The one-sentence difference.
Profound shows you where you’re invisible. Cited makes you visible.
Profound is the highest-funded platform in the category — $155M total, $1B valuation at its Feb 2026 Series C. It is a serious, enterprise-grade monitoring tool. Its differentiator is scale: it claims tracking against 400M+ real prompts across 10+ engines, with SOC 2 and HIPAA on its enterprise plans. If the buying criterion is “most comprehensive dashboard,” Profound wins.
Cited is a different shape. It probes the five engines that matter commercially (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Claude), runs the gap analysisthe same way Profound does, and then continues: drafts the off-site content, distributes it through vetted channels, and reports on citation lift. Seven Claude-based agents run the pipeline; a human approves every asset before it ships. If the buying criterion is “new citations landed this month,” Cited wins.
Feature-by-feature comparison.
| Capability | Cited | Profound |
|---|---|---|
| AI engines probed | 5 (ChatGPT, Perplexity, AIO, Gemini, Claude) | 10+ (incl. Copilot, You.com, Meta AI) |
| Citation share + SoV | Yes — per engine, per query | Yes — per engine, per prompt |
| Competitor tracking | Up to 5+ competitors | Unlimited on higher tiers |
| Revenue attribution | GA4 filter templates + cross-session stitching | Yes — proprietary attribution |
| Volatility tracking | Rolling 4-week, per query | Yes |
| Content drafting | Yes — 6–20 assets / month | No |
| Off-site distribution | Yes — directory, Reddit, LinkedIn, PR, Wikipedia | No |
| Human review + approval UI | Yes — Kanban approve / revise / reject | N/A (no content produced) |
| Monthly report PDF | Yes — auto-generated, delivered | Exportable from dashboard |
| Enterprise compliance | SOC 2 on Dominate tier | SOC 2 + HIPAA available |
| Self-serve entry price | $1,500/mo (Monitor) | ~$99/mo self-serve (verify before publish) |
| Done-for-you execution | Yes — the default posture | No — DIY or bring-your-own agency |
Pricing — the honest math.
Profound’s self-serve tiers start near $99/month, with mid-market tiers in the $199–$399 range, and enterprise pricing on request. Verify current numbers on tryprofound.com before quoting in outbound.Cited’s published tiers are flat: $1,500 Monitor, $3,500 Growth, $7,500 Dominate.
The raw per-month numbers look like Cited is more expensive. The delivered scope is different. Profound is a software license — you pay for access to the dashboard; the team using it is yours. Cited is a service — the retainer includes 6–20 pieces of off-site content produced and distributed every month, plus the monitoring layer. On a per-deliverable basis, Cited’s Growth tier runs roughly $175–$580 per shipped, cited-optimized asset. A traditional content agency producing the same output starts at $8,000/month and requires CMS access. See Cited pricing for the full breakdown.
When to pick Profound.
- You have an in-house content team and an existing agency relationship. You need a best-in-class dashboard to coordinate them.
- You need coverage across fringe engines (Copilot, You.com, Meta AI) that Cited does not probe today.
- You need HIPAA compliance at the monitoring layer and plan to handle PHI-adjacent queries.
- Your monthly citation-velocity target is <3 new assets and you have the in-house talent to produce them.
When to pick Cited.
- You want new citations landed every week — not a report telling you why they haven’t.
- Your team is small, or you’re not willing to stand up a content team for a channel that didn’t exist 18 months ago.
- You don’t want to coordinate an agency + a monitoring tool + a distribution ops person. One retainer replaces the stack.
- You value off-site focus — 56% of AI citations come from off-site sources, and Cited’s default motion is designed around that fact (AirOps, 2026).
Can you use both?
Yes, and several customers do. Use Profound as the source-of-truth dashboard for a broader engine set and a separate team. Use Cited’s Growth or Dominate tier for the content engine. The economics work above roughly $8,000/month total program spend.
The fastest way to compare is the free 48-hour auditagainst your own domain — Cited runs the same gap analysis Profound does on your top 50 queries and delivers the gap list as a PDF. If the list surprises you, start with Monitor. If it doesn’t, Growth or Dominate is the right tier.