Answyn vs Profound: which AEO platform should a UK team buy?

The row that decides most purchases is the third one. Profound publishes annual billing on both self-serve tiers, so the real Starter commitment is roughly $1,188 for the year, about £874 at today's rate, before any card conversion fee. Our commitment is one month at a time, in pounds, at a number your finance team will recognise on the statement.

Compare like for like and the arithmetic separates quickly.

At entry, both platforms give you 50 tracked prompts. We run those prompts against 2 engines daily for £149 a month. Profound runs them against ChatGPT for the equivalent of about £73 a month, on one seat, committed for a year. You are paying roughly half as much for a fraction of the coverage and a single login, which is why Starter works as a proof of concept and struggles as a working environment.

At the middle tier the gap widens the other way. Profound Growth is about £293 a month for 100 prompts on three engines with three seats, still locked to one region and one language. Answyn Business is £349 a month for 200 prompts on 4 engines, with 10 brands and 25 pinned competitors on a single subscription. That works out at £34.90 per brand per month, which is the number that matters if you are an agency or you run more than one trading name.

Two costs sit outside the headline figure on the Profound side. The first is foreign exchange: a dollar price moves against your budget every month and most business cards add a cross-border fee on top. The second is scope. Both published Profound tiers are fixed to one language and one region, so a UK brand that also sells into the United States or the EU is pushed straight into an unlisted Enterprise contract. Our published plans track the United Kingdom, and multiple markets and native languages are a Custom conversation rather than a jump in category.

Our prices exclude VAT. We are not currently VAT registered, so nothing is added at checkout, and businesses can still enter a VAT number. The current tiers are on the pricing page.

Our published roster is Gemini, ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode, with Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, and Claude available on Custom plans. Pro tracks Gemini and ChatGPT daily and Business tracks all 4. Every engine on the plan is included in the price rather than sold as a per model add-on.

Profound reaches further at the top. Enterprise contracts cover up to nine surfaces, adding Grok and DeepSeek alongside Claude, Copilot and the Google surfaces, plus ChatGPT Shopping and OpenAI Ads reporting. If your requirement is genuinely nine surfaces, Profound is the only platform in this comparison that gets there.

What that range costs you is visible at the bottom of the ladder. Profound Starter tracks one engine. For a UK buyer that is a real gap, because Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode are both live here and neither is on the Starter plan. A view of ChatGPT alone tells you about one surface of a market where Google still handles the majority of queries.

Profound is the category leader and the honest case for it is strong.

If your procurement function requires SOC 2 Type II, a signed data processing agreement and a published service level agreement attached to the purchase order, Profound publishes all three and most of this category publishes none of them. Its SLA commits to 99.9% monthly uptime with tiered service credits, and it offers SAML and OIDC single sign-on with granular roles.

Its Prompt Volumes dataset has no equivalent anywhere in the category. Profound licenses double opt-in consumer panel data covering hundreds of millions of prompts a month across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, with explicit UK coverage and a weekly refresh. That tells you what people are actually asking, rather than what you guessed they might ask. If you are building a prompt set from scratch and you want demand data underneath it, that is a genuine advantage and no amount of feature comparison makes it go away.

It is also the best-funded platform here, valued at $1bn after a $96m Series C in February 2026, with more than 700 enterprise customers by its own account, a London office and a UK-registered subsidiary. Its agent analytics are server-log based rather than tag based, with crawler verification against spoofing, which is the more reliable of the two methods.

Buy Profound if you are an enterprise with a multi-market brand portfolio, a procurement process that asks for certifications, and a budget that starts in five figures a year.

Answyn is built for the UK team that has to show progress, not just a dashboard.

You get the whole loop in one price. Daily collection across the engines on your plan, a customer journey map that shows the stage where buyers stop hearing your name, prioritised actions derived from your own collected answers, and a brief a writer can work from. Profound's briefs and prioritised actions sit behind an Enterprise contract. We include 30 briefs a month on Pro and 100 on Business.

The customer journey map is the difference between measurement and diagnosis. Buyers do not ask one question. They describe a problem, ask for options, compare named brands and then validate a favourite. We classify your tracked questions into those stages and show visibility at each one, so you can see the exact turn where a competitor takes your place instead of reading an average across the whole set. You can see how that works on the customer journey page, and the reasoning behind it in our handbook piece on customer journey analysis in AI search.

There is no composite score to argue with. We keep visibility, prominence, share of voice, sentiment and citation share as five separate, traceable numbers. Every one of them opens back to the answer text and the citations the engine used. This matters more than it sounds: published analysis has shown the same brand on the same data scoring very differently depending only on which share of voice formula the vendor chose. A number you cannot open is not evidence.

The commercial terms are British. A UK-registered company, prices published and billed in pounds, no conversion at checkout, ICO registration, and the United Kingdom as the default tracking market rather than a setting you remember to change. For a UK finance team that removes the FX line, and for a data protection officer it removes a conversation.

One subscription covers every brand on the account. 2 brands on Pro, 10 on Business. You upgrade when the questions outgrow the plan, not when a second team member joins.

Where we are narrower, plainly: the published plans track the United Kingdom, so multiple markets and native languages are a Custom conversation. Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, and Claude sit on Custom rather than the published tiers. History runs three months on Pro and twelve on Business. DPA and SLA options are available on Custom plans, negotiated rather than published. If a certification has to be attached to the purchase order before you can buy, that is the deciding fact and Profound is your answer.

When a brief becomes a published page, we keep that URL in the record and report two things separately: whether engines started citing the page, and whether the brand gets named in the answers it appears in. Only a page that is cited with the brand named in the prose is a result you can claim outright. The other combinations are still useful, but they are diagnosis rather than a win, and a platform that blends them into one number hides the difference.

LLM Analytics covers the rest of the journey: which AI crawlers reached the page, and whether real people arrived on it from an AI assistant. Profound's agent analytics do that second part well and they are server-log based, which is the more reliable of the two methods. What we add is the whole chain in one record, from the gap that was found, to the brief that was written, to the page that was published, to the citations it earned and the visits it brought. You read it on the published pages view.

Ask four questions in this order.

1. Does procurement require SOC 2 or a signed SLA before you can raise the purchase order? If yes, the decision is made and it is Profound.
2. Do you need more than one market or language tracked on a published plan? If yes, both vendors push you to a custom contract, so compare those two quotes rather than these two tiers.
3. Do you need to know what to do next, or only what happened? If you need the next action and the brief behind it, we include both on the published plans and Profound does not.
4. Is a dollar price billed yearly a problem for your budget holder? If it is, that is not a small objection. It is twelve months of FX risk on a channel that is still proving itself.

If you want to see where you stand before you buy anything, the AI crawler access check and the answer readiness check are free and need no account.