What is the difference between AIQ and Profound or peec.ai?
Profound and Peec measure AI visibility: how often a brand is cited across a set of prompts. AIQ measures AI reputation: what the engines say, which sources drive the framing, what the sentiment is, and how the picture changes over time. Both metrics are legitimate, but they answer different questions and are bought by different teams.
Profound and Peec are established products in the AI search analytics category. They poll AI engines with a defined set of prompts and report how often your brand is cited in the response. That is the visibility question. AIQ answers a different one: not whether your brand was mentioned, but what was said, by which sources, with what sentiment, and how that narrative is changing across the major AI engines.
| Dimension | Profound / Peec | AIQ |
|---|---|---|
| Core metric | AI visibility: citation rate (how often the brand appears) | AI reputation: narrative content, sentiment, source attribution |
| Primary question | Is the brand being mentioned? | What is being said, by which sources, and why? |
| Data depth | Presence/absence signal across a prompt set | Full response text, source mapping, sentiment, peer comparisons, theme tracking over time |
| Typical buyer | Marketing teams tracking AI search presence | Comms and corporate affairs teams responsible for brand narrative and reputation risk |
| Engines covered | Varies by product | The eight engines AIQ currently tracks: ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, AI Overview, Perplexity, Grok, Claude, and Google AI Mode |
| P&L alignment | Marketing / demand-generation budget | Communications / corporate affairs budget |
The main distinction
Profound takes attendance; AIQ tells you the grade. A brand can appear in every AI answer and still be described negatively, attributed to low-authority sources, or framed in ways that damage perception. Visibility tools tell you the brand showed up. AIQ tells you what happened once it did.
Who buys which tool
The marketing team asking “are we showing up in AI search?” and the comms team asking “what are AI engines saying about us in a crisis or competitive context?” are different buyers with different reporting lines. Visibility metrics and reputation metrics complement each other; one does not substitute for the other.
Last reviewed: 19/05/2026
