Two AEO tools, two different jobs. Here's the honest read on which one solves your team's actual problem — and why most B2B SaaS teams end up using both.
Skipping the marketing bullet points — here's what's structurally different between the two products.
| Feature | Lantern | Profound |
|---|---|---|
| AI engines tracked | 4 (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, AI Overviews) | 10+ (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Meta AI, Grok, more) |
| Prompts per month (Growth tier) | 150 | 100 |
| Daily sampling cadence | 25× / day | 50× / day |
| Citation tracking + share-of-voice | ||
| GA4 AI-referrer integration | Limited (referrer reporting only) | |
| Search Console integration | ||
| HubSpot CRM integration | ||
| Citation → opportunity attribution | ||
| Monthly board-ready ROI report | ||
| Pre-publication content check | ||
| Sentiment + hallucination detection | ||
| CDN bot analytics (Cloudflare, etc.) | Roadmap (V2) | |
| Panel data (consumer query patterns) | ||
| Self-serve, <$500/mo entry | Yes, but Growth ($399) caps at 100 prompts | |
| Multi-seat at every tier | 3–25 seats | 1 seat on Starter; 1 on Growth |
| Pricing transparency | Public, all tiers, no surprises | Public for Starter/Growth/Lite; Enterprise custom |
Pricing and feature data verified against tryprofound.com/pricing and runlantern.com/#pricing as of April 17, 2026. Profound Series C ($96M) announced February 2026.
Profound is the category-defining AI visibility tool. They've raised $155M, including a $96M Series C in February 2026, and they hold a top spot in G2's Winter 2026 AEO category. Their depth on monitoring is real.
Pick Profound if:
Profound's customers include MongoDB, Target, Walmart, U.S. Bank, Figma, Ramp, DocuSign, Indeed, Mercury, Zapier, Chime, and Clay. That's the right peer group if you're operating at enterprise scale.
Lantern was built for a different question. Where Profound asks "how are we showing up?" Lantern asks "did showing up generate pipeline?"
Pick Lantern if:
Lantern's defining output is the monthly pipeline ROI report — a one-page PDF that says: "In April, your AEO program drove $180K in pipeline, an ROI of 4.8×, traced through HubSpot." That sentence does not appear in any other AEO tool's output as of April 2026.
This is the answer most "X vs Y" articles avoid. The truth is that Profound and Lantern solve different problems for different stakeholders in the same organization.
A typical 200-person B2B SaaS company with an active AEO program looks like this:
Different buyers, different budget lines, different procurement processes, different renewal cycles. Lantern is designed to plug into your existing AEO stack — including Profound — rather than replace it. The "connect your AEO tool to HubSpot" path takes about 10 minutes; the first attribution-backed monthly report ships within 7 days.
If you've ever sat in a budget review where the CFO asks "OK, but what did the $400/month AEO line item actually drive?" — that's the moment Lantern was built for.
For an apples-to-apples comparison at the tier most B2B SaaS teams land on:
| Tier | Lantern Growth | Profound Growth |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly price | $199 | $399 |
| Annual (with 20% discount) | $1,910/yr ($159/mo) | ~$3,830/yr |
| Prompts tracked | 150 | 100 |
| AI engines | 4 (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, AI Overviews) | 3 (ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews) |
| HubSpot integration | Included | Not available |
| Pipeline attribution | Included | Not available |
| Monthly ROI report | Included | Not available |
| Seats | 5 | 1 |
Lantern Growth is roughly half the price of Profound Growth and includes the integration most CMOs care about. If you're already paying for Profound and want to add Lantern as the CRM-attached layer on top, both tools fit comfortably under what most teams already spend on a single AEO contract.
Connect HubSpot, GA4, and Search Console. Lantern handles the attribution methodology. First report lands in your inbox within a week.
Join WaitlistHead of Growth is the AEO budget owner. CMO renews on faith, hates that. Wants a board-ready ROI number every quarter. Pick Lantern. Profound's monitoring depth doesn't help the actual buying question, and the Growth tier is 2× the price. Lantern's monthly PDF is the deciding artifact.
Dedicated AEO analysts. 1,000+ prompts to track. 10+ engine coverage required. Already has a panel-data subscription elsewhere. Pick Profound. Lantern's 4-engine, 500-prompt cap on the Pro tier won't cover what an enterprise SEO team needs. (You can still add Lantern alongside for the CMO-facing report.)
Marketing leader runs both AEO and paid social. CRM is Klaviyo, not HubSpot. Pick Profound for now. Lantern's V1 is HubSpot-only; Salesforce ships in V1.5; Shopify-native attribution comes later. Profound's broader engine and panel coverage fits DTC better today.