CiteFuel vs Profound: Self-Serve Diagnostic vs Fix Files
| Feature | Profound | CiteFuel |
|---|---|---|
| AI citation audit | ✓ | ✓ |
| Self-serve checkout (no sales call) | ✓ (added 2026 — Starter $99/mo) | ✓ (free audit, no card) |
| Engines sampled on entry tier | 1 (ChatGPT only) on Starter $99/mo | Plan-selected lanes; each report discloses completed readings and unavailable providers |
| Enterprise-grade dashboard | ✓ | — (report page + files) |
| Page-level scoring | ✓ | ✓ |
| llms.txt review draft | ✗ | ✓ (requires factual and implementation validation) |
| robots.txt AI rules patch | ✗ | ✓ |
| Rewritten citable passages | ✗ | ✓ |
| JSON-LD fix file | ✗ | ✓ |
| Pricing (as of July 2026) | Starter $99/mo (ChatGPT, 50 prompts, 1 seat); Growth $399/mo (3 engines, 100 prompts); Enterprise custom, demo-gated | Free audit; Starter Audit $199 one-time; Visibility Monitor $19/mo; Growth $59/mo |
| Published methodology | Partial | ✓ all 26 checks + weights public |
Competitor details were re-verified July 2026 against the vendor's primary product or pricing page. Vendors change plans, so check that source for current terms. Spot an error? Tell us and we'll correct it.
Profound is a serious enterprise tool, and as of 2026 it's no longer sales-call-only: Starter is $99/month (ChatGPT tracking, 50 prompts, 1 seat), Growth is $399/month (3 engines, 100 prompts, free trial), and Enterprise stays custom and demo-gated with SSO/SOC2. Their earlier self-serve gap is closed — we're not going to keep claiming otherwise.
The gap that remains is scope and output, not checkout. CiteFuel runs the visibility lanes selected for the audit plan and reports only completed readings; provider failures remain explicit instead of being counted as passes or zeros. CiteFuel also produces optional configuration and content artifacts for review. Those artifacts require factual and technical validation and do not guarantee external visibility.
If you need enterprise-scale continuous brand monitoring with SSO and a dedicated CSM, Profound's Enterprise tier serves that. CiteFuel instead runs plan-selected visibility lanes with explicit provider coverage and supplies reviewable configuration/content artifacts starting free.
Who actually fits where: a marketing team of one or two people at a growth-stage company, with no dedicated engineer to turn "citability score: 34" into a shipped fix, is the plain case for CiteFuel — the deliverable is already the file, not a task for someone else's backlog. A team that has cleared procurement for SSO and SOC2, has multiple stakeholders who need a shared dashboard with historical trending, and is comfortable paying $399-plus/month for that visibility layer is better served by Profound's Growth or Enterprise tier — CiteFuel doesn't have multi-seat role-based access or a compliance story to offer as an alternative. The honest middle case is a team that starts with Profound for the monitoring and dashboard, then runs CiteFuel's audit when a specific property needs to move from "we know we have a problem" to "here is the patch." Paying for both isn't redundant if the jobs are actually different: one is ongoing visibility reporting, the other is a one-time infrastructure fix. Where CiteFuel loses on its own terms: if what you need is trend lines over months and a way to show a VP that visibility is improving quarter over quarter, a single fixed-price audit doesn't do that — Profound's subscription model is built for exactly that cadence, and no amount of better fix-file output changes that gap.
Where Profound wins
- Enterprise dashboard maturity — Profound has years of head start on visualization, historical trending, and stakeholder-ready reporting.
- Multi-seat team collaboration and role-based access, standard from the Growth tier up.
- SSO and a path to SOC2 on Enterprise — if procurement requires it today, Profound has it; CiteFuel does not (roadmap item).
- A larger published prompt volume on Growth (100/mo) than CiteFuel's free tier, if raw prompt count matters more to you than engine breadth or fix output.
Get the Starter Audit + fix files — $199 →
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