87.4% of AI referral traffic, so check that any tool you pick attributes ChatGPT clicks properly.
- Vendor claims about attribution are hard to verify from the outside. Run a 2-week test on your own site before you sign.
Why attribution is the thing to ask about
Most AI visibility tools do the same basic job. They run a set of prompts on a schedule, store the answers, and show you a dashboard of mentions. One of the comparison posts I read said a single developer could build that in weeks, and I think that is fair. It is why there are dozens of near-identical tools.
The question a CFO asks is different. Did any of this send people to the site, and did they buy? A mention score cannot answer that. You need data from your own site: server logs, analytics, or a tracking script.
So when you evaluate Profound alternatives, I would sort them by what they can prove, not by how many models they query.
The three layers of AI attribution
Layer 1: crawler activity
AI systems fetch your pages before they cite them. Crawler logs show which bots visited, which pages they read, and which requests failed. This is the earliest signal you get, and it often explains why you are not cited at all.
Promptwatch Data's AI crawler traffic report (IP-verified requests, June 8 to September 6, 2026) found OpenAI at 79.8% of verified crawler requests in the week of August 31 to September 6, down from 94.8% in the week of June 8 to 14. Only requests from IPs matching the operators' published ranges are counted, so spoofed user agents are excluded. That filtering matters. If a tool counts any request with a GPTBot user agent, your numbers will be inflated.
Layer 2: referral visits
A referral visit is a person clicking a citation in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Claude and landing on your site. This is usually measured with a script, a tag manager template, or analytics segments built on referrer strings. It is where most tools stop.
Layer 3: conversions
The hard part. You need the visit tied to a signup, order or lead. Orbit Media's study of 97 B2B websites found ChatGPT is the AI most likely to send traffic, and that conversion behavior differs from other channels. I would not trust a generic benchmark for your business. Measure your own.
Where citations actually come from matters too
Attribution only helps if you point it at pages that earn clicks. Promptwatch Data's social media citations report (September 28 to October 4, 2026) shows social platforms were just 0.46% of ChatGPT citations, versus 12.2% of Google AI Overviews citations. Reddit fell to 0.09% of ChatGPT citations. Practical consequence: referral traffic from ChatGPT-cited social posts is close to negligible, so your attribution reporting should focus on owned pages, comparisons, listicles and guides. Promptwatch's content type data puts product pages at 22.4% of ChatGPT citations in the same week.
Profound: what you are replacing
Profound is still the enterprise name in this space. Alhena's roundup says it reportedly raised a $180M Series D at a $1.8B valuation in September 2026 and serves more than 1,000 enterprise brands. KIME credits Profound and Scrunch with agent-traffic attribution. Profound's own site talks about proving impact on AI-driven traffic and understanding how bots view, cite and refer to your pages.
The catch is access. With only a trial and custom Enterprise pricing, smaller teams cannot compare it line by line against a price card. That is the main reason people go looking.
Note that Alhena is a vendor, so its framing favors its own product. Useful for the pricing snapshot, less so for neutral rankings.
Alternatives that cover attribution
Promptwatch
Promptwatch is the one I would start with if attribution is your main criterion, because it covers all three layers and then acts on what it finds. Its crawler logs are IP-verified and cover GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and others, with plain-language explanations of crawl errors. Visitor analytics tracks AI-referred traffic and conversions from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, DeepSeek and more, installed through a script, a Google Tag Manager template or a WordPress plugin.
The useful part is the join. 360 Insights combines crawls, citations, clicks, and Google Search Console and Bing data per page, so you can ask which pages rank in Google but never get cited by AI. Then the Action Board and Content Agent turn gaps into drafts and publish to WordPress, Webflow or Framer, and published pages are tracked through crawls, citations and traffic.
TreeHouse, the company behind Pararius, grew AI search to roughly 25% of organic conversions (99% of it from ChatGPT) by fixing crawler access and publishing proprietary data. Crisp reported 2x higher conversion rates from AI traffic than from traditional channels. Those are customer results, not guarantees.
Pricing runs from a free Explore plan (ChatGPT only) to Essential at $95/mo, Professional at $245/mo and Business at $579/mo. Confirm current numbers at promptwatch.com/pricing.
Trakkr
Trakkr positions itself around tracing AI visitors to revenue. If your priority is the revenue line and you do not need much else, it is worth a trial.
Passionfruit
Passionfruit connects LLM citation tracking to revenue attribution. Like Trakkr, it is narrower than a full optimization platform, but the attribution angle is the point.
LLMclicks.ai
LLMclicks.ai is built around clicks and traffic from AI search engines. It sits closer to the referral layer than the mention layer.
Alhena AI
Alhena targets ecommerce. It tracks visibility at the product level and, per its own page, ties AI traffic to orders. It has a free tier, then $199/mo billed annually. If you sell SKUs, the product angle is sensible. Treat the order-attribution claims as vendor-sourced until you test them.
Similarweb AI Brand Visibility
Similarweb adds AI-referral traffic for you and competitors next to visibility, starting from $99 according to Alhena's roundup. The competitor traffic estimates are the draw, though they are estimates, not your own first-party data.
Similarweb AI Brand Visibility
SE Ranking
SE Ranking's blog describes an AI Traffic Analytics feature covering AI crawlers and answer engines, alongside tracking across Perplexity, Gemini, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Claude, Meta AI and Grok. A reasonable pick if you already use it for SEO.
Scrunch AI
Scrunch is the other name KIME associates with agent-traffic attribution. It also pitches agent-ready pages for your site.
Alternatives that are mostly monitoring
These are fine if you only need to track mentions and have analytics handled elsewhere, but do not buy them for attribution.
- Peec AI: unlimited seats on every plan, from about EUR 85/mo. A common agency pick.
- Otterly.AI: published plans from $29/mo, the cheapest entry in the research.
- Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit: $99/mo per domain, and Ahrefs Brand Radar from $199/mo on top of a base plan, per Alhena's roundup.
For a wider list, the directories at bestgeosoftware.com and ai-rank-tools.com cover more of the field.
Comparison table
Capabilities below come from vendor pages and third-party roundups, not my own testing. Verify before buying.
| Tool | Crawler data | AI referral visits | Conversion or revenue link | Starting price (reported) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Profound | Yes (agent traffic) | Yes | Claimed | Free trial, custom Enterprise |
| Promptwatch | IP-verified logs | Yes, script/GTM/WordPress | Yes, plus per-page 360 Insights | Free; $95/mo Essential |
| Trakkr | Not confirmed | Yes | Revenue tracing claimed | Check vendor |
| Passionfruit | Not confirmed | Yes | Revenue attribution claimed | Check vendor |
| LLMclicks.ai | Not confirmed | Clicks and traffic | Not confirmed | Check vendor |
| Alhena | Not confirmed | Yes | Orders (ecommerce) | Free; $199/mo annual |
| Similarweb | No | Competitor and own referrals | Not confirmed | From $99 |
| SE Ranking | AI crawler analytics | Yes | Not confirmed | Check vendor |
| Peec AI | No | Limited | No | About EUR 85/mo |
| Otterly.AI | No | No | No | $29/mo |
How to test attribution before you commit
Demand-Genius suggests a 30-day switch plan: audit in week 1, run parallel tests in week 2, validate in week 3, transition in week 4. It is a vendor post, but the structure is sensible. Here is the version I would use for attribution specifically.
- Pull a baseline from your own analytics: sessions from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com and claude.ai for the last 30 days.
- Install the candidate tool's tracking and let it run for two weeks next to your analytics.
- Compare totals. If the tool reports far more visits than your analytics sees, ask how it counts. If far fewer, check whether it misses ChatGPT, which carries most of the traffic.
- Check conversion matching on 10 known conversions. Can the tool find them?
- Check crawler counts against raw logs, and ask whether spoofed bots are filtered.
Promptwatch Data's own advice for crawler logs applies here: if a provider is large in the benchmark but near zero in your logs, you may be blocked from that provider. Check robots.txt and CDN or WAF rules.
Picking by situation
- Need one platform that goes from crawl to citation to conversion and then acts on gaps: Promptwatch.
- Ecommerce with a catalog: Alhena, or Promptwatch's Shopping Insights on Business.
- Revenue reporting is the only goal: Trakkr or Passionfruit.
- Already pay for an SEO suite and want something cheap: Semrush, Ahrefs, or SE Ranking.
- Agency with many clients: Peec AI for monitoring, or Promptwatch's agency plans (from $199/mo) if you want attribution and white-label reports.
If you would rather have someone run this for you, 1001 SEO Media is the agency behind this site, and it uses Promptwatch for AI visibility work.
Caveats
I did not verify attribution features on each vendor's own pages, and I did not scrape the Orbit Media or Conductor studies directly. Treat the numbers above as pointers, not facts to quote in a board deck. Pricing in this space changes quickly, as Profound's own plan changes show. The ground truth is always your own analytics and server logs.