Profound vs Scrunch vs Promptwatch: What Each Platform Does After the Dashboard in 2026

Key takeaways

• All three platforms track brand visibility in AI answers. They split on what happens after the report: Profound orchestrates marketing projects, Scrunch reshapes how agents read your site, and Promptwatch closes a measure, diagnose, create, verify loop.
• Profound leans on a very large prompt dataset (the company says 2B+ real user prompts) and an agent layer, and it is built for enterprise buyers.
• Scrunch was acquired by Sitecore in June 2026. Its Agent Experience Platform (AXP) is the distinctive piece, but pricing and tiers look like they changed in late September.
• Pricing is the messiest part of this comparison. Profound pulled its public $99 and $399 plans around mid-September, so many reviews are stale. Always check the vendor pages.
• Promptwatch is the one with published self-serve pricing from $95/month and IP-verified crawler logs, content generation, and CMS publishing in the same product.

Why the dashboard is the easy part

Every tool in this category can run a few hundred prompts through ChatGPT and Gemini and show you a visibility score. That part is largely commoditized. What separates the platforms is what you can do on Tuesday morning when the chart says you are invisible for a prompt you care about.

So this guide skips the logo-grid comparison and asks four questions of each platform:

1. Does it tell you why you are missing?
2. Does it help you make the thing that fills the gap?
3. Does it get that thing published?
4. Does it tell you whether it worked?

A caveat up front. This site is published by 1001 SEO Media, which uses Promptwatch for its own GEO work, and Promptwatch is one of the three tools here. I have tried to stick to what the vendors and third parties actually document, and to flag where the evidence is thin or conflicting.

Note the source on that screenshot: it is Profound's own article. It is a useful read for understanding how Profound positions itself, but it is not neutral.

The short version

Now the detail.

Profound: the orchestrator

Profound is the enterprise-first option, and it has raised money to match: its own site cites a $180M Series D. Its pitch has changed noticeably this year. It no longer sells itself as a tracker. It sells an "AI Marketer".

What it does after the dashboard

According to Profound's own materials, the post-report layer has several parts:

• Aim, a background agent that analyzes your data and proposes ranked projects across content, accuracy, sentiment, and earned media.
• Context Manager, where your brand knowledge lives so the agents produce on-brand work.
• Agents, plus Workflows, Sheets (a spreadsheet where each row is its own agent run), and a template marketplace for cloning pre-built workflows.
• FactCheck, which measures where AI gets facts about your brand wrong and which sources are causing it, now connected to Noble's Mention Refresh to help correct source material.
• Agent Analytics and Pages, which show bot activity and which pages actually earn citations.

The data underneath is the strongest argument for Profound. Prompt Volumes is described as refreshed weekly and broken down by intent, country, and platform, based on real user conversations rather than guessed keyword lists. Profound says it runs prompts through the front-end browser, not APIs.

Where I would push back

The depth has a cost. Profound's own comparison page admits a learning curve in deciding which dimensions to prioritize. And an orchestrator that decides which projects matter is only as good as your trust in its judgment. Some teams will love that. Others will want to pick their own work.

The pricing story is also murky. Per third-party reporting (GEOToolbox, checked October 14, 2026), the $99 Starter and $399 Growth brand plans were published in June and withdrawn from the public page around mid-September, after the Series D and the AI Marketer launch. The public brand tab now shows a 7-day trial and a custom Enterprise plan. One competitor blog estimates Enterprise at $2,000 to $5,000+ per month, but that is an estimate, not a Profound figure. Agency pricing has been reported as $99/month plus $399/month per client workspace.

If you read a review quoting $99 and $399 as current, it is out of date, or it is describing in-app checkout plans that conflict across sources.

Enterprise credentials

Profound lists SOC 2 Type II, an independent HIPAA assessment, SSO/SAML, 30+ languages, and up to nine answer engines on Enterprise, with a dedicated Slack channel and strategist support. If procurement is the gating factor, that checklist is real.

Scrunch: the agent-facing layer

Scrunch takes a different bet. Beyond monitoring across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews, and Meta AI, it built the Agent Experience Platform. AXP serves a machine-readable version of your site to AI crawlers.

What it does after the dashboard

• Site audits for AI readiness, with page-level checks.
• A bot crawling feed showing which AI agents are visiting and how they behave.
• AXP, which presents content to agents in the form they prefer.
• An MCP server for pulling data into other tools.

The idea is clever: instead of rewriting your whole site for machines, give machines their own version. Whether that works as well as claimed is, honestly, still a question. A competitor-written piece (Nick Lafferty, who works at Profound) calls AXP's claims unproven. That is a biased source, so I would treat it as a prompt to ask for evidence in a demo, not as a verdict.

Note also that serving machines a different version than humans see is something you want to discuss carefully with your SEO team, so the setup does not end up looking like cloaking to search engines.

The Sitecore factor

Sitecore announced it was acquiring Scrunch on June 3, 2026. Bloomberg reportedly put the price near $225M, though neither company confirmed that. Scrunch still sells as a standalone product, but its roadmap is now tied to SitecoreAI. If you already run Sitecore, that is a plus. If you do not, ask how much future investment will point at you.

Pricing and what is unclear

Two third-party sources disagree, and I cannot reconcile them:

• An August 2026 review read Starter at $300/month ($250 annual) and Growth at $500/month ($417 annual), with 350 to 700 custom prompts.
• A late-September report describes a repricing: Core at $250/month with 125 prompts and 4 engines, Agency Core at $500/month, and Enterprise custom with 9 engines, AXP, full site audits, API, and SSO.

If the second is right, AXP now lives in Enterprise only. Check scrunch.com/pricing before you plan around it.

Promptwatch: the closed loop

Promptwatch is the third option, and the angle is that the same product covers measuring, diagnosing, creating, and verifying.

Diagnosing why you are missing

This is where I think the gap between platforms is widest. Promptwatch runs IP-verified AI crawler logs (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and many others, with spoofed bots filtered out), shows crawl errors in plain language, and ties crawls to citations per page. Weekly site audits run 21 checks. 360 Insights then joins crawls, citations, clicks, and Google Search Console and Bing data, so you can ask which pages rank in Google but never get cited by AI.

Crawler visibility matters more than it sounds. In Promptwatch's AI crawler traffic report (IP-verified requests, June 8 to September 6, 2026), OpenAI made up 79.8% of requests in the week of August 31 to September 6, down from 94.8% in early June. The report's advice is practical: compare your own logs to that mix, and if a large provider is near zero in your logs, you are probably blocked by robots.txt, a CDN, or a WAF rule.

Creating and publishing

Content gap analysis maps your pages against the prompts AI answers. The Content Agent (Business and Enterprise plans) plans, writes, and publishes to WordPress, Webflow, or Framer on a schedule you control, with a review inbox or fully hands-off. Content Refresh gives git-diff-style updates to existing pages. The Action Board gives a prioritized GEO to-do list, and Agent Chat is a conversational analyst over your live data.

It is worth knowing that agency plans do not include the Content Agent, AEO articles, or the Knowledge Base. Those sit on Business and Enterprise.

Verifying

Published pages get tracked through crawls, citations, and AI-referred traffic, and underperformers return as actions. Visitor analytics attribute actual traffic and conversions from AI platforms. Promptwatch's own cited results include Crisp reporting 2x higher conversion rates from AI traffic than from traditional channels.

The verification step also tells you what to maintain. Promptwatch's content half-life data tracked pages ChatGPT cited on July 6, 2026 for 90 days. Landing pages and docs were still 76 to 78% cited after 30 days, while news lost half its pages within 36 days. Pricing and landing pages tend to last, so keep them accurate.

Weaknesses

Promptwatch does not have Profound's proprietary prompt dataset marketing, and it has no equivalent to AXP's machine-readable site layer. The Essential plan at $95/month has no crawler logs (those begin at Professional, $245/month). And the breadth is real, but it means more surface area to learn.

Pricing, verified against the vendor: Essential $95, Professional $245, Business $579 monthly; agency plans from $199. Confirm on promptwatch.com/pricing.

Comparison by job to be done

How to run a fair trial

Demos are easy. A trial that tells you something takes more discipline. Here is the approach I would use.

1. Pick 20 prompts you actually care about, including a few competitor comparisons. Use the same set in every tool.
2. Pick three pages that should be cited but are not. Ask each vendor to show why, not just that.
3. Ask each vendor to take one gap all the way to a published page, then to show how they would know if it worked 30 days later.
4. Check engine counts, not just prompt counts. A plan's prompt allowance, its engine coverage, and its response volume are three different numbers.
5. Get pricing in writing for the exact configuration, since Profound and Scrunch both appear to have moved their public tiers this autumn.

While you are shopping, the GEO software directory at bestgeosoftware.com lists other platforms worth a look, and tools such as [tool:peec-ai] and [tool:otterly-ai] are the monitoring-first options if you only need tracking.

So which one?

If you are a large organization with several markets and you want a vendor to staff the strategy alongside you, Profound is built for that, and you should expect a sales process rather than a credit card form.

If you are in the Sitecore ecosystem, or the agent-readable site layer is the thing you most want to test, Scrunch deserves a trial. Ask hard questions about the roadmap and the current tiers.

If you want one subscription that goes from visibility data to crawler diagnosis to published content to measured traffic, with prices you can read on a web page, Promptwatch covers the loop most completely. That is my read of the three, and the trial exercise above is how you should test it rather than take my word for it.

None of these will fix a site that AI crawlers cannot reach or content nobody wants to cite. Start with the crawler logs.