Profound alternatives with better reporting: its own data row reads None three times on the plan you can start on, and that candour is what makes the comparison possible

Reporting in this category is three separate things and most vendors sell them as one. Is yesterday's answer still there, which is history. Can today's answer leave as a file, which is an export. Can it leave on a schedule without anybody clicking, which is an API or a connector. Read on 21 October 2026, Profound answers all three in a single word on the plan a buyer can start on: its data section publishes History None, Exports None and API None for the Trial, and flips all three to All time, CSV and JSON, and Yes on Enterprise.

That is unusually plain for this category and it is the reason this page has a precise answer rather than an impression. If you are moving off Profound because you cannot get a report out of it, you are moving off a tier rather than off a product, and the question becomes which vendor puts history, export and scheduling on a plan you can buy today. We sell a tracker here, so our own terms are in the table with everybody else's.

The criterion: which tier carries each of the three reporting things

One criterion, checkable from six pricing pages: on which tier does history start, on which tier does a file export start, and on which tier does a scheduled or programmatic route start. All read 21 October 2026, two agents each, bodies saved.

read 21 Oct 2026	history starts on	file export starts on	scheduled or programmatic route starts on
Profound	Enterprise, published as all time	Enterprise, as CSV and JSON	Enterprise, published as Yes
Otterly.AI	not stated as a tiered limit	the entry tier, as detailed reports and export	the second of four tiers, with 2,000 API and 2,000 MCP requests a month published
Rankscale	not stated as a tiered limit	the lowest monthly plan, with shared dashboards and a Looker Studio connection	the second plan, as REST API access
Peec AI	not stated as a tiered limit	the third tier, as a Looker Studio integration	the fourth, annual tier, as API access
Scrunch	not stated as a tiered limit	Enterprise: Looker Studio access is a dash on the plan you can buy	Enterprise, as query API access, with MCP and CLI also Enterprise
AI Knows Us, ours	not published as a tiered limit	every plan, as an exportable tracking log	two plans, as a Visibility API

On that criterion Otterly.AI is first, and for one specific reason worth more than the rest of the row: it is the only vendor in this set that publishes a rate limit on its own integration, at 2,000 API requests and 2,000 MCP requests a month on its second tier. A rate limit is the number a reporting pipeline actually breaks on. Everybody else publishes whether the API exists; Otterly publishes how much of it you get. Rankscale is second, because a REST API on its second of four plans is the earliest programmatic route in the set that is not gated behind a sales call.

Where we are behind is history. Four vendors here leave it unstated as a tiered limit and so do we, which means none of us is publishing the answer to the question a reporting buyer asks second: how far back does the chart go. Nobody in this set wins that column, ourselves included, and it is the most useful thing a vendor in this category could add to a pricing page tomorrow.

What the assistants said when the question mentioned reporting

Our standing dataset is 1,260 assistant readings from ChatGPT and Gemini across the United States, the United Kingdom and India. Six of them name Profound in a question that also names a report, a dashboard, an export or a stakeholder. Inside those six, Semrush was co named 5 times, Peec 3, Otterly 3, Ahrefs once and Brandlight once. One of the six produced a numbered shortlist and it put Brandlight first, which is a vendor named in only 4 of the 718 readings that name anybody.

Six readings is a small cut and it is published at that size on purpose. What it does support is a narrow observation: on the reporting framing the assistants reach for the large suite more often than their overall rate, which is the opposite of what they do when the question names Profound without a reason. In the 203 readings that name Profound at all, Semrush appears in 45.8% against a 55.3% base rate, a ratio of 0.83. In the six reporting readings it appears in five of six. The reason in the question moves the order, and reporting moves it toward the suite.

Which alternative fixes which reporting complaint

• The export is a screenshot. Otterly publishes detailed reports and export on its entry tier and Rankscale publishes CSV and a Looker Studio connection on its lowest monthly plan. Both are below the tier where Profound's export begins.
• The pipeline keeps breaking and nobody can tell me why. Otterly is the only vendor here publishing request caps, so a pipeline can be sized before it is built rather than after it fails.
• The report cannot be cut the way my board wants it. Peec publishes a source classification taxonomy on its own pricing page, naming competitor, editorial, reference and UGC as categories, plus intent classification into informational, commercial and transactional. Those are reporting primitives and no other vendor here prints the category names.
• We need the numbers in the warehouse, not in a tool. Rankscale publishes REST API on its second plan. Scrunch publishes query API access, MCP and a CLI, all of them on Enterprise and all of them a dash on Core.

The reporting question nobody puts on a pricing page

Every vendor above sells the movement of a number, and almost none of them publishes what the number is allowed to be. Our own position on that is on our pricing page in public: what is sold is a cited share, meaning our page is used as a source, and being named or recommended in the answer text is a different and much harder number that gets reported separately. One of our own properties is cited in 78% of Indian readings and named in about 1% of them. Those two figures describe the same pages on the same day and they are not interchangeable, which is why being read and being chosen have to be reported as two measurements. That page is one of the 1,068 pages of ours, 53.7% of the 1,987 in our inventory, that no stored body on this site links to.

So when you evaluate a replacement for Profound's reporting, the question to put to the salesperson is not whether the dashboard shows a share. It is which of the two shares it shows, and whether both arrive in the export.

Questions about getting a report out of these tools

Can I export anything from the Profound trial?

No. Its own table publishes Exports as None for the Trial and CSV and JSON for Enterprise, with History and API reading None on the Trial as well. Treat a trial as a look at the interface rather than as the start of a data series.

Which vendor gives me an API soonest?

Otterly, on the second of its four tiers, with published monthly request caps of 2,000 for the API and 2,000 for MCP. Rankscale publishes REST API access on the second of its four plans. Peec puts it on the annual top tier and Scrunch on Enterprise.

Does anybody publish how far back the data goes?

Profound does, as all time on Enterprise and None on the Trial. The other five vendors in the table, ours included, do not state history as a tiered limit, so it is a question for the call on every one of them.

What does a Looker Studio connection actually get me?

A live feed into a reporting tool your client or your board probably already uses, which removes the monthly copy and paste. Peec publishes it on its third tier, Rankscale on its lowest monthly plan, Otterly publishes a Data Studio connector from its second tier, and Scrunch publishes it on Enterprise only.

Is a bigger export the same as better reporting?

Not on its own. A report is better when somebody can act on it, which needs the source behind each answer and a way to cut it by competitor and by intent. Peec publishes the clearest taxonomy for that on its own pricing page, and it is worth asking every vendor to show you one answer with its sources attached before you sign anything.