A Profound Alternative for Agencies Serving Local Clients

Why agencies look for a Profound alternative

Usually not because of the product. Profound is the deepest stack in this category — daily tracking, up to ten engines on Enterprise, prompt analytics, agent analytics, SOC 2 — and an agency serving enterprise brand teams should probably be using it. Published pricing runs $99/month Starter (billed annually, ChatGPT only), $399/month Growth (three engines), Enterprise custom.

The mismatch appears when the client book is local. A brand tool's unit of analysis is a brand across a market. Your client's unit of analysis is a practice on a street, competing with four other practices within a ten-minute drive. Those are different measurements, and the brand one does not degrade gracefully into the local one — it produces a number that is technically correct and commercially useless for the conversation you are trying to have.

The second mismatch is economic, and it is the one that actually kills the model. Brand tools price per seat or per brand tracked, month after month, whether or not you sold anything. An agency with forty local clients cannot carry a per-brand subscription across the book on the chance that some of them buy.

What changes when the measurement is local

The report a prospect sees is the entire sale, so it is worth being specific about what is in it.

• The location is passed the way a customer's phone passes it — as a structured parameter where the engine supports one, rather than typed into the question. ChatGPT and Perplexity accept it; Gemini, in our testing, did not act on it, so we name the city in the text for Gemini and disclose the asymmetry rather than pretending the engines were asked identically.
• The competitors named in the report are the client's actual neighbours — the businesses a customer in that city is choosing between — not a category of national brands.
• The questions are the ones that come immediately before a booking: the urgent one (a chipped tooth tonight), the insurance one, the specific-procedure one, the comparison between two named practices.
• The volume is 138 measurements per audit: 30 prompts on each of ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, with the eight highest-intent prompts asked three times each because the engines are non-deterministic. The full method is published, which matters when a client's marketing director asks where the number came from.
• Every raw answer is stored, so any figure in a report you hand a client can be traced back to the text of a real AI answer.

The resale math

The agency plan is $400/month. It includes five white-label Action Plans, and additional plans are $89 each. Snapshots are free across your entire book, which means the top of the funnel — the free scan you run on a prospect before you have ever spoken to them — costs you nothing at any book size.

Agencies resell each Action Plan at $300–500 (the offer in detail). One closed client covers the base plan; the rest is margin. Past the five included plans, the marginal cost of a sixth is $89 against a $300–500 sale — which is the point of the structure: you pay more only after a client has already bought a deliverable from you. That is the opposite of a per-brand subscription, where cost grows with every client you add whether or not any of them convert.

For direct buyers, the same Action Plan retails at $149 and the monitoring subscriptions are $79/month (Monitor) and $149/month (Grow). Agency partners get wholesale monitoring, which is where the recurring line comes from: a client kept on monitoring is a monthly retainer item rather than a one-off project.

The honest limit on this math: it works because a local Action Plan is a deliverable a local business will pay for. It is not a way to resell a brand dashboard at a markup, and if your clients are national brands the economics of this page do not apply to you.

White-label, specifically

Your logo and a "Prepared by [Agency]" line on every report. Your price. Your client relationship. Clients never see RecoSignal, and the data underneath is the same measurement across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity that we publish the method for.

The workspace also does the thing that actually matters in a sales cycle: it lets you run a free Snapshot on a prospect before the first call. You arrive at the meeting already knowing that the assistant recommends their competitor by name, and how often. That is a different conversation from asking a prospect what their marketing goals are this quarter.

What the Snapshot opens, and what it closes

The Action Plan is the small sale. The reason it is worth running across a whole book is what it surfaces on the way through — every audit flags the gaps that produce the projects an agency actually wants: the site that cannot be read by a machine, the missing service pages, the booking flow that still makes a patient call, the absent chat, the decade-old website.

That is a materially better prospecting instrument than a proposal, because the finding is about the client rather than about you, and it is checkable. The prospect can open ChatGPT and confirm it in thirty seconds.

The data supports the pitch that follows. In three Dallas markets in July 2026, 73–79% of the sources AI cited behind its recommendations were the clinics' own websites — 1,085 of 1,367 citations in dental, against 61 for Healthgrades, 59 for Zocdoc and 45 for Yelp (full benchmark); 948 of 1,199 in medspa; 837 of 1,153 in plastic surgery. If the engines are reading the client's own site to decide whether to recommend them, then the work that moves the number is web work — which is the work an agency sells.

When to pick Profound instead

There are client books where this page is the wrong advice, and an agency should know which one it has before signing anything.

• Your clients are national or multi-market brands → Profound. Share of voice across a category is the correct measurement, and it is the one they will ask for.
• A client needs daily tracking, or ten engines, or SOC 2 for procurement → Profound. We measure on audit cadence across three engines and do not carry SOC 2.
• The value you sell is agent analytics — how AI crawlers and agents interact with a site → Profound's, or Scrunch's, territory rather than ours.
• Your clients are local businesses and the deliverable is a fix, not a dashboard → the local audit, white-labelled. See the full comparison in RecoSignal vs Profound.

How to start without committing

Run a free Snapshot on one of your own clients — ideally one in dental, medspa, plastic surgery, legal, restaurants, fitness or home services, where we already have vertical prompt sets (the vertical pages). Read the report the way the client would read it. If the competitor named four times more often than your client does not start a conversation, nothing on this page will, and you have lost nothing.

If it does, the agency workspace is at recosignal.com/agencies: white-label reports, free Snapshots across your book, five Action Plans a month on the base plan, and $89 for each one after that. What we cannot promise you — and neither can anyone else in this category — is that an assistant will recommend a client after the work is done. There is no ranking to buy inside ChatGPT. What the measurement does is name the specific gaps and let you show the client, with stored raw answers, that the gaps closed.