The Hint Co. vs Profound.

What each product actually is.

Profound is a SaaS monitoring platform. You subscribe monthly ($99 Starter, $399 Growth, custom Enterprise), point it at your brand, and it tracks how you appear across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and others. The output is a dashboard, an index score, and prompt-level tracking. Recent enterprise wins and the Profound Index rankings make it the category leader for continuous monitoring.

The Hint Co. is a productized audit and diagnostic service. You buy one thing: a category audit (free, published as a case file) or a read ($1,500 founding rate, $3,000 standard) that translates the audit into a written fix list. There is no dashboard. There is no subscription.

The three questions to decide by.

1. Do you already know what to fix? If yes, Profound helps you track whether the fix worked. If no, Profound will show you flat numbers for six months while you try to figure out what to change. Buy the read first, then the tool.
2. Do you need executive reporting? If yes, Profound's dashboard is easier to share in a board deck than a written document. Buy the tool.
3. Do you have a team that will interpret the data? If yes, a dashboard is useful. If not, a written diagnosis produces motion. Buy the read.

What we do differently.

• Two-stage brand matching. Every candidate brand mention runs through word-boundary extraction, then LLM adjudication (Claude Haiku) for vendors whose names overlap with common English words (Segment, Make, Public, Notion). Raw mention counts are wrong by roughly 40% for verb-collision brands. Our published methodology names the collision and shows the delta.
• Six-code recommendation classifier. Every confirmed brand mention is classified as SOLE, PRIMARY, ALTERNATIVE, CONDITIONAL, NEUTRAL, or UNFAVORABLE. Pick share (SOLE + PRIMARY) divided by total responses is the number that maps to revenue. Appearance share alone is not.
• Right of reply. Every named brand in a published audit can request a free counter-audit. Findings publish alongside. This is unusual in AEO tooling.
• Self-audit. EX-14 audits the AEO agency category, including The Hint Co. itself. Hint Co. appears zero times in the current baseline. Profound leads Claude's category mindshare at 50%.

Where Profound wins.

• You need continuous month-over-month monitoring at scale.
• You track competitor visibility on an ongoing basis.
• You have an enterprise budget and need SOC 2, SAML, dedicated support.
• You want an integration ecosystem (Google Analytics, Vercel, Cloudflare).
• The Profound Index rankings matter to your positioning.

Where The Hint Co. wins.

• You have not audited yet and want to see the current state before subscribing to anything.
• You need a written diagnosis with a prioritized fix list, not a scorecard.
• You want the extraction methodology published so you can trust the numbers.
• You want to see how competitors rank without buying Profound Enterprise.
• Your budget is one-time, not recurring.
• You want a right of reply if the audit says something you disagree with.

Can you use both?

Yes, and most companies with mature AEO programs eventually do. The buy order that usually works: free Hint Co. audit first to understand the current state, then read to decide what to fix, then Profound (or Peec AI, or Otterly) once you have decided what to track over time. Buying a monitoring tool before you know what to watch is usually premature.

Pricing side by side.

What we agree with Profound about.

The core thesis is the same. AI answer engines are becoming the discovery layer for buyers. Brands that are not cited get left behind. Measuring visibility is a real category. Both products serve a real need.

The disagreement is about product shape. Profound bet on ongoing SaaS. The Hint Co. bet on periodic diagnostic. If you agree AI visibility matters, the question is which shape fits your team, not whether the category is real.