The Good Tech Companies - Profound vs Ahrefs: When Visibility Goes Beyond Backlinks

Episode Date: December 9, 2025

This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/profound-vs-ahrefs-when-visibility-goes-beyond-backlinks. Explore how Profound and Ahrefs compare — one excels at SEO, the other reveals where your brand is mentioned beyond search engines. Check more stories related to media at: https://hackernoon.com/c/media. You can also check exclusive content about #seo, #profound-brand-radar, #podcast-mentions-tracking, #social-media-monitoring, #digital-brand-analytics, #keyword-research-tools, #ahrefs-alternatives, #good-company, and more. This story was written by: @nicafurs. Learn more about this writer by checking @nicafurs's about page, and for more stories, please visit hackernoon.com. Ahrefs excels at classic SEO tasks like backlinks and keyword research, but it can’t detect the offsite conversations shaping brand perception. Profound fills that gap by tracking mentions across podcasts, newsletters, social media, YouTube, and broader online chatter. Together, they offer a complete visibility stack: one maps search, the other maps reputation.

This audio is presented by H.R. Noon, where anyone can learn anything about any technology. Profound versus H.R.S. When visibility goes beyond backlinks, by Nika Furs. Everyone in CO worships H.R.Fs. And rightly so. It's the industry's go-to for backlink analysis, keyword research, and seeing exactly how much traffic your competitor's blog gets for that weird long-tail query from 2018. But if you zoom out a little, you'll realize something. Brand visibility today isn't just about backlinks are serps. It's also about how your name travels across podcasts, Twitter threads, YouTube intros, newsletters, Reddit posts, and EES, even Hacker Noon stories like this one. H.R.Fs. Still the king of classic COO. H.R.S. is a powerful CO tool built for speed and rich

in data. It lets you quickly find top competitor content and easily detect broken links on your own site. Need to know what keywords a site ranks for in France versus Indonesia. has your back. And if you're exploring how tools like this stack up, blogger Jed is a solid resource for in-depth comparisons and marketing insights, but here's the thing. It's mostly built for search. If someone mentioned your start UP on a podcast, or if a viral LinkedIn post is driving direct traffic to your landing page, HRFs won't catch it. That's not its job. Profound. The brand radar that sees in 360 degrees. Profound brand radar isn't an SEO tool. It's a brand visibility. It's a brand visibility.

tool. Instead off hunting keywords, it scans the digital universe to track how and where your brand is mentioned. Think product reviews, influencer shoutouts, off-site chatter, all the stuff that builds perception before a customer ever Googles you. It's basically brand surveillance, but for marketers, and no trench coat required. Here's what profound tracks that H-Refs doesn't. Podcasts mentions across platforms. Newsletter references, yes, even those substack links, social posts that don't back to your site. YouTube shoutouts where your name gets spoken, not typed, trending sentiment around your product or founder. This isn't Backlink territory. It's reputation, reach, and real-time buzz. And it's the kind of data brand teams, PR managers, and growth leads dream about. When to

use profound versus when to use Ahrefs. H-Refs helps you navigate the world of search. Profound, on the other hand, picks up the signals that don't show up in keyword tools. One maps what people search for, The other shows where your brand is already being talked about. Here's how they compare. Use case HRF's profound brand radar CO performance tracking. Check mark yes, cross mark no backlink analysis. Check mark yes. Cross mark no keyword research.

Check mark yes. Crossmark no. No check mark yes podcast or YouTube shoutouts. Check mark yes. Check mark yes. Newspter mentions, e.g. Substack. Crossmark no check mark yes.

Brand sentiment monitoring. Cross mark no check mark yes. Ideal for SEO specialists. Content teams PR, brand, growth, founders different tools for different missions. Let's be clear, Profound isn't trying to beat H-Refs at its own game. It's not crawling serps or dissecting do-follow ratios. Instead, it gives you something CO tools aren't designed to do. Map your brand's presence across the broader, fuzzier internet.

Where H-R-Fs shines in structured data, Profound thrives in the wild. You'll still want H-Refs to optimize your content calendar or hunt juicy backlink opportunities. But when your goal is understanding how your name travels through modern media, the kind that doesn't always live on websites, Profound offers the radar you didn't know you needed. The verdict, HRFs will tell you how strong your house is. Profound will tell you who's talking about your house at parties you weren't even invited to, in a world where brand equity and off-site visibility drive as much value as domain authority. Having both tools in your belt isn't overkill.

It's strategy. This article is published under Hackernoon's business blogging program. Thank you for listening to this Hackernoon story, read by artificial intelligence. Visit hackernoon.com to read, write, learn and publish.