Check Engine vs Profound
Profound tracks whether AI assistants mention your brand. Check Engine audits whether those assistants' crawlers can read your site in the first place. Those sound adjacent and they are not the same purchase at all. The clearest way to see it is that Profound does not publish a price for its brand plans.
Two tiers, neither of them a price
Its pricing page lists a free Trial (50 prompts a day for 7 days, against ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, in one language and one region) and Enterprise, at custom pricing, reached by booking a demo. Enterprise tracks up to nine answer engines and lists SSO/SAML and SOC2 compliance beside dedicated support.
Switch the same page to its agencies view and it does print some money: full client workspaces are an add-on at $399 a month each, and five trial workspaces are $199 a month. The Agency Growth plan they attach to has no price beside it, and Agency Enterprise is custom, so there is still no plan price to set against anything.
That is an enterprise sales motion, and the compliance line tells you who it is for. It is not a criticism: tracking nine answer engines across languages and regions is genuinely expensive to operate, and companies that need it have procurement departments. But it means the comparison with Check Engine is not really about features. One is a platform you are onboarded onto. The other is a $59 download with the price on the page.
What Profound does that Check Engine does not
Its published platform names Monitor, Answer Engine Insights, Prompt Volumes, Shopping, Agent Analytics, AI Marketer, Agents and Context Manager. Answer Engine Insights analyses how your brand and your competitors appear in AI platforms. Check Engine does none of this. It cannot tell you whether ChatGPT named you this week, how often, or beside whom.
What Check Engine does that Profound's platform list does not name
No site crawler and no technical audit appears in that list. Check Engine is entirely that: 99 checks across thirteen areas, run against your own pages.
The two meet at one specific point, and it is worth being precise about it. Check Engine checks robots.txt rules for 22 AI crawlers. A separate check requests your homepage as 9 AI crawlers plus Googlebot from your own computer. That is the question underneath a visibility report: if a tracker tells you that you are not being cited, one possible reason is that the crawler was never allowed to read the page. A firewall can treat the real, verified crawler differently, so your server's own logs settle whether it was allowed through. Check Engine cannot tell you whether citation then happens. The robots.txt half of the question, for one address and without installing anything, is the free AI crawler checker; it cannot see a server refusing a crawler, which is the part Check Engine adds.
Which to buy
- Book the Profound demo if measuring your presence in AI answers is a reporting obligation: you need it across engines, languages and regions, and someone is asking for the numbers.
- Buy Check Engine if you want to know what is wrong with your site and in what order, including whether AI crawlers can reach it, without an account or a sales call.
Plenty of companies would sensibly do both, and they are not substitutes in either direction. If mention-tracking is what you want but an enterprise contract is not, Sitechecker does it across five models inside an ordinary SEO subscription. The access question Check Engine answers instead is set out crawler by crawler. Nothing here compares the accuracy of Profound's tracking, which we have not measured and have no way to measure from outside.
Checked 19 October 2026. The factual claims about this product were read from its own pages on that date: its pricing page for brands publishes two tiers and no price: a free Trial, and Enterprise at custom pricing reached through a demo (source); its agencies view names an Agency Growth plan with no price beside it, and prints two add-on prices: full client workspaces at 399 US dollars a month and 5 trial workspaces at 199 US dollars a month; Agency Enterprise is custom (source); the free Trial runs 50 unique prompts daily for 7 days, against ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, in one language and one region (source); Enterprise tracks up to 9 answer engines, with SSO/SAML and SOC2 compliance listed alongside dedicated support (source); its published platform list is Monitor, Answer Engine Insights, Prompt Volumes, Shopping, Agent Analytics, AI Marketer, Agents and Context Manager. No site crawler or technical audit appears in it (source). Products change and pricing changes; if something here has gone out of date, tell us and it will be corrected. Everything else on this page is a comparison of approach, not a claim about their roadmap.
Check Engine is a one-time purchase for Mac and Windows: no account, no crawl credits, and the crawl runs
on your machine. Five optional checks fetch data it cannot produce alone; --offline
turns all five off.
$59once
For Macs with Apple silicon or Intel, macOS 12 or later, and 64-bit Windows
Priced in US dollars. Checkout shows your currency and any local tax.
On a Mac? Get the Mac version.
On your phone?
Launch price: $29.50 once, through 30 November. From 1 December: $59. Buy applies the code FOUNDINGDOCKET for you; if the checkout shows $59, enter it under ‘Have a discount code?’.
Screaming Frog is $279 a year. Ahrefs plans with Site Audit run $129–$449 a month. Check Engine is $59 once. Screaming Frog’s price read 4 November 2026, Ahrefs’ 9 November 2026.
30 days, no conditions, no questions asked. Refund policy
Intel Mac? Get the Intel version
Common questions
Is Check Engine a Profound alternative?
No, and it would be misleading to say otherwise. Profound reports whether AI assistants mention your brand across answer engines. Check Engine audits your site and checks whether those crawlers are permitted to read it. Neither replaces the other.
How much does Profound cost?
Its pricing page for brands publishes no figure. It lists a free trial (50 prompts a day for 7 days, across ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews) and Enterprise at custom pricing reached through a demo. Only its agencies view prints amounts: $399 a month for a full client workspace and $199 a month for five trial workspaces, with no price for the Agency Growth plan itself. Check Engine is a one-time purchase with the price on the page, which is the starkest difference between them.
Can Check Engine tell me if ChatGPT mentions my brand?
No. Check Engine measures access, not mentions: whether each AI crawler is allowed in, and whether your server agrees with your robots.txt. If a tracker says you are not being cited, Check Engine can tell you whether a blocked crawler is one reason. It cannot tell you whether citation happens.