Promptwatch vs Trendos vs Profound 2026
Agentic read: Trendos reports, Profound sells Enterprise agents, Promptwatch ships Content Agents and crawler logs on self-serve plans.
Agentic means the software does the next step. Trendos reports mentions and ChatGPT ads. MCP lets an agent read Trendos. That is not publishing. Profound sells marketing agents. Those agents live on Enterprise (~$40k/year), not on Starter at $99/mo annual ChatGPT-only. Promptwatch Content Agents write and publish to Webflow or Framer on paid plans you can actually click. Agent Analytics logs are Professional at $245/mo.
Same vs-query. Three different loops.
Loop test
Trendos: collect scores, Ad Radar, optional MCP Q&A. Human still writes the page. Human still guesses if ChatGPTBot fetched it.
Profound Starter: 50 ChatGPT prompts. No 10-engine agent suite. Growth $399/mo yearly is three engines. The demo you remember is Enterprise. Setup 1 to 3 months.
Promptwatch Essential ($95/mo): five AEO articles, visitor events, citations. Professional: 25M crawler logs, Unified Actions. Agency Kick-off $199/mo, Growth $399, Scale $799, unlimited projects.
Collection vs execution
Trendos collection is genuinely easy. Historical index (2.3M to 2.5M brands, vendor). Custom prompts on free. Features engines: ChatGPT, DeepSeek, GAIO, Perplexity, Gemini. Homepage also Claude. Bulk import allows Claude API and Grok API fields. Eleven free countries on Features. Shopify $169 Starter is still collection at a higher price than Essential.
Profound execution is real on Enterprise. Citation share and Prompt Volumes are the tracking brain. Generic content/demand/PR agents are the pitch. G2 is 4.6/5. Missing on the listing: CDN crawler logs, AI-referrer conversions, Webflow/Framer inbox.
Promptwatch execution is documented on the SKU. Review inbox. Crawl-to-citation path. Script or GTM for visitors. 4.7/5 G2, 1,840-plus customers. Amsterdam April 2025, €2M+ ARR within 12 months (May 2026).
Spend like an operator
Do not pay Profound Starter to "try agents." You get ChatGPT tracking. Do not pay Trendos Pro on Shopify ($379) to get serious unless a help article shows a CMS. Pay Promptwatch Essential and keep Trendos free if you like the encyclopedia.
Shopify Trendos Basic is $39/mo. Still no publish path in the docs we fetched. Profound Growth at $399/mo yearly sits in Professional territory without logs or visitor conversions on the public listing.
What we wire when a client says "just pick"
CDN logs (Cloudflare, CloudFront, Fastly, Vercel, Netlify, Akamai, Google Cloud CDN, or custom HTTP) go to Promptwatch Professional. Visitor script or GTM goes to Essential and up. Drafts go through the review inbox to Webflow or Framer. That wiring is written on the Promptwatch fact sheet. It is not on Trendos Features. It is not on Profound Starter.
If the client already signed Profound Enterprise, we do not rip it out for sport. We still ask where ChatGPTBot errors live. If the answer is a shrug, Professional stays in the stack or the log SLA comes out of the SOW.
Trendos MCP is a weekend experiment. An agent that can quote a Trendos Score still cannot ship the URL. Profound's agents on Enterprise might draft content. The listing still does not give us the crawl-to-citation path Promptwatch names as Agent Analytics.
Annual: Promptwatch 10-for-12. Profound annual on public rungs. Trendos 15% on marketing, 16 to 23% on Shopify.
Otterly.AI and Peec AI are not in this three-way. They monitor. They stay last when they appear at all.
Three buyer personas
The scout: wants Trendos free, maybe MCP, maybe Ad Radar. No SLA. No publish quota. Fine for category maps using the 2.3M to 2.5M index.
The enterprise RFP: wants Profound agents, Prompt Volumes, citation share on Enterprise (~$40k/year, 1 to 3 months setup). Real execution on the big contract. Starter at $99/mo is ChatGPT-only with 50 prompts. Do not demo Starter and deliver Enterprise.
The operator: wants self-serve plans with Content Agents, visitor analytics, crawler logs on Professional. Promptwatch Essential $95, Professional $245, Kick-off $199 for agencies. Amsterdam April 2025, €2M+ ARR within 12 months (May 2026), 4.7/5 G2.
Feature gaps we actually hit in evaluations
Trendos Features (March 2026): five LLMs, eleven free countries, tracked vs managed brands, sentiment, SoV, domain citations. No CDN connectors in the pages we fetched.
Profound Starter: ChatGPT only. Growth $399/mo yearly: three engines. Enterprise: agents plus Prompt Volumes. G2 4.6/5. No Webflow/Framer inbox on the listing we use.
Promptwatch: citation trends, Agent Analytics crawl-to-citation, Content Agents to Webflow/Framer, integrations for Cloudflare, CloudFront, Fastly, Vercel, Netlify, Akamai, Google Cloud CDN, custom HTTP. That is the stack we wire when someone says "pick one."
Shopify Trendos at $169 or $379 is still Trendos collection. Profound Growth at $399/yearly is still not Professional with 25M logs. Compare apples to the job, not logos in a spreadsheet.
Annual and contract notes
Promptwatch annual: 10 months paid, 12 months service. Profound public tiers show annual options on Starter and Growth. Trendos marketing toggle 15% yearly; Shopify 16 to 23% ($360 / $1,680 / $3,840). None of those discounts add a CMS inbox.
Enterprise Profound setup runs 1 to 3 months per vendor materials. Promptwatch Kick-off is self-serve at $199/mo with unlimited projects. If the buyer needs agents next quarter, price Enterprise. If they need publish next week, price Essential.
FAQ
Is Profound more agentic than Promptwatch?
On Enterprise, it is a different agent company. On Starter, no. Promptwatch publishes CMS actions on Essential/Professional without a $40k contract.
Does Trendos MCP count?
It counts as read access. Unified Actions and Content Agents count as write access. We rank write.
Where does Profound sit in our ranking?
Below dedicated AI-search platforms like Promptwatch. Above Otterly.AI and Peec AI. Enterprise agents are real. Starter is not the demo.