Noma vs Profound
Two AI search visibility tools, compared on what each one tracks, what it costs, and which problem it is actually built to solve.
- Noma and Profound are both answer engine optimisation platforms, so this is a real like-for-like. Both track whether AI engines name your brand when someone asks a category question. The difference is not what they do, it is what you get on the plan you can actually afford.
- Profound tracks more engines than Noma, but only on Enterprise. Their site lists nine engines at that tier, including Copilot and DeepSeek, which is genuinely broader than Noma’s five. On the published self-serve plans it is one engine at $99 a month and three at $399. Enterprise pricing is not published.
- Noma gives every plan all five engines and unlimited seats. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Grok, polled daily, with the page behind each citation recorded and share of voice measured per prompt. There is no tier where an engine or a colleague is locked out, and the trial runs 14 days with no card.
- The question is whether your coverage should depend on your plan. If you need Copilot or DeepSeek and can sign an Enterprise contract, Profound covers ground Noma does not. If you want every engine and your whole team from day one, tiering is the thing to avoid.
Why AI search visibility needs its own tool
When someone asks an assistant for a recommendation in your category, the answer names two or three brands and stops. There is no second page and usually no click. You are in the answer or you are outside the consideration set, and from the outside those two states look identical.
Measuring that is a different job from rank tracking, and a category of tools has grown up to do it. Noma and Profound are both in it, which makes them worth comparing directly rather than talking past each other. The interesting differences are not in the pitch, they are in what each plan actually includes.
This page uses Profound’s own published pricing page, checked on the date shown above, for everything it says about them. Where their documentation does not state something, this page says so rather than guessing, and it does not quote or paraphrase named reviewers, because those claims could not be verified from a public source.
What to look for in an AI visibility tool
Four questions separate tools that change what a team does from tools that add a dashboard. They are worth asking of both products below, and of whatever you are using today.
Engine coverage and cadence
A tool that watches four engines cannot tell you about the fifth, and an infrequent reading cannot separate a real shift from noise. Ask which engines are covered and how often each is polled before anything else.
Mentions versus citations
Knowing you were mentioned is a score. Knowing which page the engine drew on is a task list. If a marketplace listing is cited instead of your own product page, that is a fixable problem you cannot see from mention counts alone.
Prompts, not keywords
Nobody types "best sunscreen oily skin india" into an assistant; they ask a question. A prompt set assembled from real customer questions gives a different — and more honest — visibility picture than one derived from a keyword export.
Recommendations you can action
Most tools in this category are good at telling you that you are absent. The useful ones tell you why, and rank the fixes by expected impact so a content team knows what to write first.
Noma vs Profound, feature by feature
| Capability | Noma | Profound |
|---|---|---|
| Category | AI search visibility (AEO/GEO) | AI search visibility (AEO/GEO) |
| Entry plan | 14-day free trial, no card; paid plans after | Starter, $99/month billed yearly |
| Engines on the entry plan | Five — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Grok | One — ChatGPT |
| Engines on the next plan up | Five, the same on every plan | Three, on Growth at $399/month |
| Widest engine coverage | Five, included everywhere | Nine listed, on Enterprise — pricing not published |
| Engines they cover that we do not | — | Copilot and DeepSeek, at Enterprise |
| Team seats | Unlimited on every plan | One on Starter, three on Growth, custom on Enterprise |
| Polling cadence | Daily | Not published |
| Citation tracking | Records which page each engine cited | Not published |
| Recommendations | GEO changes ranked by expected impact | Not published |
| Creator marketing | Included via Nia — free, 10M+ profiles | Not offered |
| Paid media analysis | Included via Pulse — Google and Meta Ads | Not offered |
Rows come from Profound’s public pricing and product pages as checked at publication. “Not published” means their documentation does not state a position, not that the answer is bad. “Not offered” means outside the product’s stated scope, and a row saying so is a note about what each one sets out to do rather than a criticism.
Where Noma fits
Noma runs your category prompts against ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Grok on a schedule and records whether your brand is named in the answer each one generates. Five engines, polled daily — the fifth being Grok, which most tools in this category do not cover.
Being mentioned is only half the reading. When an engine cites a page, Noma records which page: your own site, a marketplace listing, a review roundup, or a competitor’s blog. That is the difference between knowing you are invisible and knowing what to do about it. Alongside the mention it captures the wording used to describe you, because being named as a budget option is a different outcome to being named as the category leader.
Share of voice is measured per prompt rather than as one site-wide number, because visibility is never uniform across a category — most brands are strong on a handful of questions and absent on the rest. The prompt set is built from questions customers actually ask rather than from a keyword list, and the recommendations that come back are ranked by expected impact: the pages to write, the wording to fix, the structured data to add.
Noma also sits on one platform with Nia for creator marketing and Pulse for paid media, so AI visibility can be read next to the channels competing with it for budget. Whether that matters depends entirely on whether you have those problems too.
What Noma actually measures
The rest of the platform: Noma for AI search visibility, Nia for creator marketing and attribution, Pulse for Google and Meta Ads — or how the three apply in your category.
Where Profound fits
Profound covers more answer engines than Noma does. Their site lists nine at the Enterprise tier, including Microsoft Copilot and DeepSeek, and neither is on Noma’s roadmap today. If your buyers are on Copilot because your organisation runs on Microsoft, that is a real gap on our side and no amount of framing changes it. They also publish a $99 entry plan, which is a cheaper way to find out whether AI search matters in your category than any annual contract.
What it does not cover
- Engine coverage is gated by price. The $99 Starter plan tracks ChatGPT alone, so the single-engine picture it gives you is the one least likely to reflect your whole category.
- Three engines at $399 a month is still a partial view, and the nine-engine coverage that makes Profound genuinely broad sits behind Enterprise.
- Enterprise pricing is not published, so the cost of full coverage cannot be compared before a sales conversation.
- Seats are capped at one on Starter and three on Growth. AEO work spans content, SEO and brand, and a three-seat cap decides who is allowed to see the data.
- Polling cadence is not published, so how quickly a change in the answers reaches the dashboard is unknown before you buy.
Which one your team actually needs
Category presence, before it is gone
AI answers name two or three brands and stop. There is no tenth position to occupy and no long tail to fall back on — you are in the answer or you are not in the consideration set at all. The number worth reporting upward is share of voice across the questions customers actually ask, tracked over time, because it moves slowly and then all at once.
A discipline that diverges from ranking
AEO shares fundamentals with SEO — crawlability, structured data, credible sources — then parts company on what counts as success. A page can rank third for a keyword and never be named by an engine answering the same question. Measuring the two with one tool produces a confident answer to the wrong question.
What to write, in what order
Citation source data turns AEO from a theory into a queue. If engines are quoting a review roundup for your category, the work is getting into that roundup. If they are quoting a competitor’s comparison page, the work is writing a better one. Both are concrete; a visibility score is not.
The cost of finding out
For a brand that has not yet established whether AI search matters in its category, the first question is what it costs to find out. A trial that needs no card answers that in a fortnight. A monthly commitment answers it in a procurement cycle.
What a rollout looks like
AI visibility is not a switch. This is the sequence that gets a team from “we think we are missing from these answers” to a trend a content team can work against.
Phase 1 — Baseline
Week 1–2- Build the prompt set
Start from the questions customers ask in your category rather than from a keyword export. Twenty good prompts beat two hundred derived ones.
- Name the competitors you care about
Share of voice is only meaningful against a defined set. Pick the brands you actually lose to.
- Take the first reading
Establish where you appear, where you do not, and which sources engines cite instead of you. This is the number everything after is measured against.
Phase 2 — Fix the sources
Week 3–8- Answer the question in the first two sentences
Engines quote what is quotable. A page that opens with positioning and reaches the answer in paragraph six will not be cited.
- State facts that can be verified and attributed
Add the structured data that lets an engine attribute a claim to your brand rather than to whoever restated it.
- Get into the roundups engines already cite
If a third-party comparison is the source for your category, being absent from it is the whole problem. That is outreach work, not on-page work.
Phase 3 — Hold and widen
Ongoing- Read the trend weekly, not daily
Answers move as models and their sources update. Weekly is enough to tell a shift from noise in most categories.
- Widen the prompt set as the category moves
New questions appear. A prompt set fixed at launch slowly stops describing the category it was built for.
- Judge it against the rest of the budget
Nia for creator and Pulse for paid sit on the same platform, so AI visibility can be read next to the channels competing with it for spend.
The verdict
Profound is a serious tool with wider engine coverage than Noma at the top of its range, and if Copilot or DeepSeek matter to you it is the better fit. What it asks in return is that your coverage and your team size track your budget: one engine and one seat at $99, three and three at $399, everything else on a custom contract. Noma takes the opposite position — five engines, daily, unlimited seats, on every plan, with the source page behind each citation recorded and the recommendations ranked. Which is right depends on whether your constraint is engine breadth or getting a complete picture and a whole team onto it now.
Choose Noma if
- You want every engine on the plan you are actually on, not the one above it
- Content, SEO, brand and leadership all need access without a seat cap
- You need the page behind each citation, not only a mention count
- AI visibility should sit beside creator and paid performance in one place
- You want to see your category before committing to a contract
Choose Profound if
- Microsoft Copilot or DeepSeek coverage is a requirement
- You can sign an Enterprise contract, where their engine list is widest
- A single seat tracking ChatGPT alone at $99 is the scope you need today
Common questions
What is the difference between Noma and Profound?
Both track whether AI engines name your brand in generated answers. Noma covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Grok on every plan, polled daily, with unlimited seats, the source page recorded for each citation and recommendations ranked by expected impact. Profound tiers its coverage: their published Starter plan at $99 a month tracks ChatGPT only with one seat, Growth at $399 tracks three engines with three seats, and the nine engines they list, including Copilot and DeepSeek, sit at Enterprise on unpublished pricing.
Does Profound track more AI engines than Noma?
At the Enterprise tier, yes. Their site lists nine engines there, including Microsoft Copilot and DeepSeek, which Noma does not cover. On the published self-serve plans it is one engine at $99 and three at $399, against Noma’s five on every plan. So the honest answer depends entirely on which plan you are comparing.
Which AI engines does Noma track?
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini, Claude and Grok — five engines, polled daily, on every plan. Your category prompts run against each on a schedule, and Noma records whether your brand appears in the answer, which source the engine cited, and the wording used to describe you.
What does Noma cost compared to Profound?
Noma starts with a 14-day free trial and no credit card, with paid plans after; seats are unlimited on every plan. Profound publishes Starter at $99 a month and Growth at $399, both billed yearly, with one and three seats respectively. Their Enterprise pricing is not published. The comparison worth making is not the headline number but what a given plan includes.
Why does the seat limit matter for AEO?
Answer engine optimisation is not one person’s job. The prompts come from what customers ask, the fixes are content and structured data, and the results get reported upward. When a plan allows three seats, someone in that chain works from a screenshot. Unlimited seats are less a pricing feature than a decision about whether the data is allowed to reach the people who act on it.
Does Noma have a browser extension?
It is in development. The plan is a Chrome extension that scans ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini pages as you browse and highlights brand mentions in place. It is not shipped yet, so it is not a reason to choose Noma today and it does not appear in the comparison table above.
How quickly do results appear?
The first reading arrives as soon as your prompt set is built, usually within the trial. Moving the numbers takes longer: publishing citable pages, adding structured data and earning mentions in the roundups engines already cite is six to eight weeks of work before the trend is unambiguous. Anything faster is usually noise in a single reading.
Can Noma run alongside our existing SEO stack?
Yes. Noma measures something a rank tracker cannot see and does not replace it. Most teams run both, because a page that ranks well and is never cited is a specific, fixable problem, and you can only find it by looking at the two together.
Profound is a trademark of its respective owner. Nurdd is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Profound. Marks and product names are used only to identify the products being compared, and every claim about Profound was taken from their own public pages on the date shown above.
Other comparisons
Find out whether AI engines name you
Build your prompt set and see your first visibility report inside the trial. Fourteen days, no credit card.