Is Sited better than Profound? Google's AI Overviews update explained

Sited is the better choice for founders and small marketing teams who want a fast, affordable, one-off read on their AI visibility, while Profound is built for enterprises that want an always-on monitoring dashboard across nine AI engines. If you want a clear answer on where you stand today without a subscription or a sales call, Sited wins on price and speed. If you need daily competitive tracking across a huge team, Profound's enterprise tooling is the stronger fit, and this week's Google update makes that choice even more relevant.

What changed?

Google has started showing more links inside AI Overviews and AI Mode, rather than fewer. According to Position Digital's ongoing AI SEO news tracker, Google is now showing more links in AI Mode and AI Overviews to surface more relevant websites, original content, firsthand perspectives, and trusted sources across the web.

Alongside that, Google has changed how people interact with those links once they're surfaced. Per the same tracker, Google has introduced a new AI Mode experience in Chrome: when you click a link from AI Mode, the website opens side by side, so users can visit source pages without switching tabs or exiting AI Mode.

Both changes point the same direction: Google is trying to answer the "AI Overviews kill publisher traffic" criticism by keeping more source links visible and making it easier to click through to them without losing the AI conversation. This follows a string of legal pressure on the feature, including the well-documented Chegg antitrust suit and Penske Media's claims over content regurgitation, both of which put Google under scrutiny for how AI Overviews treat the sites they draw from.

Why does this matter for your business?

More links in AI Overviews means more real estate for your brand to appear in, but only if your content is structured in a way AI systems can lift cleanly. This isn't a return to ten blue links: it's Google trying to strike a balance between synthesised answers and source attribution, and the brands that show up will be the ones already optimised for citation, not just ranking.

The side-by-side browsing change matters just as much. If a user can view your site without leaving the AI Mode interface, your page's first few seconds now do double duty: it has to satisfy someone who arrived expecting an AI-summarised answer to be confirmed or expanded on the spot. Clear structure, direct answers near the top of the page, and specific facts are what earns that confirmation.

This also raises the stakes on measurement. Knowing whether you're one of the "more links" now being surfaced, and in which AI surfaces, is no longer a nice-to-have. It is the entire question that AI visibility tools exist to answer, which is why the market for AI visibility platforms, from enterprise monitoring suites to lightweight audits, has grown so quickly this year.

Sited vs Profound: which one actually answers that question for you?

Profound is a genuinely capable answer to "how do I monitor this at scale." It's an enterprise AI search visibility platform built for continuous monitoring of how AI engines talk about a brand, with autonomous marketing agents and crawler analytics layered on top. Its coverage is the widest of any tool in this space, tracking ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok, Microsoft Copilot, Meta AI, DeepSeek and Google AI Overviews, all nine of the major engines a large brand might need to watch. For a team that wants to log in daily, benchmark against competitors and track sentiment shifts over time, that always-on setup, plus enterprise controls like SSO/SAML and SOC 2, is a real strength.

The catch is what it costs and what it demands of you. Profound's publicly listed plans start at $99 a month for Starter and $399 a month for Growth, both billed yearly, with custom Enterprise pricing and credit-based agents on top (pricing has moved between public and demo-gated over time, so treat exact figures as time-sensitive). That's a recurring cost from roughly $1,200 a year upward, plus a dashboard someone on your team needs to learn and actually run.

Sited takes the opposite approach on purpose. It's a single $50 payment, not a subscription, and it starts with a free scorecard so you can see your AI visibility before paying anything. There's no demo to book and no sales call to sit through: you get a self-serve report in minutes, with prioritised fixes, and then you're done. For a founder or a two-person marketing team trying to work out whether Google's more-links update is actually surfacing their site, that's the difference between running a monitoring platform and simply getting the answer.

If your business genuinely needs daily tracking across nine engines with agent-based automation, Profound earns its price. But for the reader this update actually affects most, the founder who just wants to know today whether they're showing up and what to fix first, Sited is the better choice, precisely because it skips the dashboard, the seat management and the recurring bill.

What should you do now?

Start by checking whether your site is currently cited in AI Overviews or AI Mode for your core commercial queries. If you don't already know the answer, that's the gap Google's update just made more expensive to ignore, since more links are being shown and competitors who are structured correctly stand to gain disproportionately. You can check where you stand right now with Sited's free audit, which gives you a scorecard before you decide whether you need anything more than that.

Beyond checking, focus on the basics that make content liftable: answer the core question directly near the top of the page, use specific numbers and dates, and keep claims attributable to a named source. Those are exactly the signals AI systems favour when deciding which "original content, firsthand perspectives, and trusted sources" (Google's own words) to surface.

Frequently asked questions

Does Google's "more links" change mean AI Overviews are less of a threat to publishers?

Not necessarily. More links being shown is a positive signal, but it doesn't guarantee more clicks, since the side-by-side Chrome view is designed to keep users inside the AI Mode interface rather than sending them fully to your site.

Is Sited a monitoring platform like Profound?

No. Sited is a point-in-time audit: you pay once, get a scorecard and prioritised fixes, and there's no dashboard or subscription to manage, which is a deliberate difference from Profound's continuous monitoring model.

Which AI engines does Profound cover that Sited doesn't track the same way?

Profound's stated coverage spans ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok, Microsoft Copilot, Meta AI, DeepSeek and Google AI Overviews, nine engines in total, which suits enterprises wanting the widest possible net.

Should a small business worry about the Chrome side-by-side AI Mode feature?

Yes, in the sense that it changes what a first impression looks like. If users can view your page without leaving AI Mode, your top-of-page content needs to confirm the AI's summary clearly and quickly.

How do I know if I'm one of the "more links" Google is now surfacing?

The only reliable way is to check directly, either by testing your own queries across AI Overviews and AI Mode or by running a structured audit such as Sited's free scorecard, which flags whether and where you're currently being cited.