Profound vs Gauge vs Vaulto: AI Visibility Tools Compared (2026)

full disclosure before anything else: i built vaulto, the cheapest tool in this comparison. read everything below with that in mind. i'll make it easy to check my bias by being specific, and by telling you when a competitor is the better choice, which is more often than my landing page would like.

this comparison exists because a founder told me his team runs Profound and Gauge at the same time, and i wanted to understand what each one actually does. here's what i found.

key takeaways

• all three tools answer the same question: when buyers ask AI for recommendations, are you the answer?
• Profound is the enterprise option: 9+ engines, prompt volume data, $399 to $5,000+ per month, sales call required, no free tier
• Gauge is the mid-market option: up to 600 prompts checked daily, sentiment, GA4 integrations, $100 to $599 per month, self-serve
• Vaulto is the founder option: instant free scan, technical GEO audit, copy-paste fixes, from EUR 29 per month
• the real difference isn't features, it's what happens after the dashboard: Profound and Gauge tell you what's wrong, Vaulto's Fix Kit writes the fix

what do these tools actually do?

they monitor your brand inside AI answers. when someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity "best deploy platform for indie hackers", these tools check whether your product appears, how it's described, who gets recommended instead, and which sources the AI cited to build that answer.

that's the category. the products differ on three axes: how many engines they watch, how many prompts they track, and what they help you do about the results.

Profound: the enterprise category king

Profound is the most complete monitoring platform in this space, and the most expensive.

what you get: tracking across 9+ engines (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, Copilot, Meta AI, DeepSeek, Google AI Overviews), custom prompt monitoring, citation analysis, bot crawler analytics (which AI agents crawl your site and when), autonomous content agents, and the feature nobody else has: Prompt Volumes, real data on what people actually ask AI, at scale.

what it costs: reports put plans between $399 and $499 per month at the low end and $2,000 to $5,000+ per month for enterprise. there is no free tier, no self-serve signup, and every plan starts with a sales call. reviewers note 1 to 3 weeks from signup to usable data.

who it's for: AEO and content teams at companies where AI visibility is a budget line, agencies managing multiple brands, anyone who needs prompt volume data to justify strategy to a VP.

honest verdict: if you have the budget and a team to act on the data, Profound is the deepest tool here. if you're a founder wondering whether AI knows your product exists, you'll spend $5,000 and three weeks learning what a free scan tells you in thirty seconds.

Gauge: the mid-market monitor

Gauge sells most of Profound's core loop at a fifth of the price.

what you get: 100 to 600 custom prompts checked daily across 7 engines, brand coverage and gap analysis, citation analysis, sentiment, a content engine for recommendations, agency mode, and GA4 / Search Console integrations. their positioning is "be the answer for AI", which is the right way to think about the whole category.

what it costs: $100 per month for the starter (100 daily prompts, ChatGPT only), $599 per month for growth (600 prompts across all models). self-serve, no sales call.

who it's for: B2B companies with a marketing function, especially in dev tools and fintech, that want daily prompt monitoring without enterprise procurement.

honest verdict: probably the best monitoring-per-dollar in the category right now. if your question is "show me daily data on 200 prompts across every engine", buy Gauge, not Vaulto.

Vaulto: the fix-first founder tool

Vaulto is the tool i built, so calibrate accordingly.

what you get: an instant free scan (no signup, no card, no sales call) that returns your visibility score across live AI engines, an 8-category technical GEO audit (robots.txt, llms.txt, schema, meta), who AI recommends instead of you, which sources it cited, and a prioritized fix list. the part nobody else does: the Fix Kit generates the actual files (llms.txt, JSON-LD, robots rules) plus a one-paste prompt for Claude Code that applies every fix in your repo. Pro adds weekly re-scans, drop alerts, your own buyer prompts checked weekly, head-to-head competitor comparison, and CSV export.

what it costs: 3 free scans, EUR 7 for a single deep scan, EUR 29 per month for Pro.

who it's for: founders and small teams who want to know where they stand in thirty seconds and fix it the same afternoon, not commission a quarterly report about it.

honest verdict: vaulto tracks 2 engines live today (Claude and Perplexity) against Gauge's 7 and Profound's 9+, and checks prompts weekly, not daily. if you need engine breadth or daily granularity, the others win. what vaulto does that neither competitor does is close the loop: monitoring ends in a diff you can apply, not a dashboard you can admire.

the comparison table

so which one should you pick?

it depends on what you'd do with the data, honestly:

• enterprise team with budget and headcount: Profound. the prompt volume data alone justifies it at that scale.
• marketing team that wants daily monitoring without procurement: Gauge. best monitoring-per-dollar in the category.
• founder who wants the answer now and the fix today: Vaulto. run the free scan and you'll know your score before you finish this sentence's coffee.
• running two of them: more common than you'd think. monitoring depth from one, a different lens from the other. the budgets in this category are young and so are the habits.

whichever you pick, the underlying truth is the same and none of us can sell our way around it: AI recommends products it finds discussed in sources it trusts. the tool shows you the gap. the work that closes it (comparison content, directory listings, community presence, technical hygiene) is yours either way.