Mycel vs Profound
The category's enterprise answer, and the tool an agency can actually run a retainer on.
What Profound is good at
Profound is the most serious pure-play in AI visibility — heavily funded, working with Fortune 500 brands, and the deepest analytics of anything in the category. If your question is only 'how visible is this one large brand across answer engines', it is the strongest instrument available and it is not close.
The actual difference
Profound measures. Mycel measures and then does the rest of the job. An AI-mentions retainer is not a dashboard — it is a weekly check, a written report in the client's language, a portal the client opens, an invoice, and the chase when it goes unpaid. Profound is the first of those, done extremely well, and is priced and shaped for a brand watching itself rather than an agency watching thirty clients. Mycel treats the measurement as one job among several, then does the rest of the engagement.
Side by side
| Profound | Mycel | |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | The brand being measured | The agency measuring for clients |
| Client portal | White-label reporting on higher tiers | A portal on your own hostname, per client |
| Invoicing and chasing | Not its concern | Same system, same client record |
| Other back-office work | None | Books, contracts, recruiting, questionnaires |
| Price band (Aug 2026) | Hundreds to thousands per month | Starter and Growth tiers, per agency |
Choose Profound
- You are one brand watching your own visibility, not an agency reselling it
- You need the deepest possible analytics on a single brand and have the budget for it
- Enterprise procurement, SSO and a named account team are requirements
Choose Mycel
- You are an agency and the report has to arrive in a client's portal with your name on it
- You want the invoice and the chase attached to the report, not in a separate tool
- You are adding GEO to an existing service business rather than becoming a GEO company
Other comparisons: ChatGPT, Claude, or whichever tab is already open, Grok Bot and the AI-employee platforms, Hiring an account manager, Otterly, Building it yourself, Zapier & n8n, Temporal, LangGraph, CrewAI & AutoGen