Should you build your own Profound?
Tracks how ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews describe your brand, and what AI crawlers do on your site
The tracking loop is genuinely weekend-buildable: send a fixed prompt set through four model APIs on a schedule, count brand and competitor mentions, normalize the citations, and parse your access logs for AI crawler and AI referral traffic. That gets you most of the dashboard for one brand. The gaps are the honest part. API answers are not the answers the ChatGPT app or Google AI Overviews actually serve, you cannot measure what real people ask AI, and a number with no history behind it tells you nothing on week one.
ENOriginal research content in English. Original prompt preserved in English.
Build me a local AI answer engine visibility tracker for one brand. Requirements:
- Node 22, TypeScript, SQLite via better-sqlite3, a CLI, and a plain server-rendered
dashboard. Local only, no accounts, no telemetry.
- brand.json holds my brand name, aliases, domain, and competitor names. prompts.json
holds up to 40 buyer questions.
- `track run` sends every prompt through OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and Perplexity with
each provider's web search or grounding tool enabled. Keys live in .env.
- Store one immutable row per run, prompt, and provider: raw answer, cited URLs, model
id, latency, and error text. Never overwrite an existing run.
- Cap concurrency at 3 per provider, retry twice on 429 and 5xx with backoff, and keep
failed cells visible in the report instead of dropping them.
- Detect brand and competitor mentions case-insensitively using the alias list, and
record the first-mention character offset as a crude prominence proxy.
- Score the sentiment of each brand mention in one cheap structured pass over stored
answers, after the run, never inline.
- Normalize citations to hostname plus canonical path, strip tracking parameters, then
compute owned-domain citation share and a top 25 sources table.
- `track serve` renders visibility per provider over time, share of voice against each
competitor, the sources table, and the prompts where competitors appear and I do not.
- `track crawlers --log access.log` parses server logs for GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot,
ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and friends, plus referral hits from
chatgpt.com and perplexity.ai, and reports which URLs they touched.
- Keep the bot user agent list in an editable JSON file. Log lines matching nothing get
counted as unknown agents, not silently discarded.
- `track export` writes runs, mentions, and citations to CSV.
- Fixture tests for mention detection, URL normalization, and log parsing.
- Out of scope: real consumer surface answers, prompt volume estimates, content
generation agents, teams, and hosted scheduling. Do not scrape the consumer web UIs.
- README: setup, per-run cost estimate, a cron line for daily runs, and a plain note
that API answers only approximate what users actually see.The prompt opens pre-filled in your agent. Review it before running.
What would building your own look like?
Run a fixed prompt set daily through the answer engine APIs, score brand and competitor mentions plus cited sources, and parse server logs for AI crawler and AI referral traffic.
What you will need
- OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and Perplexity API keys
- each provider's web search or grounding tool
- server access logs
- durable per-run storage
- a scheduler for daily runs
- an API budget that scales with prompts x engines x days
Because the tracking is the cheap half. Profound sells the two things a personal script cannot produce: prompt volume data drawn from real conversations, so you know which questions are worth ranking for at all, and a maintained panel across nine answer engines including the consumer surfaces with no usable API. Marketing teams also want a number somebody else vouches for before it goes in a board deck.
xprompt volume data: what people actually ask AI is not measurable from outside
xthe real consumer surfaces, since AI Overviews and the ChatGPT app have no API that matches what users see
xmonths of history and competitor baselines, without which a single week's visibility number means nothing
xupkeep as engines, crawler user agents, and citation formats keep changing
xthe agent, recommendation, and product visibility layers stacked on top of the tracking
Prefer something ready-made?
ElmoA real self-hosted AI visibility dashboard; crawler-log analysis is the conspicuous thing it does not replace.Open source↗License, setup, and limitations for each alternative.
How much does Profound cost?
No public price. Check the official site.
Saved to My list. You will see a notice on this site when the price changes.
You complete the purchase on Profound’s site. Vibe Radar does not handle payments.
- No public price$99 → Not listed · EnterpriseSource ↗
| Plan | Monthly | Annual (per month) | What is included |
|---|---|---|---|
| starter | $99/workspace≈ $99 | - | 1 seat; 50 prompts; 1,500 AI responses/month; daily refresh; 1 language/region; 100 agent credits; unlimited domains. |
| growth | $399/workspace≈ $399 | - | 3 seats; 100 prompts; 9,000 AI responses/month; daily refresh; 1 language/region; 400 agent credits; exports. |
| enterprise | custom | - | Custom seats, prompts, response volume, languages/regions, data access, security, and support. |
Free tierno free tier; a trial link is offered, but public duration and numeric caps were not verified
Billing termsmonthly only on the public pricing page; no public annual rate
Additional costsAgent usage can continue past included credits or be paused, but public per-credit overage pricing is not disclosed.
verified 2026-10-20 · source ↗
Is it cheaper to build or buy Profound?
Adjust the numbers: hours to build, your hourly rate, running costs and the subscription price.
Over 24 months, subscribing is cheaper.
Starting hours estimated from the analysis (multi-day). Does not price what you give up (support, integrations, security).
Can I rebuild Profound?
Kinda. The core of Profound is buildable in a weekend with the prompt on this page, but there are real gaps: prompt volume data: what people actually ask AI is not measurable from outside, the real consumer surfaces, since AI Overviews and the ChatGPT app have no API that matches what users see. Read the honest list above before committing.
How much does Profound cost?
Profound’s pricing is usage-based or varies by plan · Self-serve Starter ($99) and Growth ($399) plans were removed around September 2026; only a free trial and custom Enterprise remain for brands..
What do I lose by replacing Profound?
Honestly: prompt volume data: what people actually ask AI is not measurable from outside; the real consumer surfaces, since AI Overviews and the ChatGPT app have no API that matches what users see; months of history and competitor baselines, without which a single week's visibility number means nothing; upkeep as engines, crawler user agents, and citation formats keep changing; the agent, recommendation, and product visibility layers stacked on top of the tracking. If any of those are load-bearing for you, keep paying.
Is there an open-source alternative to Profound?
Yes: Elmo (A real self-hosted AI visibility dashboard; crawler-log analysis is the conspicuous thing it does not replace.) The prompt is for when you want it exactly your way.